Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 6

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Continuation of previous threads to discuss VAT on independent school fees.

What is the measurable value of posting hundreds of thousands of words over months and years saying the exact same thing and changing nobody's mind on a corner of the internet with zero practical influence?

If we are talking social mobility, the level of education of preschool and nursery staff is far more relevant than who cares for @Walkaround in their dotage.

Well the anti-education agenda is in plain view for all to see @tortoise18 - it’s university’s turn now and dumbing down GCSEs. Next it will be KS2 SATs. Given how dumb the general population is and how they vote, it’s relevant.

A major skill in surgery is deciding who NOT to operate on. People forget there are 3 outcomes from any surgery or medicine - you get better, you stay the same or you get worse. Getting worse includes possibly dying because of the surgery. Neurosurgery is incredibly niche but actually any specialist will see many patients a week - standard clinic template might be 5 new & 4 follow up patients, say 2 clinics a week plus 2 theatre lists plus out of hours. If you aren't in a surgical specialty you'll probably be doing 4 clinics or more a week plus on-call. The number of people seen racks up pretty quickly. I'm part time and I'll have at least 23 face to face appointments a week, plus spend the same amount of time on admin. Sorry off topic and not sure how this relates to private schooling!

That's the entirety of internet forums summed up for us!

I was going to say the same thing!

In any case things change in politics due to pressure from SM. So chat away. Hopefully the policy will be kaput in a few years.

I made my point. It’s not my problem if it doesn’t fit in with what you want to talk about. 😉 It is just thousands of words on the internet, after all. Should become an influencer and monetise it, instead. I’m sure that would make the world a better place 😂.

The constant bleating about doctors and the holy cow NHS is also tiresome. Pharmaceutical companies and researchers and chemists and the people funding them (and including cheap shareholder funds), they save lives too. The doctors are largely just understanding and prescribing those drugs. The new obesity drugs save lives as well, whether anyone is making loads of money out of it or not.

Thank you

Not half as tiresome as the constant bleating about a niche VAT policy. I'm sure our neurosurgeon participant appreciates your view that they are largely just understanding and prescribing drugs. Guessing you've never needed a neurosurgeon. I could bet that you would think differently if you had.

@Araminta1003 ,

‘The constant bleating about doctors and the holy cow NHS is also tiresome. Pharmaceutical companies and researchers and chemists and the people funding them (and including cheap shareholder funds), they save lives too. The doctors are largely just understanding and prescribing those drugs. The new obesity drugs save lives as well, whether anyone is making loads of money out of it or not.’

The constant bleating about your children failing to fulfill their ‘musical potential’ is also tiresome and somewhat contradictory to the rest of your arguments.

Assuming you are talking classical music, that is one industry that is massively subsidised by the taxpayer. Should we give everyone a voucher for entertainment instead of paying a subsidy to classical venues?

As for doctors vs big pharma, big pharma is for profit, so there shouldn’t be much contradiction between doing good and making money. It does, of course, make an obesity management or blood pressure management drug a far better proposition than looking for permanent cures to conditions.

Just saw this. I haven’t directly made a point about VAT and NI, etc, except to say it seemed clear to me that money raised by VAT on school fees would be insufficient to make a tangible difference to a public sector under so much stress, and wouldn’t go to education, but that it was low hanging fruit, so was inevitably going to be picked.

I have said on other threads and in passing on this one that increasing employer national insurance is, in my view, the single most harmful thing this Government has done at a time of rising costs - a ridiculous own-goal that will result in big job losses in the public sector in areas like education where that is needed like a hole in the head, and will cause huge problems in sections of the private sector, reducing employment opportunities for people the Government wants to get back out to work. That ludicrous taxation decision was the result of Government being backed into a corner by promising not to increase tax virtually anywhere else and promising not to borrow huge sums, but with a general public that expects it to fix the harm done by years of austerity and lack of any kind of strategic direction which achieved little more than to make the country less productive, less healthy, less optimistic, more overcrowded, infinitely more run down, and utterly unprepared to deal with any kind of threat. And unfortunately for Labour, the threats just keep on piling up, making the money required to fix anything grow far faster than the economy itself.

Much to the apparent surprise of the Tories, it would seem, their actively unkind policies and the money they wasted on ideological change to the way public services like the NHS were structured, rather than provision of actual services, made the population even more needy and pathetic, it did not make the nation more resilient and inventive, and now we are where we are - in a big hole which we keep on digging and an outside world that is becoming rapidly more unpredictable and threatening. I don’t think children with SEN are therefore anywhere near the top of the Government’s agenda, so the bus they have been thrown under will now likely reverse over them for good measure.

@walkaroundthat was an interesting post, enjoyable to read. I agree with some not all but mostly absolutely in the NI stuff.

I also agree with @Walkaround on the incredibly damaging NI changes by this government. And the devastation wrought by the Tories.

Wow….you really said this…..up until this point your posts were fairly balanced however your true view of the general population shows you to be a snob and I suspect an inverted snob at that. It is people like you that run good people down because in your view they are just “dumb” because someone has chosen a different path this doesn’t make them less than you or dumb!!!! I hope for your sake that when you are old there are the minimally educated “dumb” folk that are hugely compassionate to look after you! Education is about more than grades on a piece of paper….education in your view is about schooling when the reality is education is around us all day long. I’m tired of this thread and am out.

Actually, I am perfectly entitled to state that the general population in this country is dumb because they voted for Brexit and now many of them are likely to vote Reform and believe all their lies. And I blame the Education system for that. And I certainly do not think that making things worse in the Education sector will improve that. It will make things worse. I said very clearly that preschoolers and toddlers from poorer backgrounds NEED educated preschool and nursery staff to plug the gaps. But clearly Labour’s plan is to simply dumb down education further and I like many on this thread, regardless of how they feel about private schools, do actually agree that Education really really matters. If you have educated people they are also less likely to make poor health choices, enter into terrible relationships - the aim has to be to educate out of ignorance. That is not being a snob. It is probably the fundamental element underlying a functioning democracy.

Absolute rubbish…..you are no better than the “uneducated” you refer to as you honestly believe that everything you think is correct and anyone who disagrees with you are “dumb” and “uneducated”. The fact you say these things show you to be no better.

We have an ad hominem tourist.

Come on then @Floatingthrough - hit us with your substantial arguments. All ears.

@Araminta1003 “Ad hominem tourist” you really are hilarious…..have you been using Google again

Whilst businesses were telling Labour NI is difficult, the Autumn Budget was days before the US election so it is not like anyone knew for sure the volatility that a Trump administration would bring, which has made the Budget even worse for businesses and jobs. But the fact that the US election was a risk should have been more on their radar.
Just like Brexit has ended up even worse of a shock because of the ensuing Covid crisis. The Tories may have been somehow able to fudge Brexit more, were it not for Covid.
However, Brexit was based on lies and so is this VAT policy on private schools.

@newbutoldfather I'm not an economist - I just read things that I'm interested in. That's a very nice thing to say though, on a thread where we're talking economics 😊

Economists absolutely don't only think about / optimise on money though - you're not discussing economics enough with your friend if you think so! It's fundamentally about what drives choices - and you can apply the same thinking to any type of resources, any choices, any goals.

It's simply a way of quantifying what someone is willing to give up of one thing to get another, but money can be a handy way to express that. And then it's about modelling what the consequences will be when scaled up to many people with different preferences.

And they certainly consider externalities - consequences that affect a third party who is not directly involved in the transaction (eg climate change or pollution) - and what governments can implement to discourage/mitigate negative externalities or encourage the positive ones. This is economics bread and butter! But the important thing is to quantify it, not base decisions on magical thinking like 'it will massively increase GDP'

In terms of whether people can prove their value in a job (perhaps a slight sidetrack, but happy to follow that thread) people can 'blag it' and underperformed in any job.

I actually think that a CEO's success is pretty quantifiable (eg company profit, market share) . It's easy to be cynical and say they do nothing concrete, but that really doesn't match what I've seen. We'll have to agree to disagree.

A CEO's success is certainly more quantifiable than eg teaching or nursing. As a teacher, you can be judged on your students' exam scores but inspiring students in a life-changing way and teaching genuine understanding are hard to judge.

Interesting that you consider a footballers skill more quantifiable. Quite apart from the fact that they are part of a team, I'd suggest that their success isn't purely how many goals they achieve - but actually how much they contribute to the drama and entertainment of the game, since that's what people are paying for. Perhaps not so quantifiable after all.

But people making hiring decisions do as well as they can on the information they have, and it soon becomes apparent when they've made a mistake. It really is another chip-on-shoulder myth that hiring decisions are based on nepotism. Not these days. Not for jobs that actually matter. A privately owned family business - sure - but not for a listed company.

It's not really very strange or controversial to quantify an impact as (number of people affected) x (how much they're affected, quantified in a consistent way eg how much they would pay for that benefit).

I mean, it's a bit tricky to figure out exactly how many people are affected by how much, but it's still better to try than just to use qualitative guesswork.

How do you weigh up the estimated impact of different options in order to make a decision? The one that best resonates with your preconceptions?! How has that worked out for you?

My point was to illustrate that there are some things that are pretty much impossible to quantify. In my view, the value of directly saving a human life is one of them. It doesn't matter how many people it affects, even if it is one person, it still carries a huge value.

I don't feel the need to force things that don't fit into over-simplified, neat and potentially inaccurate little boxes, which is just a different type of guesswork. That's worked absolutely fine for me.

So you think that one single human life should be valued above, say, a STEM program rolled out across schools? Or the building of a new water reservoir.

These aren't hypothetical choices for a government: spending decisions have consequences.

I'm glad that making choices based only on emotional intuition has worked well for you, but I'm also very glad that you don't work in government policy.