Labour’s plans for VAT on Private Schools

[Busydadof2]

The Labour Party has proposed introduction of VAT on private schools.

In the scheme of things the money they will bring in from this is tiny compared with total expenditure on state schools, while it will drive more burden on the state system as some parents leave private schools. I think this is a populist ploy to get traditional Labour voters to vote for what is in any other sense a centrist party.

Have you considered signing this petition to make sure the policy gets scrutinised and the weight of public sentiment against it is known?

Change.org petition: Stop Labour from adding 20% VAT to private school fees and forcing kids to change schools

www.change.org/p/stop-labour-from-adding-20-vat-to-private-school-fees-and-forcing-kids-to-change-schools

Various perspectives from the signatories of this vote come to mind and resonate with our own situation, including this: “I work in a state school with over 30 in a class and oversubscribed. My 2 kids went or go to private schools and we have sacrificed loads to do this. We are NOT wealthy, many of the kids at the school I work at live in bigger houses and have much more disposable income than we do. We chose to send our kids to private school rather than live in a bigger house instead of our semi detached on a main road. We holiday in the UK every year and I work full time. I buy my clothes on the high street or in charity shops. Many parents at the school my kids attend are in exactly the same situation. I agree there are some very wealthy parents there too and the addition of VAT will not even make an impact on them, they will pay it without batting an eyelid. All this will do is push the kids like ours back into an already oversubscribed state system, increase class sizes even more and create a bigger divide as private education will become truly elitist.”

I’ve got kids. I would welcome an influx of formerly privately educated kids into the state sector. The government absolutely should step up to accommodate that and they will have to if that is in fact the outcome.

Why would you welcome them? And what's the financial impact on your school - where's the extra money coming from to accommodate them?

The question of where the extra money is coming from is one for the government.

I would welcome them because the likelihood is that families who valued education enough to pay for it would make a positive impact on any school.

Just anecdote obviously but my kids go to an outstanding state primary in an area where most kids are in state for primary and private for secondary. So the parents of my DCs peers are overwhelmingly the type with high demands of the school. The PTA is amazingly well funded and supported and as a result the school has lots of good facilities. Parents are really involved with the school in things like giving talks to the kids about their jobs, supporting school trips etc. They push for enrichment activities like trips, sports, music. Results are high, support for SEN is excellent. All pupils at the school benefit from this.

If the kids all went to the local state secondary no doubt it would also see improvements along these lines. It is generalising obviously but the parents who pay for private education are also the parents who would demand improvements to the state sector if they had no choice but to use it.

Government doesn't have money. The question of where money comes from is one for all taxpayers. If this policy doesn't raise the expected money, which it probably won't and could raise zero money, because people will (as you say) arrive in state schools thus not paying VAT and instead demanding a place, it's a problem for state schools' resources.

Yes and it will have to be dealt with.

But let’s be honest, the people
objecting here aren’t doing so out of concern for state school kids 🤣.

Looking at the top quartile, there are around 2m children in state schools from families earning >£65k or so (actually more than that because families with school-age children are heavily weighted into middle and upper percentiles vs younger people on first jobs).

Why should we expect the migration of a few tens of thousands of children into schools their families don't like, to demand or influence the improvements the existing 2m affluent children don't already generate? It just doesn't make sense.

It makes even less sense when you figure how many children are in private schools with SEN or with other concerns (anxiety, trauma, victims of bullying); and that some private school parents actually live up to the negative stereotype of being a distracting PITA....not many, but enough that you'd notice if they (1) were at your school (2) arrived at your school already in a state of "hacked off". All adds up to a massive distraction.

As you say, you're generalising. You're having a terrific state school experience and I couldn't be happier for you, but that doesn't mean the arrival of private school pupils elsewhere will have the same benefits.

Out of curiosity, how many places are there at your school?

I'm one of them, and I am very much concerned with the state of the economy and the impact on state school kids.

You’re not correct on that

Even if fewer kids in private school has no positive impact on state schools at all, it will go at least some way towards making our society fairer, which should be a goal in and of itself.

My kids school is 3 form entry in London.

Well, you’re not going to admit it’s out of blatant self interest but that is how most of us generally behave.

You might but whether a policy is poor or not is of interest

The pp covers some of the economic info

My dc are at state and it still looks like a poor policy

My own personal view is ideologically based. I do not believe that our society should give tax breaks to institutions which perpetuate inequality, the main victims of that inequality being children. I believe that ultimately a system which allows the most talented, as opposed to the most wealthy, to succeed is what we should all be striving for because ultimately we will all benefit from that.

The ins and outs of how the policy is administered and how the impact is dealt with are obviously very important, but my starting point is that this is absolutely what we as a country should be doing.

It is obvious that no one who currently benefits from a particular system is going to want it to change, and that individual parents will always (and should always) do the best for their kids, whatever that means in the current context. But that is why government needs to take a broader view and work to change that context.

I feel like whatever system we had in place, a lot of posters here wouldn’t like it.

Grammars = elitist
Privates = unequal
Comprehensives = one size fits all

You can make a case for the policy but not everyone is talking from a point of personal benefit or otherwise

I agree with the pp economically it’s poor and bad overall for standards

And that’s reflected in the U.K. being the only country to do so.

It won’t be good for state or private

@Naptrappedmummy (love your username, by the way!)"Grammars = elitist
Privates = unequal
Comprehensives = one size fits all"

2 of these 3 are accurate descriptions!

Equality. I agree "equality" is a thing, particularly if we were even pretending to talk about "levelling up", which we're not...

Family, choice, diversity, excellence, costs/benefits, tax impact and "not being educated by the state" are things too, and trashing private schools is helping none of them.

So sure, if you're keen to validate this policy, you have to do so by saying every harm is justified in the name of equality. If that's the only value on the table, nobody can disagree with you.

By the way it's not a "tax break". It's just that we, like every country in the world, don't tax education

If we needed to pull our children out of private education, they would still benefit from our money. They would have their state education supplemented with all the enrichment we could fit in, plus tutors. We
would save the extra money for a house deposit and early pension schemes.

It may make you feel better, but it's not a level playing field.

Family, choice, diversity, excellence, costs/benefits, tax impact and "not being educated by the state" are things too, and trashing private schools is helping none of them.

These are all just different ways of saying you want to be able to pay for an advantage for your kid. I get it, and I may well do the same if it is what turns out to be the best for my kids. But I won’t pretend that’s not what I’m doing and I won’t begrudge paying for it in full.

And sure, people will pay for extra tutoring etc etc but that is different from the state sanctioning this kind of unfair advantage through its tax system.

By the way it's not a "tax break". It's just that we, like every country in the world, don't tax education

It’s a basic misunderstanding

Agreed

"All"...no.

They are certainly elements of families wanting to do the best for their children. Which is a good thing - families should be doing the best for their children and should be encouraged to do so.

They are also elements (costs and benefits and tax impact) of saying private education is a double positive externality: encourages private investment in human capital while saving the state serious money. The cost of your absolute equality drive is enormous per chart:

Again, if equality is the only value, I get it, and at least you're straight up about it rather than trying to argue the tenuous fiscal case.

Oh also, how do you think the tax treatment of tutoring is "different" from independent schools? Apart from

• tutoring doesn't save the state money
• tutoring is, to put it politely a "less than optimal" contributor of income tax and NICs

Yes of course families should do the best for their kids (as I’ve said in previous posts), but what an individual should
do is a completely different question from what the state should do.

It’s artificial to look at the financial impact in a vacuum as that chart does. But in any event as you say, my views on this aren’t informed by the finances of it in a narrow sense.

From an economic pov I’d say the state is making the wrong decision.

Hence being an outlier

It’s not a narrow pov, the opposite it’s looking at overall impact