Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 7

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Continuation of previous threads discussing VAT on independent school fees. The thread title is a headline from a Times article last autumn.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5237575-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5242586-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-2
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5280646-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-3
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5301690-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-4
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5317397-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-5
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5337850-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-6

Absolutely - Labour's aim was to destroy private education. Look at what they're doing to academies too.

Tax was just their mechanism - after their previous attempts failed due to EU law. Government are given enormous leeway to tax, even where it violates human rights.

Destruction of education is absolutely their aim.

Yes they would rather see the standard of education diminished for everyone than have inequality in the system. It's crazy really and not at all what you would do if you were serious about getting better outcomes for everyone and the country.

How is the standard of education being diminished?

Labour are massively reducing the autonomy of academies, and have cancelled several academies which were already planned and costed. Academies have been a huge success story in improving attainment. Can't have that!

They've cancelled multiple state school programmes in Latin, computer hubs, language schemes, maths and physics
www.ft.com/content/aca9722c-27f7-44f6-9c67-81a33629a481

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/labour-cost-cutting-spree-now-hits-stem/

Here's a quote about the 'Stimulating Physics Network' program (in state schools) they cut:

"An impact report three years ago found A-level physics entries in SPN schools “was almost six percentage points above the national increase” after three years.
The proportion of girls taking the subject was also up 29 per cent over the period in these secondaries, compared to 13 per cent in other schools."

They are deliberately destroying education - not only in private schools but across the whole country.

Academies were a cross-party initiative to improve education. It's pretty sad.

www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/284dc810ba7bc2ba

How are they reducing the autonomy of academies?

What about the jobs of the people who work in private schools: teachers, office staff, cleaners, catering groundsmen.

@BustopherPonsonbyJones I guess many in the Labour Party will see them as the ‘enemy’ for working at private schools and won’t care if they’re out of a job.

I think you are confusing free schools and academies. The overwhelming majority of academy schools follow the National Curriculum, not some amazing invention of their own, despite the fact over 80% of state secondary schools are academy schools and, despite your claims, a rapidly growing number of primary schools are now academies or in the process of becoming academies. The fact is, state school funding being per pupil, with rapidly falling numbers of children being born to enter the education system in the first place; employer national insurance increases; underfunded pay increases; a growing number of societal failures being brought into the remit of schools’ responsibilities (whether extremism, misogyny, mental health issues, behavioural issues, increasing SEN, safeguarding, potty training, malnutrition, or anything else); and massive inflation of unavoidable costs, are what is doing for education of all stripes.

Did you read the Telegraph article, which I gave you a gift link to?

The Government’s schools bill will force academies to follow the national curriculum (yay for brainwashing 'decolonising the curriculum'), end academies’ freedom to set their own pay and conditions for staff (so they have to follow the national pay scales), and end their freedom to recruit expert teachers who lack official qualifications, such as retired university lecturers.

It will also scrap a requirement on faoling state schools to failing state schools to convert into academies and be paired with a strong school sponsor

The Government have also announced cancelling 46 planned (and funded) free schools, including a 450-pupil college in Middlesbrough set to be run in partnership with Eton College. Eton had committed to donating £1million per school per year to the 3 academies it was offering to support - that's £2k per student on top of government funding. But Labour clearly thought that Middlesbrough kids should know their place. No extra education for them!

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23738283.eton-colleges-plan-new-middlesbrough-school-green-light/

No - deliberately destructive Labour policy is what is doing for education in the UK.

Private schools, academies, free schools, Home Ed, educational programmes supporting languages and STEM - anything which aspires to improve education - all under attack by Labour.

Yet somehow - God knows how - they're still managing to hoodwink a few remaining people into believing that they're the 'good guys'

Most academies follow the national curriculum anyway.
CST are saying that the Bill will mean that MATs can't underpay staff, setting a floor rather than a ceiling, surely a good thing?
Joining at MAT does not automatically fix a broken school, so I think the ability to have a more nuanced approach is a good thing.
Having said all that, I don't think RISE teams will have much impact, and I don't really understand the thinking there.
There is still a huge amount that is unknown about the Bill, so we will have to wait to see the actual content.
What schools actually need is a huge injection of funds, which isn't coming.

None of this is really anything to do with VAT on private schools.

Pretending schools were using supposed freedoms when they weren’t is what’s doing for education. Ideological driven changes to funding structures with faux-freedoms behind them are not good for education. Michael Gove, Conservative Party, was a massive enthusiast for making control over education far more centralised, the exact opposite of what you appear to want. All state schools now even have to upload their registers direct to the DfE every day, it’s so obsessed with controlling what schools should do and how they should behave.

None of this is really anything to do with VAT on private schools.

No, it's not - just expanding the thread from Labour's deliberate destruction of private schools... out to their deliberate destruction of other parts of UK education... which itself is part of their weakening and dismantling of the UK.

18 pages in, I think we're allowed to zoom out a bit to give context.

I really appreciate the expertise, wider political context and diversity of political views on the thread

Its a crap argument to suggest it’s somehow the job of today’s cohorts of kids with SEND (and kids without SEND) to be punished by government policy to the extent that their fee-paying schools close, simply because the government’s ideological disagreement with entrenched privilege thinks that disrupting education is somehow a win. with great damage to the kids, no benefit to anyone else and an actual increased cost to taxpayers.

It’s absolutely not the job of today’s cohorts of kids to solve the problems for funding the schools system with falling rolls. The educational and social harms of having to change schools already fall disproportionately heavily among kids with SEND who have to move for those reasons and/or lower income families who have to move for housing costs reasons. Successive governments are making it so more of these kids have to do it again. Not just with VAT on education. This government and the hopeful parties are not tackling any of these problems which affect education. I predict they will all hide behind ‘falling birthrate’ which is not evenly distributed across the country. Policy effects are rarely evenly distributed either.

Rolls are falling especially in schools located in areas with very high housing costs in urban areas, and/or in areas with a high workforce affected by Brexit so a proportion of families have left back to EU countries or they don’t come to the UK any more, and/or where schools are located in rural areas with a high lack of work opportunities, so (if they have any means to make choice) families will move away because they can’t afford to live and work there either. These counties become areas for retirees and Air BnB visitors.

All of these are scenarios arising from successive government’s policies. The wider political discussion is often very relevant to education.

Quite apart from individual stories our private school as an industry for Britain is a success story and good for the economy/reputation of our country.

Anything that is different. It is an obsession to control the experience for all kids and curtail anything different (including positive things). It is a grey and limited vision.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y4lj1llvjo

‘While the court did acknowledge the negative impact on some groups, including children with SEND and who attend faith schools, it said this was outweighed by the money raised for state sector schools.’

Firstly well done the parents from the religious schools for pursuing this. Secondly if the reporting on the judgment is correct this is very weird. It uses the false and stupid cliché that parents ‘can always home educate’ if they can’t access a state school that reflects their religious belief. No, they probably can’t, or they would already be doing that.

And what is the court doing saying it’s OK to leave gaps in state provision such that a minority of families are forced to pay privately and now 20% more on top , because overall the imposition VAT raises money for the state school sector. Which seems to be very questionable politicised maths.

But anyway so what if VAT on education does, or doesn’t raise money for a different government spending purpose?

By that logic, why dont the government slap VAT on everything it’s not currently applicable to, so that we can raise more much-needed money for spending on schools or hospitals or mending potholes or creating jobs or fighting wars?

Shouldn’t the court instead be looking at whether kids and families are being discriminated against by having to find 20% more money just to go to or stay in a suitable school? or who have to leave their suitable school because they can’t afford it? or whose schools have closed because their school community can’t afford it?

And surely a great example of exactly that kind of discrimination, is to say, ‘they can always home educate, if they don’t like it’

The parents complained on human rights grounds. The problem they have is that, whilst the EHRC establishes a right to education, it is established case law that there is no right to education of a particular kind or quality other than that prevailing in the state. These families therefore do not have any right for their children to be educated in line with their religious beliefs. The question therefore is whether the government has an objective and reasonable justification for its decision not to exempt low-cost independent schools from VAT. The court concluded that they did and that the measure was a proportionate approach to achieving a legitimate aim. The fact that parents have the option to educate their children at home, even though that may not be practical for all parents, is relevant when considering the balance to be struck for proportionality. Again, this is well-established case law. It is part of the reason why, for example, parents will always fail with arguments that their human rights have been breached when their child is allocated a school that is not in line with their own religious beliefs.

In my view, this decision is unsurprising. I did not expect this challenge to succeed. If they appeal to the Supreme Court, as reports suggest, I would expect them to lose there too.

That's a good analysis and yes completely unsurprising result and a waste of time all round.

Imagine if the court has found that being unable to afford to send your children to a particular school breached your human rights. It obviously doesn't - that doesn't mean I think the VAT is a sensible policy but this was always doomed to fail.

Whilst I believe that with private school VAT the government are using tax as a subterfuge to deliberately remove education from children - which does go against their human rights - I can understand why the courts are taking the government's stated intent (to raise taxes to pay for state-funded services) at face value as a 'legitimate aim'

I also understand why they are setting the bar very, very high about what is 'proportionate' to achieve the aim of raising taxes even where it disproportionately disadvantages groups who would normally be protected from indirect discrimination (SEND, religion).

All taxes cause disadvantage to whoever is paying the tax, obviously! And as a society, we balance the disadvantage to the tax payers against the benefit to those recieving whatever the tax money is spent on (which may or may not be the same people, or with the same proportion of harm/benefit). That's never going to be exactly 'fair'.

It would be crippling if every tax resulted in legal challenge. The government of the day need a reasonable amount of leeway to do what they think is right, especially if it was in the manifesto.

There is a boundary though. We wouldn't allow, for example, a tax which was only applied to Jewish people - even if that money was used for really useful purposes.

These cases are testing the boundaries, and that's OK.

What I think will be interesting is if it goes on for long enough that it becomes apparent that no money is being raised, when you consider the increased cost of educating the children who move from parent-funded education to tax-payer-funded education.

Whilst the government will undoubtedly argue that their intent was a reasonable aim, will it shift that balance for the courts once it becomes apparent that the aim isn't being achieved and it's only bringing harm? Would a case be more likely to succeed at that point? A judgement against the government would still hugely damage future governments' ability to raise taxes, so I suspect the courts would remain very reluctant.

VAT on education is such an odd concept.

"We'll pay for your children's education, because we think education is really important!

But if you decide to pay for it yourself, you have to give us extra money in addition!!"

It makes so little sense. But then Labour rarely do make any sense.

It would make no sense if the different kinds of non-state education were either broadly the same quality as the state offer just achieved in a different way. However I think it sort of makes a bit of sense when the "luxury" element is considered (which I recognise isn't true at all schools but it certainly is at some).

An equivalent analogy woukd be that at a state school your KS1 child can have a free school lunch but if that's not good enough for you and you send in a packed lunch from home then yes you have to pay VAT on the VAT-rated elements of that food (basic food is vat-free but some is liable).

I think it would be fairer if it could be possible to split school fees into a "basic education" element and a "luxury upgrade" element so that the small independent schools that have no luxury upgrades, class sizes similar to the state sector, and are just doing a normal level of education with an ethos that isn't controlled by the government can be VAT-free but the schools where the facilities and class sizes are in a completely different league pay VAT on the difference..

Education itself is a global "good thing" that benefits the world and shouldn't be taxed. However a large chunk of the fees at the most expensive schools are not paying for the actual education but for the squash courts and swimming pools and beautifully manicured grounds etc etc.

In reality it's not possible to split the costs in that way though based on analysis of each school's budget. What I would like to do if I was in charge is put a VAT of 30% on the difference between the school fees and the per-head cost paid by the state for a state education (about £6600 per year) so that an independent school offering education for c£7k pa would charge hardly any VAT but the ones where fees are £35k pa would pay much more.