Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 6

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

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

I didn’t jump in to derail anything - I pointed out that you were wrong in your assertion that It was already a thing for some students targetting Oxbridge to move from our academic private to a good local state sixth form.

You brought that ‘derail’ in all by yourself. You can now try and justify that by claiming it’s to avoid discrimination, but the truth is that some parents have done it in the past to try and game the admissions system, and it doesn’t work because Oxbridge cottoned on to it years ago.

I really don’t care where your children get their education, nor do I care that you seem to think that I’m taking money out of your pocket. Your children won’t have anything different to mine in educational terms, so making out that I feel threatened in some way by our kids having anything yours don't is yet another ridiculous and unfounded assertion.

It must be exhausting to have to keep justifying your choices by claiming that anyone that has made different decisions to you or has different political beliefs to you or chooses to spend their (also taxed) income in a different way to you is spiteful and bigoted.

Do have the most wonderful day.

I can guarantee this will happen... private school kids with their strings of 9s taking all the external places and leaving comp kids with less shiny results with not such great options.

The complaining will be high.

Not that there aren't comprehensive kids with equally good grades, but there are plenty at selective privates who will be looking to switch purely because parents can no longer afford the fees.

Exactly this. There have already been threads where posters are saying that their sixth form has increased entry requirements, meaning that existing students need to get higher grades than in previous years. Of course schools will want to attract those who are most likely to get better grades; it affects their league table position.

People are not just switching because they cannot afford the fees with VAT. Plenty are switching “out of principle”. Principle works both ways. And by law they are perfectly entitled to switch and take the state places that are theirs rightfully to take, in accordance with the set out admissions criteria and the fact that the state has to treat all children equally. There is nothing the Government can now do about ex private school kids going state. They have to give them the places and pay up for it. They should have planned for this. It is an entirely reasonably foreseeable consequence. What is boiling my blood is that my DD has had plenty of disruption from Year 6 to Year 7 due to Covid and is in a high birth year. How dare they disrupt her mental health further for lefty extremist principles with no economic gain! I cannot forgive this one.

Just to be clear; you aren't spiteful or bigoted, you don’t care how other children are educated or parent’s education choice for their children and you say independent children get nothing different in educational terms. What are your reasons for supporting education tax and closing down schools?

How on earth can you still claim I'm wrong with a straight face?

It absolutely was already a thing for some students targetting Oxbridge to move from our academic private to a good local state sixth form.

Just because you don't know any people making that choice, doesn't mean they don't exist. I do. And the article I linked showed that it's effective.

Let me just link that again:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/16/private-schools-university-entry-cambridge-state-schools

If you read the article, Cambridge said that applicants are not “gaming the system” because admissions tutors are aware of an applicant’s full education history.

Yet
"In 2022, the acceptance rate was 24 per cent for those who changed to sixth form college and 25 for those who switched to grammar. This was almost 33 per cent higher than the 19 per cent acceptance rate for private school children."

If bias is embedded in quotas - sorry 'targets' - like discrimination, and offer numbers reflect that like discrimination, then it probably is discrimination.

Same answers as I gave last time you asked the same question (and you didn’t like them then either).

Improved socio economic cohesion in state schools.

Potential for simplification of the tax system.

Interesting to think that if you extrapolate that, almost 25% of the state students who started at Cambridge in 2022 wouldn't have had an offer if they had applied from a private school.

Maybe that's why you jumped on it so quickly, instead of engaging with the subject being discussed - ie whether state sixth forms will be oversubscribed this year.

I take it back, it’s not spite..you simply want to close hundreds of schools and force tens of thousands of children from their school to help the ‘simplification of tax system’ 🙄. Amazing.

@strawberrybubblegum

Cambridge contextualises the information so it has a full understanding of each candidate’s achievement in relation to their school and their cohort at GCSE and A level. Cambridge also says it’s a very small number of students that switch - without seeing the actual numbers you don’t know how statistically significant those figures are (did the Telegraph actually publish the data?)

You’re also assuming that the children that switched would not have gained places if they had stayed in their original school. How many switched and either didn’t get an offer or didn’t meet an offer? You don’t know that either.

Given that there’s no ‘quota’ for state schooled pupils, it’s all rather moot, isn’t it?

It’s a perfectly valid reason. It doesn’t involve ‘envy’ or ‘spite’. It’s exactly what happens in New Zealand.

You didn’t like the answer last time either.

Not sure how having a subset of “charities” with a completely different tax regime to all other charities, is simplifying the tax system. The opposite is the case!

As regards socio economic cohesion in state schools, again, where I am sitting, the opposite seems to be playing out in front of my eyes, as people buy there way more into the sought after private schools if they can no longer buy their education privately, couple that with the huge and undeniable boom in tutoring/purchased EdTech, it becomes a nightmare for teachers to pitch the content, unis to assess who needs help, all whilst a massive crisis in SEND unfolds with zero plan, before our eyes.

So put it simply @SabrinaThwaite - you and the Labour Party have got this one very very wrong.

That was meant to say buy their way into sought after state schools, a phenomenon that has been happening for years.

The only positive I can see in all of this is house prices going up. Something I personally see as a negative for “equality”.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bridget-phillipson-has-destroyed-britains-education-system/

I hope Bridget Phillipson is OK with taking the fall for what is actually Rachel Reeves fault? I would be mightily pissed off in her shoes.

Oxbridge fascination a little weird here? Very much not the reason we use private schools...

Bridget has presided over it all and been vindictive and crap though.

Potential for simplification of the tax system.

This has to be one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve seen used in trying to justify this non sensical.

It’s done exactly the opposite. We now have a situation where some (but not all) children with ECHPs are exempt from VAT, state boarding schools are exempt but other institutions providing exactly the same provision are subject to VAT. Some charities are exempt from business rates, but now others are not. Some families who have pre paid fees have avoided the tax, whereas other families have been caught because of the wording of the fee payment schemes. This policy is definitely not “simplifying” things.

As for “socio economic cohesion”, that too is laughable. The top performing state schools do not have diversity; they are dominated by wealthy families who can afford tutors and high house prices.

It’s exactly what happens in New Zealand.

It isn’t. For a start, their tax is at a lower rate. On top of that, the government provides a subsidy towards private school fees. Some boarding fees in NZ are subject to a lower rate. It’s not the same as the UK VAT at all.

So bad. One of the things we do well. To be attacked by a Labour gov

FFS New Zealand is a small country and its best uni is ranked 65!
UK’s Education is one of our biggest exports, it is literally world leading. Massive self harm going on here, yet again.

In 2022, Cambridge still had an explicit target of 69% of students to come from state schools, which was cascaded to everyone in admissions.

Of course we don't know exactly which children would or wouldn't have got offers otherwise. The beauty of looking at overall numbers is that we can see the patterns, and infer causes from them.

The 33% difference in 2022 is based on 145 applicants who had switched from private to state 6th form college. That compares to 3900 aoplucants from private school. Not huge numbers (4%) but the difference is significant. The number of offers to that cohort would have to drop from 45 to 28 to match the expected rate.

And it's repeated year on year. The diagram is based on a 7 year average.

Suggesting that it's just a (persistent, long-running) data anomaly is a bit of a stretch...

Very true. I certainly feel that a bit of University discrimination is a price I'm willing to pay for a better school education. Although it is annoying.

I just mentioned it as one amongst many reasons why state 6th forms are likely to be oversubscribed this year.

But the anti-private lot always jump on it. I think it challenges their victim mentality to know that their DC benefitted from positive discrimination.

Just for my own sanity, are you being genuine?

Apparently discrimination is referred to as recognition when your DC hasn’t been to an independent school.

How can it be simplifying the tax system when no other categories of education services are being targeted for VAT? It’s obviously complicating the tax system. All education services were exempt; now some are and some aren’t (on political and arbitrary principles - eg. now if my DD’s music teacher has her fees invoiced by the school, as she did before, we have to pay Vat on them; but if she sends us the invoice for the same amount direct, we don’t).

Not sure how you can argue that’s simplifying the tax system? Books are VAT-exempt, but if you decided that some categories of books were “privileged” books and suddenly announced that only those books were subject to VAT, would that be simplifying the tax system? Plainly not.

You can’t just argue black is white and expect people to believe it?