Private schools should be taxed at 25% to fund teachers for Blackpool says Lord Adonis

[noblegiraffe]

Private schools should be taxed at 25% to fund extra pay for teachers in hard-to-recruit areas like Grimsby or Blackpool says Lord Adonis. This £2.5 billion fund could also be used to fund tuition for those in danger of failing maths and English. I'm sure some people on here might have opinions on that?

And he doesn't think pupils should be expelled unless they've broken the law (not sure what he thinks they are currently expelled for but even breaking the law is often overlooked).

"He said whole towns and cities are affected, referring to reports of how doctors in Blackpool use the "Shit Life Syndrome" description.

"Deep poverty, pervasive drugs, obesity, anti-depressants and mental illness in a large isolated town exhibiting alarming signs of disintegration – including the largest encampment in Britain of children expelled from school.

"...For Blackpool today, read also Hull, Grimsby, large parts of the North and the Midlands, and large towns in the South, including Hastings, Dover and Folkestone.""

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/lord-adonis-calls-ban-expelling-pupils-unless-they-break-law

One way forward is property tax like the US system. It's like council tax but a hell of a lot higher. The more expensive your property the more you pay. There is no cap on the upper end. It's a percentage of the value of the property. It incentivises those in expensive properties to use the state system. It is only paid by those who own their home rather those who rent. If you rent your landlord pays the property tax each year. No where I know of would entertain class sizes of 30. I'm sure someone will pop up to tell me they know of one somewhere but it certainly isn't the norm. I'd be happy to pay a property tax to fund schools appropriately.

Good luck Monkey I admire parents who take this view and genuinely hope you and others like you are able to be a voice and influence your DD's school to make a significant difference.
The only thing that concern me is that you might be able to influence some of what your DD's school does on a day to day basis but can you influence government funding? I understand from teachers that schools hands are very tied due to insufficient funding.

"It incentivises those in expensive properties to use the state system."
I'm not sure if I'm being a bit thick here but how does it do that?

It incentivises them to use it because they are already paying so much money toward it. To pay private fees on top is a huge amount. My mothers house in the US is a 3 bed 1300sq foot cottage. She pays 7000 usd a year in property tax.

I love a statistic here are average class sizes across the world, interestingly China has classes of more than 30!

It one answer but like Lord Adonisis plan it wont stop the super rich (with all their other existing advantages) paying for education. Secondly wont it encourage more people to rent, which might not be a bad thing is terms of property prices but could have an effect on the costs rents; pushing them up thus making it harder for those at the bottom to rent somewhere decent. I think I heard on the radio the other day that 40% of the population in the UK are now renting.
The solution is to improve state schools 1. by increasing funding 2, by stopping endless government interference and 3. by addressing the teaching crisis. This would hopefully them mean that the vast majority of parents would have an excellent state school close to their home and genuinely want to send their DC's there.
There will always be a small group who will pay come what may regardless but from reading what is regularly written on here many pay because they just don't believe their states options are any good.

More stats . You all also maybe interested to know that the average class size in Singapore which tops the PIZA league table is 35.5.

What % of children in Singapore are in schools? What is the provision for children with SEN? How is the art, music and sport provision?

Bertrand as you will have seen upthread Im not holding Singapores education system up as the solution Im just pointing out that some other countries have eclipses of more than 30.
What % of children in Singapore are in schools?"
Not sure what you mean by this question.
Music would be considered by many to be very strong in Singapore. I understand from friends there that playing 2-3 instrument to grade 8 is the norm.
Art is none existent, sport provision is not great.

classes not eclipses .

Happy, your statistics about class sizes are completely meaningless in societies that have parallel systems of education, via long hours of tutoring after school. Sure, students may sit in classes of 30+ - but they then spend hours after school in tutoring, doing hours of homework to reinforce what they learnt in school.

User, Happy and Monkey your posts are interesting and you all make good points but please could you try to use paragraphs or put some gaps in between as it's hard to read large wodges of solid text.

Bertrand, primary education in Singapore in compulsory and about 89% go on to secondary.

The problem is we still have grossly unfair state education funding. If my child went to school in Westminster they would receive amongst the best funding in the country, in an area with no poorly performing schools, good gcse results and good ks2 sats results. People with English as a second language do even better. In the general population only 10% have no qualifications.
In the lowest funded area 80% of local authorities have poorly performing schools.
In Blackpool over 40% of the population (can't remember the exact figure) have no qualifications.

There is very little connection between funding and need which is why education is so awful as a means to social mobility.
Best funded areas tend to be in labour or marginal seats. There are no votes in changing funding. I say this from the bitter experience of being in a tory safe seat that has v poor funding
Btw fairer funding for schools was shelved the day after brexit. we might not be able to afford it but if we want to compete we need to sort out funding inequalities.
Btw Westminster gets about £6K per pupil. Blackpool about £4.3K.

Do remember reading a summary of one of the PISA reports and it pretty much said that globally the significant factor that they could see, by country, that affected performance was class size. The larger the class size the better the performance of the country.

The reason suggested was that: say you had £4,000 per child p.a. to spend on education, then with larger class sizes you could spend more per class. I.E have more qualified and better teachers, better resources, teachers that had fewer contact hours per week, etc.

"Happy, your statistics about class sizes are completely meaningless"

user19283746 I am very aware that tutoring is rife in countries like Singapore and in fact stated exactly this up thread which is why the PIZA league tables putting Singapore at the top are totally meaningless. I was simply responding to Shiggle's comment that: "No where I know of would entertain class sizes of 30."
When you look at results from countries like Singapore the general ethos and expectations of the mainly Chinese population also is a significant factor. I am not critising them at all, my very good friend is a Chinese Singaporean. I've found that in general they expect their DC's to do very well at school and get top exam results.

I was specifically referring to the US not the world. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think the cultural differences mean the Far East data is very hard to compare to our (roughly Western) own.

If you opened a Singapore style hothouse school with a class size of 35 you wouldn't have many private paying parents lining up in the U.K. . If we accept that private education gives a child a leg up then we need to understand exactly what the meaningful differences are between state and private are and class size is definitely one.

Fairer funding for schools has not been shelved. It's coming in in two years' time and we're entering a two year transitional period.

And yes to all the posters who've said we can't replicate a Shanghai or Singapore style of education without emulating a Shanghainese or Singaporean style of society, which often values different things in education and behaviour.

Singapore was a few years ago trying to address the fact that their excellent educational system was not delivering enough entrepreneurs or creative thinkers. The strapline above the Ministry of Education (or whatever it was called) used to be "Moulding the Future of of Nation".

"their excellent educational system"
I think some Singaporeans may dispute this! There are quite a few children from Singapore being educated in UK indepedent schools.
Shiggle what sort of leg up do you think private education gives you? If you're talking about the old boy network frequently mentioned on here if it exists at all it only applies to a few schools and it's a much more complicated than what school you went too.

user1471450935 My point about Scarborough was that it's offer is more akin to an old technical college. Nothing wrong with that. Unlikely to become a good university though so unlikely to pull in great teachers (not Oxbridge level) say national nursing leaders for example.

I live in the same county as you and have friends who went to the school your children currently attend. A huge part of the problem is that the spend per child in this county has been the lowest nationally for many years so hopefully the funding formula rejig will start to address that. Did you miss my earlier comment where I said basing a minister up north could be good for their insight ?

We need our kids to get degrees locally and stay local and rebuild. I think ideally we need our kids to go away and get degrees and then come back having lived elsewhere. In my view a lot of the problems in Hull are from having a city council that never changes and is accepting of low aspiration. No, I haven't been round the Ron Dearing College either but I hope that helps drive up standards too. You clearly value education but many, many local parents do not.....and I say that as someone who goes into schools and talks to teachers a lot both professionally and socially.

Fairer funding has been shelved. What is coming is a move to a different funding formula. It is in no way fairer funding which was meant to bring funding to a fairer level for the poorest. What is coming is a new national funding formula NFF. Actually what this currently means is my local primary school loses £40K from its block funding but increases elsewhere. In total a 1% gain. Schools in Westminster also get a 1% gain so this is not in anyway fairer funding.
The reality is that county councils are top slicing education budgets to fund things that have been withdrawn by the govt. They are allowed to do this in the transition phase and to fund historically underfunded things like high needs. In reality extra funding doesn't trickle down to schools.

Bobbing back in, having RTFT (or glanced over it to be more accurate) could we please leave the super-rich out of the discussion? In UK terms, they are a tiny fraction of the student body. They are almost certainly a factor in the thinking of elite schools, but given that the parents have the money for the fees, and MOST will have earned it (contrary to myth) then the children are also likely to be highly intelligent and to have gained their places in highly selective schools on ability. Most private students are the children of the local bank manager and doctor; I was the first person from my family to go to university (1970s). My grand parents all left school at 14 to work (in aircraft manufacturing, secretarial, and as a horse dealer, the fourth as a mother aged 17).

In bygone days, User's sons might have gained places, free places, at selective/grammar schools with intellectual /family support. Their achievements are significant and I am sure they will do well in life. But, if I may... at some stage in their late teens/early twenties, they will need to leave home to flex their wings; this is a crucial juncture in life. If your family can't help out even a little financially, then getting the experience needed to step up and out of the home environment becomes much, much more difficult. Banning unpaid internships longer than 10 working days would help here, but it doesn't distribute influence outside London.

To give some context, my DS has been back and forth between state and private education so we have seen the differences, up close and first hand, between outstanding and failure. DS' friends from less advantaged families are struggling for minimum wage jobs locally... they are never likely to fulfil their gap year dreams, and their ambitions rarely stretch to Russell Group universities.

BUT, while schools proclaim how under-resourced they are, especially post 16, as a person who qualified as a teacher (full secondary PGCE) in a non-core subject at 55, my emails offering to help out as an unwaged volunteer in the local sixth forms with university applications, went unacknowledged. Private schools rarely turn away free assistance without at least considering the offer. There are shortcomings on both sides of the fence.

Sorry I didn't just post and abandon. I was at work until 1400. Then wèekly shop, lidl money goes further. Then joys of two DSes one at football and one at rugby training only 20 miles apart. Must use paragraphs for ANDANTE57. Sorry Andante my set 4 English teacher from my 1980's education(CSE 2 only) would have a field day with her red pen.
Happy I really don't want to ban/outlaw the likes of Win College and so pleased your sons got such a great education, I maybe a little jealous please don't ever feel guilty.
I sometimes think I should never have stumbled onto mumsnet, a) I am a dad and b) before reading education threads I didn't know Win College even existed. So.if I hadn't found you lot I would never know what my boys miss out on.
I would hope if either of my boys met any of your chiidren or Dapples or anyother of the early posters on this thread, they would like and treat them with kindness and the dignity they deserve. I hope we have taught them that. All kids are similar and no one is better than you or equally worst.
Iseenodust I did miss your point about basing a minister in the north, so sorry. God I seem to say that word in every post lately. Must be my poor CSE education. Yes i live in East Yorkshire, Holderness too be accurate. We use local school, it has that in name.
I have to be back at work at 0500 again, so can i continue tomorrow. I will discuss my thoughts on Hull and Holderness futher. Plus I would like to add what I think might help schools like ours and add what DS1 thinks would add to it.
Plus answer sockorphanage well thought points.
Hope the paragraphs helped. Good night