Guest Post: "Education is about partnership – and we owe it to all our children to work together in their best interests" - Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson MP's back to school message for parents

[SophiaCMumsnet]

I love back to school week. Sending my children off to school on their first day back, I’m always sad (and maybe a little relieved!) to see them go, but I think forward with such excitement to what the new school year will bring for them. New friends, new experiences, new opportunities.

You all know that familiar mix of feelings as they walk through the school gates once again – nervous, excited, hopeful. If you’re anything like me though, overall, you just want them to do well and be happy.

As parents, we all want the best for our children, both in school and beyond. We want them to grow up happy and healthy, to get a good job, and to be able to buy a nice house.

I understand those aspirations – I share them for my own children and, as Education Secretary, for yours. That’s why this job is the greatest privilege of my life. I want to make sure each and every child gets the best start in life, to ensure that where you’re from doesn’t determine where you end up. By breaking the link between background and future success, we can break down barriers to opportunity and give all children the skills they need to thrive.

Education lies at the heart of this change we all want to see. And education means more than maths or English or science, as important as they are. An excellent, whole-childhood education journey builds a lifelong love of learning, nurtures a sense of belonging, and creates connections that last for years to come. A good education gives our children strong foundations and sets them up for work and for life.

High and rising standards in all of our schools is at the heart of our plan. My offer to you is this: I’ll support your children taking their first steps into learning. I’ll put 6,500 new expert teachers in classrooms across the country. I’ll introduce free breakfast clubs in all primary schools. I’ll improve professional careers advice and work experience. I’ll expand support for families by rolling out funded childcare. I’ll review the curriculum, making it richer and broader, setting all children up to thrive now and in the future. I’ll boost mental health support across our schools and reform provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

I’m ambitious for our children and for our country. But government can’t achieve all this in isolation. I want to work in partnership with you to deliver the very best life chances for our children. We all have responsibilities – you as parents, us as government, and schools do too. I want to reset these relationships, rebuild trust and work together for the benefit of all our children.

I need all parents to play their part too. Every child is different and you know your child best. I know that every child has different needs, but one thing that can have the biggest positive impact for children is making sure they go to school. When things are working well and children have the right support, ambition, opportunities, belonging, all come from being in school. However excellent our teachers, they can’t teach children who aren’t there. As I put in place measures to drive high and rising standards in schools, children who are absent won’t feel the benefit of them.

Attendance from day one really matters. Children who miss a day at the beginning of a new term are much more likely to be persistently absent for the rest of the school year. So my ask of you for this back to school week is simple, but crucial. If you make sure your children are where they belong - in school - schools are there by your side to support you in this, and so is government.

Education is about partnership – and we owe it to all our children to work together in their best interests. As a new September rolls round, let’s use this moment to fix our foundations, begin the work of rebuilding Britain. Happy back to school week!

🍀 Completely get you! Hang in there, this hopeless uninspiring government won’t last forever!

Levelling down is never going to end well. We are racing towards North Korean style under Labour!

They can’t get out soon enough for me! Unfortunately, they won’t be out quick enough not to cause irreparable damage to thousands of innocent children and their amazing vulnerable schools.

Totally agree. Many people are ignorant to how these economies start. This is a dictatorship: the RED FLAGS are there when the ministers REFUSE to engage in conversation with the electorate, they CENSOR any comments on Facebook that don’t agree with their diatribe, they TELL you to ‘put up and shut up’ with their policies and they start to marginalise and DIVIDE society. Sound familiar? Those who are oblivious to these signals need to wake up before it’s too late. I have zero confidence in this government, their ministers and I’m losing faith in my country. So sad.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-should-work-with-schools-not-tax-them-out-of-existence/

Maybe you’ll listen to a Labour peer if not the many parents concerned about what this will do to ALL children:

Lord Hacking on 5th Setember:

My Lords, I stand here as a supporter of the Government, but no support can be blind. I cannot support the proposed VAT on independent school fees, whether or not it was in the manifesto. It is immoral and destined to bring about significant social and political damage to my party and the country.

There are many serious worries. For example, the introduction of an education tax will put us at odds with every country in the European Union and all federal and state law in the United States of America. There is also a serious worry about a blatant breach of the education provision in article 2 of the first protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is not among us, but we have heard his views through the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and he supports entirely what I just said.

The most worrying feature is the failure properly to assess the likely level of forced pupil migration from the independent to the state sector—a vital assessment. The VAT proponents have not revealed their calculations, but the arithmetic is such that any pupil migration above 10% will wipe out any profit for the state and become a progressive burden on the state. Since the VAT proponents are still claiming a profit of between £1.3 billion and £1.5 billion for the state sector, the assumption has to be that they are the working on a very low pupil migration figure, possibly as low as 5%.

There are other calculations. The October 2022 parent survey by the Independent Schools Council, conducted among 16,000 parents, found that 18.8% of parents were likely take their children out of independent education. In April 2024, a parent survey by the Times newspaper set a pupil migration figure of 26%. A preparatory school in Surrey forecasted the same 26% migration of pupils. The Hulme Grammar School in Oldham believes that 50% of parents will find it difficult to meet the VAT school fees. Scaling down the figures as far as possible, this means we are risking no less than 80,000 to 108,000 pupils being forced from the independent sector, with all the education disruption and distress this will involve, and with a big burden of new pupils being placed into the state sector.

The task, therefore, upon which I have embarked is to persuade my party not to carry this measure further forward. It must be noted that the well-endowed schools constitute only 10% of the independent sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, pointed out. The axe will fall not on them, although they will be affected, but on the hundreds of independent schools, some very small, throughout the country which are providing most valuable education to supplement the state sector. Take, for example, the independent schools in Greater Manchester that I recently visited—the Hulme Grammar School, which I have just mentioned, and the Bolton School in Bolton. As I learned, the parents are just working people employed in health, education, catering and hospitality. They are taxi drivers, joiners, carpenters, and all are making great sacrifices to provide a better education for their children. These are the very people my party has pledged to support.

Finally, I can only repeat that this VAT proposal is wrong. Any reasonable assessment of likely pupil migration will show that it will provide no benefit to the state but would be a heavy burden on it. I ask the Minister and the Government to respond positively to all these concerns and, as promised by the Leader of the House, to listen to constructive criticism.

Has probably been mentioned already, but what this message fails to mention is what about all the children without a school place from September, who wish to attend a suitable school for their needs but due to waiting lists, lack of school places, let down by their local council, etc, the space for them is not available? When is this urgent issue going to be addressed by the DoE?

And they are NOT even the party that MAJORITY VOTERS voted! They are in much of the dictatorship, which means neither morality or rationality matters to them!

I forgot to say, not even human rights law matters to them!

Both my children have excellent attendance. However, having two children with SEN things are much more complicated than that and I would love to work in partnership but in reality I am constantly fighting to get my children an adequate education.

1. The new funding is great but in my experience private nurseries use every excuse under the sun not to offer a child with additional needs a place. When I looked at nurseries and explained that my son was speech delayed and may be autistic many nurseries suddenly ‘didn’t have any availability’ despite have good availability less than 24 hours earlier. I ended up leaving my well paid career as I could only obtain a pre-school place from 9-3 term time only rather than a nursery place (all year round 8-6)
2. My son has been assessed by a number of professionals who all say he needs and EHCP. His pre-school applied for one last October. The LA refused to issue one in November as they claimed my son does not have SEN. I appealed and the LA conceded and conducted an ECHNA which confirmed the significant amount of support my son required. The LA refused to issue a EHCP. I have appealed and it is listed for July 2025. My son has started school and we are almost 1 year down the line and no closer to an EHCP.

Check out https://educationnottaxation.org/legal/ and support if you are able to

6,500 new expert teachers that must start this year as 8 private schools just closed in deprived areas and from my son’s school about 10% are leaving into the state system. Exactly what you wanted them to do, except for the fact that some of your LA websites are asking people to reconsider if the change is good for their children (a recommendation that did not exist before) and some other LA are asking parents to prove that they really can not afford the private system any longer. Why???

In short, nice words but you are doing it in the wrong way.
Trying to squeeze more money from children’s education as oppose to trying to raise taxes on sugar/salt or giving incentives for companies to open in deprived areas will never bring growth - never. It will only take everyone back and the people to suffer the most are always the weaker population

some of your LA websites are asking people to reconsider if the change is good for their children (a recommendation that did not exist before) and some other LA are asking parents to prove that they really can not afford the private system any longer. Why???

Which LEAs are asking parents to prove they can’t afford private schools? Please can you link to some of these websites?

It was Buckinghamshire. It ended up in the papers yesterday

Oh right-I can’t see anything on the admissions page of their website.

Parents must 'provide evidence of their finances' to secure school place (yahoo.com)

suspect wording for this and future requests will be formalized and worded more suitably.

This policy alone ensured that I will never vote labour again.

This is a bit of a ramble, but as someone with a background of educating in state school and children who have been in both state and private schools, i just had stuff to get off my chest and had to do it in a hurry.
My children both have scholarships now to private school and both came from state. The teachers at their school told me they couldn’t give my kids what they needed. I struggled to get my kids school places in state school when we moved house and i could t get them into the same school because of lack of spaces. I wonder what will happen now so many are pushed back into the state system when so many of the school around us are full.

We sent them to private school as we were struggling during covid for care for the kids while i was having cancer treatment. We wanted to ensure that they would have extended wrap around care if need be on an adhoc basis and sometimes without notice. We didn’t know what would happen to me and wanted as much security and normality ongoing for the children as possible, with such an uncertain future. My husband has to go away for work once a week and sometimes to the states for a week at a time. . private school offered the option of boarding with friends, fun and familiarity. It gave me peace of mind that should something happen to me, they would all manage on a practical level at least. The pastoral support at private school has been amazing compared to their state school.

The extra curricular clubs are a godsend as i don’t have the energy or capacity to get them around anymore.

I worked in the state sector and watched the arts, sport, holistic, creative and pastoral aspects of education be stripped away. Not for cost but for emphasis on academics. My role changed and so did the enjoyment of my job and the engagement of the children. It wasn’t funding, it was valuing sport, arts and the whole child less than straight academics.

As someone whose Dad was a staunch Labour supporter, my opinions of private schools changed after working in the state sector and having my own children. I see my kids private school offer provision for the local state schools, for access to sports facilities, creative spaces and cookery days, harry potter themed library events, creative writing workshops, nature days in the grounds etc etc all free of charge.

I’ve had conversations with parents who are eating one meal a day to send their kids to private school and a friend whose husband had died suddenly and she was managing on one income and worried sick about the fees but desperately doesn’t want her son to lose his friends and the security of school as well as his father. One friend is a single parent who is a nurse. She works god know how many hours to send him there, i have no idea how, but i do know she’s exhausted doing it. These are the families who will suffer. Also from working in the state sector, how about we look are the disparity between the quality of education and percentage of outstanding schools around the london area and then look at it as you travel north. Tell me about the grammar schools and the state schools who board, wear tweed suits and play lacrosse. Tell me the disparity isn’t hugely about postcodes and less about state and private.

Penalising the children whose families can only marginally afford private school, only punishes the children and weighs heavily on the state. I genuinely can’t see how schools/councils are going to cope with the influx of private school fees. They are already having to build new schools and lose sports pitches to build new classrooms before this happened.

Imagine the impact on the NHS if privately paying patients were pushed back onto the care of the state.

Its nonsensical.

I understand the romantic notion of all children having equal access to quality education and i fully agree, but ill thought out, desperate vote snatching policies, which will let’s be honest negatively impact both state and private pupils is absolutely not the answer.

Dont get me started on SEN provision, as this is my background. They say there will be exemption for SEN pupils, but this o ly applies to those with EHCP’s which thousands of them don’t have. Many parents move to the private sector after battling for so long to get recognition and provision for their child’s needs. An EHCP costs the state and don’t we know it. Parents can be suicidal trying to get the support they need and get an EHCP and some don’t have the fight and give up. The private sector often picks these kids up.

I’ve watched both of my children come back to school after the Summer and some of their friends just haven’t returned, with no warning. The children didn’t know they were leaving, parents had to make sudden decisions and take provision where/when they could before the places went. The kids didn’t even get to say goodbye.

I can also tell you of those that are staying, many are stripping back, extra curricular activities like music lessons or hobbies. They are letting employees go, they are spending less aa they have no disposable income and charitable giving is going. How does that impact the economy. i also know that teachers both in the private sector and the state are being asked to spread themselves thinner to cover the financial losses to private schools and the influx of pupils to the state.

As a parent, my peace of mind is gone and my kids are worried about losing friends and potentially school. I’m not sure i’ve spoken to a single person from whatever background who thinks this is the way the even up the playing field. Everyone thinks it just widens the divide, stretching state provision and making the Private Sector even more elite.

My heart goes out to you. Since the government only focus on the ‘majority’ as they call it, you epitomise the ‘majority’ of private school parents. It’s disgraceful that the government try to paint a picture that we are all champagne quaffing parents with ‘broad shoulders’. I was brought up Labour, like you and soon opened my eyes to ideology versus reality once I grew up. The sad truth is bitterness and those who would withhold aspiration use ideology as a weapon to beat people down. It doesn’t work. People are different and want different things.

I believe in opportunity for everyone, as does nearly every private school parent I know. The state system in some areas is diabolical, but it’s also excellent in others. The inequality of opportunity and standard of education in state schools is just as great as it is in private versus state. So, taxing education and forcing some of the most vulnerable children out of their beloved schools, away from dear friends and cherished teachers is beyond cruel - it’s vindictive and evil.

If politicians are supposedly (and I use that word satirically) the most intelligent minds, then why have they come up with the most illogical solution? The answer is it is driven by hatred and bitterness and not intelligent and well researched thinking.

The sad part is, the people who think it’s a good idea, won’t realise it isn’t until it is too late. This is something that will cause irreversible damage and I dread to think of the long term consequences.

I truly hope you and your family can come through this. I presume you are already engaging with the Facebook group ENT?

Read the comments in the legal action that Education Not Taxation is supporting..... educationnottaxation.org/legal/

The government's actions are deeply concerning. It's time to also change the perception the 93% of those in state schools have about independent school families — that independents are only attended by the wealthy.

I once shared this view, and felt embarrassed to share that I have moved to independent. My experience over the past 12 months has shown me the reality: most students (from the 7% in independent schools) come from everyday working and middle-class families, including carpenters, electricians, key workers, small business owners, shopkeepers, cleaners, administrative staff, and many others from both blue and white-collar professions.

Many families, including those with children who have special educational needs but lack EHCPs, choose independent schooling after getting lost in the state system or let down.

Each hard-working non-elitist parent has their own reasons for making the difficult decision to give up a free state school place (which they still pay £7,690 per pupil per year in England from their income tax) and make significant sacrifices to go to independent. 20% increase in one go with little notice to plan halfway through an academic year is scandalous.

If more families return to the already overstretched state sector, it will further strain the system. There of course be places available in severely underperforming or way out-of-catchment schools.......which ticks the Government's box of legally allocating a school place to a child returning to state school...

Every parent has the right to choose the best avenue for their child, whether in the state or independent sector. Now more than ever, the entire education system and nation needs to collaborate rather than push through divisive policies...

I'd like to change the narrative that all of the 93% is underfunded, impoverished and socially disadvantaged. Does Eleanor Palmer school feel that way? Pate's Grammar? Many parents sending their children to the top selective and non-selective state schools are far wealthier than a lot in independent schools and have paid eye-watering amounts of money to live in tiny and exclusive catchment areas. The PM's £2m was in the 180-yard catchment of the Eleanor Palmer School where his children went. Most properties there cost at least £1m. They are buying a better education, sometimes costing more than independent fees would (with the difference in house prices). But now I'm being told my family has broader shoulders than those families, waving as they leave for their trip to the Maldives, and we need to buy them breakfast?

It's hypocritical in the extreme. As a former Labour voter, I'm disgusted with how we're being treated, at the same time as they're telling everyone they're "for aspiration." Yes, you can aspire, but don't actually achieve anything, as well take it away (unless you're using your wealth to buy your way into a top state school; that's fine).

What is this propaganda!?

i urge everyone to vote in the next council elections next year
I don't think people will take much persuading.
to oust all the labour councillors

It relates to https://educationnottaxation.org/legal/

How about when your autistic child can't go to school due to school not being able to meet their needs?

It's great that you love sending your children off to school and they happily go through the gates. Gloating about it on here doesn't seem very understanding of you!

My child however was too distressed to leave the house. They couldn't cope with the environment at school, it isn't designed for neurodiverse children who have difficulty with noises, smells and overcrowding. If they did manage to go in then the teachers didn't adapt any work or the environment, they were instead isolated in a cloakroom in the corridor which didn't even have a working light for half the year.

We moved them to a small independent school to meet their needs as the local authority could not. Now we can't afford the 20% rise in fees that we are being penalised with in January. What do I do now???
My child isn't as lucky as yours and can't just walk through the gates of a busy mainstream school. SEND provision is poor or non-existent in many state schools.
How are you providing for these children who will be stuffed back into mainstream schools? The classes will be bulging, this is detrimental for ALL children. Not to mention staff of mainstream schools with oversized classes, no funding and no SEND support!
What are you putting in place for these children? You say get them in and you will do the rest?

Did you listen to BBC Radio 4 Women's Hour on Tuesday 10th September? The girl who spoke up for all neurodiverse children who has experienced school trauma and had no support? Maybe you should. She speaks the truth!