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.”

Do you have comparable degree attainment statistics for Oxford?
I wonder if any of the differences come down to choice of degree? E.g if many more private school pupils do languages AND they give a high proportion of 1sts (no idea whether that is true, just an illustration) that might skew the numbers.

There’s top comprehensives made inaccessible by high house price too. VAT will increase that issue

So how do you assess DCs' achievements then? Surely four A star A levels from Westminster are a bit more facilitated than four A stars from Grange Hill? That ought to be recognised if you really are looking for the shiniest stars.

What does 'fall' for Labour mean?

Maybe it isn't a brilliant policy, but it's not the only one and most of the electorate won't care too much as it affects a percentage of 7% of families - so even numerically, it's just not a priority for the vast majority of people.

The biggest issue is of course cost of living, and the worst poverty in more than a generation - according to the Department of Work and Pensions a few months ago, the UK has seen the biggest rise in absolute poverty in 30 years, that is 18% of the population, with 20% of the population deemed to be in poverty. When the government itself produces such statistics and then headlines ensue (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68625344), the electorate at large are bound to vote against that government and not consider a very minority interest policy that will only affect a tiny number of votes. Tbh I imagine the Tories' Rwanda plan and national service proposal will be far more off-putting than the VAT.

“So how do you assess DCs' achievements then? Surely four A star A levels from Westminster are a bit more facilitated than four A stars from Grange Hill? That ought to be recognised if you really are looking for the shiniest stars.”

It is not that simple though these days because so much information is available online and tutoring is rife. And stuff can be easily faked and grades can be tutored/bought without an admissions tutor even knowing. And parents can purchase online Oxbridge prep classes as well. You don’t need to go to Westminster for that. The intellectual atmosphere a DC grows up in and the books and debate they are surrounded by daily from an early age are probably far more determinative anyway. And how are they going to second guess that?

The policy isn’t just about the 7% it’s about the overall impact on education and state schools when students shift

If there’s no extra funding from it there’s no extra teachers

Then damage to the sector

Why is that good?

It’s a shame they’ve gone for red meat policy which will damage education. There are better ways. And as you say they’ll win anyway, they don’t even need it

Well let's see what the details are.
I'm sure it must be worrying for anyone who doesn't want to move their child and feels under a lot of financial pressure, so I hope their schools are sympathetic and explore ways of keeping costs down.

The reality is - for most people who are worrying that they might have to move their children because they can't afford it, they will already be at one of the less expensive schools. And those are the schools that just can't afford to reduce costs much further or are in danger of closing.

@Mia85
That is a very good question and happily Cambridge has the answer to that because they did a multivariate regression analysis of the factors that might explain their splendid outcomes, and it included subject choice.

They found that while subject choice is important, the type of school that students attend is significant when that is controlled for.

Note the results for cognitive/learning difficulties on one hand and state school attendance on the other.

Tutoring is rife in both sectors. A level grades cannot be purchased or faked in the UK. We are talking about UK Oxbridge admissions here. A levels may not be perfect in terms of syllabus but they are at least public exams and the context in which they are achieved is important. If it's all about the intellectual environment in which a child grows up, why did you bother sending yours to grammar? Surely a Grange Hill eqivalent would have sufficed?

That’s really interesting thank you. Did you get all of that through foi? Is it just Cambridge that you are looking at? Thanks for sharing it.

The vast majority of the UK has no access to the sort of comprehensive schools that send pupils to Oxbridge.

I'm not sure what your point is.

@HelsinkiSummer” If it's all about the intellectual environment in which a child grows up, why did you bother sending yours to grammar? Surely a Grange Hill eqivalent would have sufficed?”

I sent mine to grammar because they were bored and not challenged in state primary. We had to challenge them with books, instruments, chess, sports etc. They are all academically gifted - we were too. One who is off the scale clever was a bit depressed in KS2. The main benefit for them at grammar is peer group and other kids who like newspapers, history books, coding, languages, advanced maths.

Exactly. For some very able DC, if they are not challenged, irrespective of their parents' education level, they can switch off from learning and not reach their full potential. I think you demonstarate that point saying that your DC became depressed. Some can power through and get amazing results in a less challenging teaching environment and others struggle. So school learning environment clearly does matter.

@Mia85

The table showing results by school type is from an FOI. I don't have comparable data for Oxford, I rather lost the will to live after the first one. I am sure it would show roughly the same thing, although perhaps not so diabolical because they got off to a later start and they probably still put more effort into their admissions process.

The statistical analysis is from: Ekaterina Samoylova and Laura Hall, Analysis of student characteristics and attainment outcomes at the University of Cambridge Academic and Financial Planning and Analysis (2020).

Thank you, would be interesting to compare, though they seem quite quiet about the data in public as far as I can see.

@HelsinkiSummer
Your Grange Hill/Westminster comparison fails to take into account that Westminster's intake is already highly selected. If you compare Westminster and Hills Road you will get a different answer, because school results are largely explained by pupil selection and this also applies to universities

Cambridge University chose to select on nonacademic criteria even after they could see that they were progressively selecting those less able in significant numbers. The data shows that this "contextual" approach to admissions does not work. There is no other interpretation.

@Marchesman Westminster's intake is highly selected. That does not mean to say that an equally able child does not end up in a school where the learning environment is far, far less conducive to success. Their results should be considered in relation to the environment in which they were achieved. I agree that, as it stands, contextualisation is not a sharp enough tool for its purpose. However, the principle is correct.

The principle may be correct, the problem lies in its application. Subject specific testing, plus or minus a foundation year could in theory identify a very small number of suitable applicants. However, at the point of university entry it is generally too late. Furthermore, Cambridge demonstrably sets a lower bar for entry for applicants from state schools in general and that is spectacularly blunt to qualify as a context no matter how they spin it. (University of Cambridge Access and Participation Plan 2020-21 to 2024-25, p19.)

This is not about increasing the admission of lower socioeconomic status applicants because that has a separate target in the plan, which is independent of their target for state schools. It is also not about finding untapped talent, as their data shows. If neither of these, can its purpose be anything but ideological or political in the same way as Labour's VAT, the net aim of both being to put pressure on and shrink the private sector?

My point is that many posters are more than a little obsessed with grammars when they are available only to a minority of UK children.

Maybe that just flew over your head.

I know Marchesman has previously tried to use the Samoylova and Hall paper to show that the state education effect is as significant as that of cognitive and learning disabilities.

Worth noting that when you read the Samoylova and Hall paper it states:

The results show that taken individually, all of the factors remain fairly poor predictors of the outcome. For example, the top ranked predictor based on R-squared value for the first class outcome variable only explains 5.3% of the variance in that outcome.

Across all three outcomes, the results obtained in the first year of study and the course of study (Tripos) remain the two strongest predictors in that order.

And:

It is important to note that the statistically significant result for a particular category does not indicate the importance or causal effect on the outcomes - as highlighted above, the predictive powers of all the factors on the outcome remain very low.

Interestingly, although Marchesman only showed the part of the table referring to the multivariate model for first class degrees, when the results for good honours degrees (first class and upper second) are shown, comprehensive schools are no longer statistically significant.

The paper concludes:

Both univariate and multivariate modelling of a number of quantitative factors indicate a relatively low predictive strength of these factors, both as individual predictors and as a combined set. It is not possible to numerically capture and model all characteristics of an individual and use them in a predictive model. It can be hypothesised that a number of attributes related to teaching and learning approaches, such as study and revision behaviours, levels of self-confidence, peer-group interactions, content of education activities and assessment types, which are intrinsically harder to measure quantitatively and which thus remained outside of the scope of this investigation, can be influencing the outcomes.

Of all factors studied, the attainment in the first year of the course was consistently shown to be the best predictor amongst the rest, which is not surprising as previous attainment is a known indicator of future academic performance.

https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/files/attainment_outcomes.pdf

“Exactly. For some very able DC, if they are not challenged, irrespective of their parents' education level, they can switch off from learning and not reach their full potential. I think you demonstarate that point saying that your DC became depressed. Some can power through and get amazing results in a less challenging teaching environment and others struggle. So school learning environment clearly does matter.”

My DC in state primary finished work and extensions in minutes and then just sat there reading his book. And eventually they let him bring his own work. But the real problem was not having friends like him who wanted to discuss politics and violin sonatas and famous violinists. The way his brain works is that it is hungry for knowledge so if it wasn’t satisfied at school he would come home and practise the violin ferociously for 3 hours, read War & Peace type literature, teach himself Japanese and spend hours watching Maths tutorials. The local boys comp does not even set in Maths until Year 9 so for a kid who could do GCSE Maths comfortably by Year 5 that is not a good environment. At the superselective grammar there were some boys like him, definitely a handful who could do further maths A level by GCSEs and are accessing content online. But the important thing for them is peer group and meeting kids like them as teenage years are hard if you are an outlier. They need friends too and they have special educational needs as well. For this type of kid if the school does them more harm than good the parent has a choice of home schooling as a only real alternative. It’s another reason why VAT policy is crazy. They are going to push even more kids into homeschooling via need and our figures are already internationally embarrassing.

Also all my DC did the CAT tests at secondary and got top results but these tests did not seem to differentiate between my one DC who is a true outlier and the other 2 who are just very intelligent and able to cope and get straight 9s in 11 GCSEs/ 4 A stars at A level, fit in and access school in a normal way and move on to top unis.
It’s far easier to parent and access education with the former 2 who are probably top 2 per cent. I do wonder whether elite unis are geared at them too and sometimes missing out on the outliers. I am definitely not the only one who struggled to get my academically gifted DC interested in learning how exactly to answer GCSE style questions to get the right amount of marks when their brain is craving far greater depth and the same applies at A Level for some whose brain wants to access uni level depth and challenge.

In other words, it was a contribution to private schools' fixed costs, as I said. Yes, some people of the "private school evil" brigade didn't like it. But it happened.

This report Too many bright children let down in the state system - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) is incredibly damning.

The country needs those children to be able to access the education that suits them. "If we are going to succeed as an economy and as a society, we have to make more of our most able young people. We need them to become the political, commercial and professional leaders of tomorrow."

Indeed. We need people who will be highly productive in whatever way. One way (and I know there are others) is to get a job paying shedloads of cash and contributing shedloads of tax; anyone demanding government spending on this or that by "taxing the rich" had better have a plan for ensuring there are enough of "the rich" to tax.

That's the argument for grammar schools (slashed by both parties), Direct Grants or Assisted Places (both abolished by Labour). Those abolitions are directly responsible for the intense demand and high prices of independent schools. And that's also an argument for independent schools - if children are ill-served by the state, and parents are willing/able to pay, it's terrific for society that they do.

The only alternative is the nihilistic "equality" mantra which comes, as it always does, at the expense of quality, family, innovation, choice, diversity and efficiency.