Q for the weirdos who think what school they went to 20+ years ago is somehow relevant or a badge of honour - do you look at st7 school high achievers and wonder whether you would have achieved the same without the leg up?
If yes - your parents spaffed away a load of your inheritance
If no - you're not as clever as you think you are, m7
Although I favour nationalisation for lots of sectors, secondary education is one where the State has proved itself so woefully inadequate and inefficient that it is probably incapable of providing the service at all.
I have sent this to Labour central office in the hope of ensuring legislation is in place to ensure that VAT is payable according to when service is provided not when paid
I think it should be a tax charge (not vat) introduced for foreign students only and equal to the cost of educating a child in the state system.
Private schools should also be asked to make more places available to the less well off. Perhaps a mandatory scholarship scheme open to all - but with selection taken out of the hands of the school.
It will not be news to them of course, but the more detail they have on the plans of individual schools the more likely it is they can successfully ensure the loophole is closed.
Wasn’t VAT chosen because it’s relatively simple to put in place?
There was a perfectly good free places scheme in place decades ago now but iirc thatcher abolished it.
The country as currently constituted shows no interest in equality of opportunity, given that millennials can’t cope with adversity of any sort at all. Thems that can afford private are scarcely going to vote to make it more expensive.
I think most of the very wealthy schools will end up taking the VAT hit (or at least a big chunk of it), at least initially. A number of them have been ramping up their fees in recent years to get ready for that. The government are going to have to watch very carefully to make sure the main result of this isn't that the schools offer fewer bursaries and do even less actual, genuine charitable work.
I understand why labour have done this but I do think they will end up regretting it politically particularly if they don't stage the introduction of the full rate. The main impact is going to be to force smaller independent schools to close. That is not a big deal really in the long term and may well be positive in terms of pushing the children of more engaged parents into the state sector and so improve standards there. But in the short term, the right wing press is going to be full of pictures of middle class kids crying about their school being closed or their parents being forced to take them out of school. Obviously they are going to pick the kids with learning difficulties or who have been badly bullied in the state sector previously and the parents who live off beans on toast, work 3 jobs and drive 20 year old cars to be able to afford to send their kids private.
Inevitably some former private school pupil somewhere is going to get hurt (or harm themselves) and that will blow up.
Labour will need to hold Middle England to get more than one term and Middle England doesn't much like assaults on aspiration even when it is targeted at those considerably better off than them and particularly if the impact seems 'nasty'.
Labour are clearly going to go with the full VAT pretty quickly. But dealing with the relatively minute problem of a few people’s school fees being paid in advance is, according to someone in Labour’s policy team that I know, likely to be something that they won’t be bothered to confront.
I think most people would find photos of posh kids in twotty uniforms crying because their bottom tier of the privileged fannies rugby bloke factory was getting closed down a bit funny.
Point is Rham it won't be the 'posh kids' the Daily Mail will cover. It will be the dyslexic son of a nurse and dentist couple who have made all sorts of sacrifices to get their son away from the bullies in the local comp that ruined his life. They will have his state educated older brother there saying how worried he is about how his brother will cope at his school.
Asian families with amazing stories of fleeing persecution and former doctor parents working hundred hour weeks as taxi drivers are also likely to feature heavily I suspect.
we will probably pre pay if there’s an option to do so
although after labour win virtually every middle class seat in the south, I suspect there’s very little chance of them actually biting the hand that feeds them in this manner (and cratering the state primary school system). At the very least I’d expect a multi multi multi year taper-in (prob 15+yrs)
"But in the short term, the right wing press is going to be full of pictures of middle class kids crying about their school being closed or their parents being forced to take them out of school"
95% of families and voters (and right wing press readers) do not send their kids to private school so they are hardly going to have any great sympathy for wealthier families being "forced" to send their kids to schools their own kids attend. Really Rof can be so out of touch sometimes...
Labour remain much much better than the tories in every respect, and the only sensible party to vote for at the coming general election, hope this clarifies.
its not retrospective taxation it is closing a loophole whereby a service is being paid for early artificially specifically to avoid a tax. It is classic tax avoidance strategy that the government is perfectly entitled to legislate to prevent.
Guy it will be a combination of measures. Firstly they will be able to recover VAT on inputs if they are fully subject to VAT which will reduce costs. Secondly they will take some money out of their reserves to cover the shortfall. Thirdly they will cut back on big capital projects for a while. Fourthly they've been out raising funds from old boys to provide more bursaries to students who would otherwise struggle to pay. Then over time they will slowly the increase the fees again to also compensate.
Well Face they don't know that I don't plan to have children so still happily sending me all their communications and advertising so not that extraordinary really and also I've got a friend whose son was offered a place to start next year.
Face actually you'll find it's part of the school's founding charter that they provide education to 70 poor and needy scholars as the place was founded long before anyone knew what a charitable institution was.
There’s a lot of cack talked about retrospective legislation, especially in the tax field. It would be perfectly ok for Labour to pass anti forestalling stuff on prepayments back to the day after their election victory for example
"Performative class warfare from Labour is always counterproductive in the long term".
Nope, developed countries with little or no private education have better overall education attainment. That is even true in the UK NI has few private schools and far better overall outcomes (and this is not because of the grammar school system, grammar school areas in the rest of the UK do not perform better than the comprehensive system).
Guy, you’re noted as a single issue pervert on private education matters, but yes, enacting a law to apply VAT to a payment already made before that enactment is, indeed, very retrospective taxation very indeed.
the funniest thing on this thread though is the roffers thinking the electorate will care about private school kids being kicked out of their schools and sent to a comprehensive along with their own kids. Far from not looking good - most people will take quiet satisfaction from it.
in middle class constituencies in the south it is absolutely an outcome changing swing issue, and the left are deluded if they think otherwise
Is it bollox. A good half of private school parents will be voting Tory anyway, even in this election, so we are left with perhaps half of private school parents who may not vote Labour because of this, and most of them will vote Labour anyway as most people who are not blind Tories realise (including you Laz) that it is worth 20% on school fees to get rid of this government which is slowly destroying the country their kids will grow up in.
.My school, from 40 or so years ago, was grammar, now private, have started writing to me for donations. The whole alumni thing, fairly recent. As have the people at the schools my kids went to.
I bought a Porsche rather than a Jag, and could still send them to private school if I wanted but even aged 10 and 9 mine have realised that most (not all to be fair) of the kids going private are the ones they wouldn't want to go to school with.
When a drive to work I drive past all the parents dropping theirs off at Terra Nova. They all look like the worst kind of ghastly khvnts I'd want to get away from, not pay to have to socialise with. All Rangies and G Wagons with private plates and Overfinch body kits.
the supposed poor quality of state education is the excuse the wealthy give to send their kids to private school. It is of course absolute crap. You pay for private education to give your child an advantage over the 95% this would remain the case however good the state education system is (a) because fees would just keep going up so private schools remained better resourced (as indeed they have done over the past 70 years) and (b) the networking opportunities presented by the rich and powerful all sending their kids to the same schools
All Rangies and G Wagons with private plates and Overfinch body kits.
Clearly one of those awful nouveau schools. True gentry still drive old estate cars.
I know a few Labour voters who happily have their kids privately educated who may now think twice before applying their mark on the ballot. However, some will see at as their penance for their hypocrisy.
(a) because fees would just keep going up so private schools remained better resourced (as indeed they have done over the past 70 years)
This is why I don't know a single old boy sending their kids to Winchester which is now full of foreign students who probably won't stick around in the UK thus eroding the benefits unless your kids want a career in India or China.
Mine most definitely did not have ski trips (unless you count the day spent breaking our fingers at the local dry slope). It did, even then have a significant problem with kids bringing knives into school and violence connected to drugs and I went to the 'good' school (the ex grammar) in the town I grew up in.
What comps are like in affluent suburban areas =/= what 'most comps' in the UK are like.
High Guise, you cannot extrapolate what you would do to everyone else- it is classic Tory to assume everybody is as cynical as they themselves are and are only pretending not to be totally self interested. I have voted many times in the full expectation that I will pay higher taxes if my favoured party wins.
I have no intention of becoming a school governor anywhere. I probably could at three or four of them if I donated enough money and time. Is that a local status thing? Don't need that.
And then there are the university alumni donation machines. I admire their marketing, Fairly slick these days.
Schools won't increase fees by 20%, that's not how VAT works in a market economy. Schools are already charging market rate, they might manage to push fees by 5% but they'll have to eat the rest like every other producer/services firm etc
Apparently 17.5% of French children go to religious private schools which receive 75% of their funding from the state in return for following the national curriculum. That does sound extraordinary.
No Sails, plainly it does not. Even labour themselves only claim it would raise GBP 1.6 billion and I think that assumes all pupils currently in the private sector stay there (which clearly will not be the case over the medium term). If they take a billion off the table net (taking into account the cost of additional kids in the state sector) I will be surprised.
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Gotta love a good Scheme.
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I have to say, my school is adopting a rather more cautious stance.
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Q for the weirdos who think what school they went to 20+ years ago is somehow relevant or a badge of honour - do you look at st7 school high achievers and wonder whether you would have achieved the same without the leg up?
If yes - your parents spaffed away a load of your inheritance
If no - you're not as clever as you think you are, m7
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Trailblazers you might say.
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@dux
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Some parents have enquired about it but we're not encouraging upfront payments.
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Although I favour nationalisation for lots of sectors, secondary education is one where the State has proved itself so woefully inadequate and inefficient that it is probably incapable of providing the service at all.
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I have sent this to Labour central office in the hope of ensuring legislation is in place to ensure that VAT is payable according to when service is provided not when paid
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People don't get law making do they
Parliament could never fix the tax points to the supply of education, random McGhee KC said so in an opinion!
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My school is just going to swallow the VAT.
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so have they been making super high profits before Sails or are they cutting costs?
(heh at "my school" when you left school 30 odd years ago)
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"People don't get law making do they
Parliament could never fix the tax points to the supply of education, random McGhee KC said so in an opinion!"
Not quite sure of your point Clergs, but parliament can obviously do what the hell it likes.
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lol @ guy thinking this will be news to them.
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I think it should be a tax charge (not vat) introduced for foreign students only and equal to the cost of educating a child in the state system.
Private schools should also be asked to make more places available to the less well off. Perhaps a mandatory scholarship scheme open to all - but with selection taken out of the hands of the school.
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It will not be news to them of course, but the more detail they have on the plans of individual schools the more likely it is they can successfully ensure the loophole is closed.
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HEH@ shatners 22.17
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All the usual rofballs in play.
Wasn’t VAT chosen because it’s relatively simple to put in place?
There was a perfectly good free places scheme in place decades ago now but iirc thatcher abolished it.
The country as currently constituted shows no interest in equality of opportunity, given that millennials can’t cope with adversity of any sort at all. Thems that can afford private are scarcely going to vote to make it more expensive.
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I like that idea Parsnip. Sponsor a poor British child. Just £10 will be enough to pay for his school meals for a whole week.
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I think most of the very wealthy schools will end up taking the VAT hit (or at least a big chunk of it), at least initially. A number of them have been ramping up their fees in recent years to get ready for that. The government are going to have to watch very carefully to make sure the main result of this isn't that the schools offer fewer bursaries and do even less actual, genuine charitable work.
I understand why labour have done this but I do think they will end up regretting it politically particularly if they don't stage the introduction of the full rate. The main impact is going to be to force smaller independent schools to close. That is not a big deal really in the long term and may well be positive in terms of pushing the children of more engaged parents into the state sector and so improve standards there. But in the short term, the right wing press is going to be full of pictures of middle class kids crying about their school being closed or their parents being forced to take them out of school. Obviously they are going to pick the kids with learning difficulties or who have been badly bullied in the state sector previously and the parents who live off beans on toast, work 3 jobs and drive 20 year old cars to be able to afford to send their kids private.
Inevitably some former private school pupil somewhere is going to get hurt (or harm themselves) and that will blow up.
Labour will need to hold Middle England to get more than one term and Middle England doesn't much like assaults on aspiration even when it is targeted at those considerably better off than them and particularly if the impact seems 'nasty'.
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Labour are clearly going to go with the full VAT pretty quickly. But dealing with the relatively minute problem of a few people’s school fees being paid in advance is, according to someone in Labour’s policy team that I know, likely to be something that they won’t be bothered to confront.
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I think most people would find photos of posh kids in twotty uniforms crying because their bottom tier of the privileged fannies rugby bloke factory was getting closed down a bit funny.
Or maybe I'm a monster.
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Performative class warfare from Labour is always counterproductive in the long term.
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Rof
Twot still means the original thing
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I'd love to see all the Stewart's Melville lot with their little cardboard boxes doing the Lehman's march
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Point is Rham it won't be the 'posh kids' the Daily Mail will cover. It will be the dyslexic son of a nurse and dentist couple who have made all sorts of sacrifices to get their son away from the bullies in the local comp that ruined his life. They will have his state educated older brother there saying how worried he is about how his brother will cope at his school.
Asian families with amazing stories of fleeing persecution and former doctor parents working hundred hour weeks as taxi drivers are also likely to feature heavily I suspect.
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Oh no not the dyslexic🤣
Go to normal school or be lolled at
Everyone hates those "sacrificing" parents, maybe more than the straightforward rich w**kers
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Just abolish private sxhools
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Vat on private healthcare after that.
It levels down in the same way.
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we will probably pre pay if there’s an option to do so
although after labour win virtually every middle class seat in the south, I suspect there’s very little chance of them actually biting the hand that feeds them in this manner (and cratering the state primary school system). At the very least I’d expect a multi multi multi year taper-in (prob 15+yrs)
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there may be an option to do so but there is only a chance that it gets you out of a VAT change
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Vanishingly rare agree with dalek.
They are an anachronism. Abolish them.
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this attitude ofc is part of why Labour are so shyt now
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rich arseholes with nothing better to do than pretend reality is a feeling
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"But in the short term, the right wing press is going to be full of pictures of middle class kids crying about their school being closed or their parents being forced to take them out of school"
95% of families and voters (and right wing press readers) do not send their kids to private school so they are hardly going to have any great sympathy for wealthier families being "forced" to send their kids to schools their own kids attend. Really Rof can be so out of touch sometimes...
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retrospective taxation generally considered a human rights offence so doubt prepayment will be successfully attacked
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Labour remain much much better than the tories in every respect, and the only sensible party to vote for at the coming general election, hope this clarifies.
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its not retrospective taxation it is closing a loophole whereby a service is being paid for early artificially specifically to avoid a tax. It is classic tax avoidance strategy that the government is perfectly entitled to legislate to prevent.
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Lol @ retrospective taxation
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Ofc the bigger risk is the school goes bust and fooks off with hilarious quantities of six figure prepay
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My sides!
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Guy it will be a combination of measures. Firstly they will be able to recover VAT on inputs if they are fully subject to VAT which will reduce costs. Secondly they will take some money out of their reserves to cover the shortfall. Thirdly they will cut back on big capital projects for a while. Fourthly they've been out raising funds from old boys to provide more bursaries to students who would otherwise struggle to pay. Then over time they will slowly the increase the fees again to also compensate.
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lol @ Sails knowing the school he left 30 years ago’s approach to a tax issue which doesn’t affect him. Menkal
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"we sacrificed so vewy much to send Timmy to Better than Thou Academy and now he's back with the scum anyway!!!" 😭
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Ah, bursaries. The way to keep a totally uncharitable service a registered charity.
BAN PRIVATE EDUCATION
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Well Face they don't know that I don't plan to have children so still happily sending me all their communications and advertising so not that extraordinary really and also I've got a friend whose son was offered a place to start next year.
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Indeed
But until then - laugh at its misfortune
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If you think this will be unpopular or that it affects "middle england" in any way you have sailed far, far from any contact with reality.
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Face actually you'll find it's part of the school's founding charter that they provide education to 70 poor and needy scholars as the place was founded long before anyone knew what a charitable institution was.
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Whenever I want a laugh I read the Eton College Inclusion statement.
https://www.etoncollege.com/college-life/inclusion-education/#:~:text=Eton%20believes%20in%20equal%20opportunity,disability%2C%20or%20social%20demographic%20background.
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SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND!!!!
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How absolutely fvcking spiffing of the khvnts!
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Needy hahaha Christ
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“Rupert this one is really needy, they don’t even have a swimming pool at their house and they drive a NISSAN QASHQAI”
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There’s a lot of cack talked about retrospective legislation, especially in the tax field. It would be perfectly ok for Labour to pass anti forestalling stuff on prepayments back to the day after their election victory for example
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"Performative class warfare from Labour is always counterproductive in the long term".
Nope, developed countries with little or no private education have better overall education attainment. That is even true in the UK NI has few private schools and far better overall outcomes (and this is not because of the grammar school system, grammar school areas in the rest of the UK do not perform better than the comprehensive system).
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Wot Donny said. Yet another excuse for the not disadvantaged to complain.
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Guy, you’re noted as a single issue pervert on private education matters, but yes, enacting a law to apply VAT to a payment already made before that enactment is, indeed, very retrospective taxation very indeed.
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it’s not your fault your dad spent the money on a Jag rather than buying u out of comp, m88
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My money is still on it raising far less than anticipated.
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the funniest thing on this thread though is the roffers thinking the electorate will care about private school kids being kicked out of their schools and sent to a comprehensive along with their own kids. Far from not looking good - most people will take quiet satisfaction from it.
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in middle class constituencies in the south it is absolutely an outcome changing swing issue, and the left are deluded if they think otherwise
loads of labour voters and more potential labour voters send their kids to private school
my own kids will be privately educated to 11, and I have sworn never to vote for any party other than Labour (mainly to annoy people).
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also apologise for the tone of my penultimate post above
was meant to be a joke but didn’t work
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My dad didn’t do this but if he did I would heartily approve
Better to be illiterate and poor than join the grasping private school khuntocracy
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I love being part of the grasping private school khuntocracy.
All the pretty pretty MILFs
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in middle class constituencies in the south it is absolutely an outcome changing swing issue, and the left are deluded if they think otherwise
Is it bollox. A good half of private school parents will be voting Tory anyway, even in this election, so we are left with perhaps half of private school parents who may not vote Labour because of this, and most of them will vote Labour anyway as most people who are not blind Tories realise (including you Laz) that it is worth 20% on school fees to get rid of this government which is slowly destroying the country their kids will grow up in.
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there are constituencies wheee sixty percent of children go to private school m88 and some of those constituencies are winnable fkr labour
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I agree with your latter point tho
If VAT on school fees were actually going to happen I’d just pay it
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I’d then stand (including for labour) on revoking it
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if anything, the government should provide mass subsidy for the brightest kids to go private
oh laz oh laz that would leave state schools as just sink schools
newsflash, they are anyway and have been for decades, except the grammars
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there are constituencies wheee sixty percent of children go to private school m88 and some of those constituencies are winnable fkr labour
I really struggle to believe there would be any constituency where the number was higher than 20 per cent. Please link up to the stats.
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No need m88, I made it up. But not with intent to cause you non trivial harm, so we’re all good
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.My school, from 40 or so years ago, was grammar, now private, have started writing to me for donations. The whole alumni thing, fairly recent. As have the people at the schools my kids went to.
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guildford gonna fall, chambo m88, bye bye tories
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I bought a Porsche rather than a Jag, and could still send them to private school if I wanted but even aged 10 and 9 mine have realised that most (not all to be fair) of the kids going private are the ones they wouldn't want to go to school with.
When a drive to work I drive past all the parents dropping theirs off at Terra Nova. They all look like the worst kind of ghastly khvnts I'd want to get away from, not pay to have to socialise with. All Rangies and G Wagons with private plates and Overfinch body kits.
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newsflash, they are anyway and have been for decades, except the grammars
i notice quite often that people who went to private schools have a completely demented idea of what most state secondaries are like.
if you live in a nice middle-class area, your local comp will be full of nice middle-class kids and middle-class teachers. no-one is getting stabbed.
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though this is made worse by people who went to comprehensives massively exaggerating how rough for credibility
mine had ski trips ffs
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the supposed poor quality of state education is the excuse the wealthy give to send their kids to private school. It is of course absolute crap. You pay for private education to give your child an advantage over the 95% this would remain the case however good the state education system is (a) because fees would just keep going up so private schools remained better resourced (as indeed they have done over the past 70 years) and (b) the networking opportunities presented by the rich and powerful all sending their kids to the same schools
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All Rangies and G Wagons with private plates and Overfinch body kits.
Clearly one of those awful nouveau schools. True gentry still drive old estate cars.
I know a few Labour voters who happily have their kids privately educated who may now think twice before applying their mark on the ballot. However, some will see at as their penance for their hypocrisy.
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(a) because fees would just keep going up so private schools remained better resourced (as indeed they have done over the past 70 years)
This is why I don't know a single old boy sending their kids to Winchester which is now full of foreign students who probably won't stick around in the UK thus eroding the benefits unless your kids want a career in India or China.
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No one votes to increase their own tax bill. They say they do but they don’t.
If Labour go full gas with this they will never live it down.
These things aside, some good angst on here. Straw that broke the struggla’s back hmm wasn’t it.
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Very good idea and will be an overall vote winner for labour, same as taxing carried interest as income (which it is)
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Mine most definitely did not have ski trips (unless you count the day spent breaking our fingers at the local dry slope). It did, even then have a significant problem with kids bringing knives into school and violence connected to drugs and I went to the 'good' school (the ex grammar) in the town I grew up in.
What comps are like in affluent suburban areas =/= what 'most comps' in the UK are like.
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SummerSails03 Apr 24 10:36
My money is still on it raising far less than anticipated.
_____________________________________________________________________
circa 3bn on a back of the fag packet calc (615K studes - average fees 23,700 - VAT @20%)
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High Guise, you cannot extrapolate what you would do to everyone else- it is classic Tory to assume everybody is as cynical as they themselves are and are only pretending not to be totally self interested. I have voted many times in the full expectation that I will pay higher taxes if my favoured party wins.
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Laz m7, very disappointed with your class treason in this thread.
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A classic Tory? Moi? Woteva next.
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I think Cons will hold on in Guildford Laz, not really a hotbed site of revolutionary fervour. LibDems wI'll try hard though.
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Sumo does that factor in ability to reclaim VAT on inputs and also schools not simply increasing fees by 20%?
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I was referring to the school of which I'm a Governor, as should have been blindingly obvious from the context.
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"I was referring to the school of which I'm a Governor, as should have been blindingly obvious from the context."
I was referring to Sails' post immediately above, as should have been blindingly obvious from the context
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Ridiculous comments above. Of course guildford will go (back) to the libdems
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I have no intention of becoming a school governor anywhere. I probably could at three or four of them if I donated enough money and time. Is that a local status thing? Don't need that.
And then there are the university alumni donation machines. I admire their marketing, Fairly slick these days.
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We'll see Jersey boy.
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SummerSails03 Apr 24 12:16
Sumo does that factor in ability to reclaim VAT on inputs and also schools not simply increasing fees by 20%?
_____________________________________________________________________________
no, just a quick calc on the headline numbers
Schools won't increase fees by 20%, that's not how VAT works in a market economy. Schools are already charging market rate, they might manage to push fees by 5% but they'll have to eat the rest like every other producer/services firm etc
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lol @ guy. I suppose chinless posh thicko schools need matching governors
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‘When a drive to work I drive past all the parents dropping theirs off at Terra Nova.‘
Terra Nova is far from the worst for that in that part of the world m7
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Apparently 17.5% of French children go to religious private schools which receive 75% of their funding from the state in return for following the national curriculum. That does sound extraordinary.
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You don’t know Dawn Handbags she goes to a different school
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No Sails, plainly it does not. Even labour themselves only claim it would raise GBP 1.6 billion and I think that assumes all pupils currently in the private sector stay there (which clearly will not be the case over the medium term). If they take a billion off the table net (taking into account the cost of additional kids in the state sector) I will be surprised.
This clearly isn't really about raising funds.
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Yeah I know my m8 sends his to The Rileys, with an assortment of football players kids, gangsters and carpet warehouse magnates
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