Over the last 14 years, in Conservative-led England at least, educational standards have risen against international benchmarks, our children are now the best readers in the Western world. Parental choice has become an embedded reality in our education system.
But that hard-won progress is now under immediate threat from Labour.
The most immediate threat to our education system looms from January 2025. Labour’s tax raid on parents of independent school children is not a benign tax redistribution policy. This is a policy which will harm our entire educational system. It will strain our state system with unexpected demand. It will disrupt thousands of young people, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), by removing them from settings that work for them.
To what end? All it seems to achieve is the sating of long-held Labour prejudice about independent schools. It is the triumph of the politics of envy, over the power of evidence in policy making.
Exhibit number one is the “technical note” consultation slipped out quietly, with no notice to MPs, on the imposition of VAT on independent schools. It was a perfunctory attempt at seeking views, with parameters for feedback so narrow it was largely pointless. Nonetheless, I took the opportunity to make clear just how damaging this move is.
I set out three key areas of concern in my own response. There are many more, but these are the ones that I believe get to the heart of why this policy is madness. It makes the UK an outlier in the world for taxing education. It will weaken the state funded education sector. It is particularly damaging to the 100,000 SEND pupils educated in the independent sector without Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP).
In the technical note, officials slipped into the lexicon of Labour politicians of describing this as the removal of a “tax break”. It is no such thing. Education has never been subject to VAT, and this will leave the UK as an outlier in the world for taxing education – an absurd place for a developed economy like ours to find itself.
This is the imposition of a new tax on independent schools, not the removal of some benevolent break. In almost all circumstances, it will fall on parents to pay, out of already taxed income, through increased school fees. These are parents who already contribute tax revenue to the state education system but have removed the costs of a child from that same system by paying for independent education. An impact which Oxford Economics estimated as a £3.6bn saving in its report of December 2022.
The government claims this policy will enable it to bring in 6000 new teachers – I doubt it. In 2023 the now education secretary said it would raise £1.7bn. In February 2024, the shadow education minister lowered this to £1.3bn. Even if Labour politicians genuinely believed that at the time, the evidence now is this policy will have the effect of increasing demand and funding pressure on the state sector. The net revenues generated will be negligible, if not non-existent.
There will be pupil displacement due to parents not being able to afford the increased fees. I hear this from parents across my constituency weekly. The consultancy Baines Cutler estimated that VAT imposition would lead to a drop off 134,800 pupils over 5 years in the independent sector, needing to be picked up by the state sector. The Independent Schools Council has reported a drop of 2.7% already due to anticipation of these changes. The rush to January 2025 is hastening impossible choices for parents who are already pushed to the limit in meeting these school fees.
Even at a modest assessment of displacement, the impact on state schools having to absorb these pupils is significant and over time will be corrosive to the financial wellbeing of state schools. Increased class sizes, thus worsening pupil outcomes. Significant strain on SEND teams having to support an influx of students with no EHCP but clear SEND needs. The truth is that Labour are going to have to fund more than 6000 more teachers to cope with this.
Compounding this issue is the haste with which the government is seeking to tax parents – from January 2025. It will lead to pupils leaving their settings mid-year, state school places not being available in preferred schools and likely chaos for parents and schools to navigate. The government’s answer? “Parents were warned”. A cold contempt for those parents who just want to create opportunities for their child.
There are 100,000 young people in the independent sector with SEND being well supported but are not in possession of an EHCP. This is a potentially catastrophic impact from the imposition of this tax. There is no plan to deal with displacement from this group.
Woven into the fabric of our education system is parental choice and the importance of the right school setting being available for each child. In my constituency that parental choice is rich. Fantastic, high achieving state and grammar schools. A thriving independent school sector. The co-existence and successful collaborations of the independent and state schools in my constituency, and many others, is now threatened. This policy will fundamentally weaken the fabric of our education system, limiting parental access independent schools to all but the super-wealthy. All whilst putting more pupils, more cost, constrained parental choice and inevitably poorer outcomes into our state system. One that has improved so much since 2010.
It’s not too late for Labour to realise the damage they are about to do. It’s not too late for them to put evidence before ideology.
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