How's the Private School VAT increase impacting you?

[mumsthewordi]

To private fee paying ...are kids/s still in private ? Are you comfortably still able to afford and happy paying it ?

To state, how do you feel? Have you been impacted by more kids in class or would you expect that to play out this year? Or perhaps you weren't supportive ?
Do you think state schools will improve ?

Full disclosure
A struggling fee paying parent of one kid only other is at state and my oh is an amazing secondary school teacher - we are a divided household indeed at time, but we've made choices best for us.

So how are these students managing to pass the relevant admissions tests and be predicted / achieve the standard offers of A star A star A - AAA if they are so unsuitable for Oxford?

Because the anonymous dons and the University admissions spokesperson can’t both be correct?

So what was the point of state schools admissions targets? By some mechanism (feel like we are getting bogged down in semantics) they were looking to admit state applicants over private, meaning some state applicants would get a place that they might otherwise not have.

They might have the same grades, but we’re not the same quality of candidate - grades don’t tell you everything worth knowing.

@Labraradabrador They might have the same grades, but we’re not the same quality of candidate - grades don’t tell you everything worth knowing.

And that’s what admissions tests, written submissions and interviews are for.

@SabrinaThwaite but if a student is given a pass on the other stuff, how is that any different than getting a pass on grades? The net effect is the same - different standards for state vs private.

Three of the “anonymous dons” as you call them are admissions tutors. Why not contact them and ask?

So many students now get top grades, GCSEs and A levels are not the academic challenge they used to be, which is why Oxbridge admissions needs ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff. It sounds like that is what they may be prevented from doing in some cases.

And it is during that process that they are identifying that some of the candidates they are required to admit are subpar:

“The part about being admitted ‘on the same rigorous basis as all other students’ strongly implies that academic standards are not being compromised by this scheme, which is simply false.”

“I have known students admitted under this scheme who could not write essays in grammatical English, something previously unknown in my experience among Oxford undergraduates.”

You say they do but you are wrong again. Maybe read what @SabrinaThwaite has posted and you might learn something. I'm out of patience with trying to explain to you something that you can't seem to grasp.

A pass on what ‘other stuff’? The university is stating that the Opportunity Oxford candidates still have to meet the standard grades and the admissions tests.

It’s currently 250 places out of 22,000 applications, 10,000 interviews and 3,300 admissions.

Three of the “anonymous dons” as you call them are admissions tutors. Why not contact them and ask?

One was described as an admissions tutor, the others were described as involved with admissions.

Given that they are anonymous in the Times article, perhaps you have their contact details?

If these dons / lecturers involved with admissions are complaining about students being admitted under the scheme, then they should take it up with whoever conducted the interviews and reviewed the written submissions and admissions tests.

Again, why would they need a target for state schools in admittance if they were admitting purely based on qualifications? If they are actively increasing the proportion of state to private then they are admitting students from state that otherwise would not have made the cut,

They’re all involved in admissions is the point. If you want to split hairs, the fact it says “an” admissions tutor not “the” indicates the person quoted may be involved in admissions like the others rather than being the Tutor for Undergraduate Admissions for the college.

The university is stating that the Opportunity Oxford candidates still have to meet the standard grades and the admissions tests.

The online spiel says that and yet some of the tutors involved in admissions are saying this is “false”.

Because historically high achieving private school students are much more likely to apply to Oxbridge than similarly high achieving state school students? And historically the high achieving private school students have had a higher acceptance rate than the high achieving state school students?

The Sutton Trust has been reporting on this for years.

So why have they seen a decline in quality of accepted students if they were exactly the same standards?

@Mirabai The Times article quotes four people - are they representative of the views of everyone involved in admissions in all 43 Oxford colleges?

Did the Times approach Lucinda Rumsey for a right of reply?

Indeed.

I simply don’t understand why there are posters who carry on and on and on telling us that our SEN children could attend a state school. Mine wasn’t offered a mainstream education. I know his situation is unusual, but it makes me want to weep that some posters carry on completely refusing to acknowledge that SEN cannot always be met in mainstream, with no alternative offered. It would appear that Labour agrees with them, hence they have no apparent plan to improve SEN provision.

Multiple local mainstream schools told the LA that they couldn’t meet my son’s needs. He’s had an EHCP since he was four years old. For secondary, the state mainstream school that was informed by our LA that they had to take him whether they wanted to or not, told us that he would have to arrive at each lesson five minutes late and leave five minutes early and learn standing in the corridor, looking through the window in the classroom door. They also said he would need two full-time learning support assistants because he couldn’t be left alone for a second. They put it in writing twice to the LA that they couldn’t provide him with an adequate education. During this time we privately funded his place at a specialist independent school until the LA relented and took on the costs themselves. Before that we paid for several years in a mainstream private school, until it became essential for him to be in specialist education.

Our shoulders would be a lot broader if we hadn’t paid vast sums to enable our son to access the education that the state refused him.

Having shared our story on another of these threads, a poster told me that our situation was irrelevant to the thread. And yet somehow their spiteful opinions were entirely relevant. 😵‍💫

‘Our children are still being mocked with imagined 'posho' names of course.’

Every name I mentioned is a genuine one! Names can carry prejudice against them, both ways… whether people consider them ‘posho’ or ‘chavvy’…

CatkinToadflax that is so awful. I’m sorry you all had to go through that and really glad that your DS is getting some support now.

to you too x

Yes names can carry prejudice both ways, so why do you think it’s acceptable to mock independent school children with what you perceive to be “posho” sounding names?

It’s an embarrassingly cheap shot, whether the names are “genuine” or not.

The same applies to anyone using supposedly “chavvy” names in this way. However, I think the only time I’ve seen this done in the VAT threads is in response to a “posho” names post, to expose the double standard and illustrate just how inappropriate it is.

‘Yes names can carry prejudice both ways, so why do you think it’s acceptable to mock independent school children with what you perceive to be “posho” sounding names?’

mocking? Pretty sure it’s the parents snobbery that I’ve been mentioning. I know that Monty ( real name, 2 I know at private school) and Georgina ( real name, at private school) will be absolutely fine in state school.

There's a difference between a small once-off cost for a private dentist and a high, predictable, long-term cost like school fees which you organise your life and job around.

The pp has pointed out that for him, the marginal income tax rate is 60%. I think that there will be more parents on 60% marginal tax than the 20k job you describe, so I stand by the typical marginal tax rate being 40%.

The real question is whether you are representative of anyone involved in Oxford admissions, & the answer’s no.

I will be guided by the people who are rather than an online random who is not.

It’s interesting reading through threads like this, that nobody actually argues that the education tax will bring in any meaningful funds to improve state education. Which was the justification.
The argument just appear simply to be that making it difficult to access non state education by closing down schools or pricing out parents will improve state education somehow. It’s crabs in a barrel, politics of envy spiteful nonsense. Anyone who supports this, especially parents, should be ashamed.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m representative of admissions at Oxford or not - the real question is whether the four anonymous people in The Times article are representative of the colleges taking part in the programme, isn’t it? The Times didn’t interview anyone involved in the OppOx programme, so it’s hardly a balanced piece.

I would be more interested in reading the review that’s due to be published by the university on the programme.

BTW, you tick the ‘online random’ box too.

That’s why Oxbridge uses admissions tests and interviews as well as public examination grades.

Not really no, that anyone is concerned is problematic and 4 sources is quite a lot for an article of that type. Academic standards at Oxbridge is a key preoccupation, so if 4 people are prepared to go on record in a national newspaper there are likely to be more. What does representative mean in this context? What you really mean is whether it’s a majority view - which is unknowable. It’s likely that there are both supporters and critics, and the critics may not be unsupportive of the principle of the scheme just like to see it implemented differently.

We’re both randoms but only one of us is disputing the word of people who actually work in admissions at Oxford.