Labour’s proposal to make school fees subject to VAT to fund reforms to state schooling continues to evoke strong feelings. Yet the discourse around this policy has been almost entirely fiscal, ignoring the impact on children who are currently thriving (in happy ignorance of this debate) within independent schools.
The independent sector educates 620,000 children in the UK – you probably know some of them. They attend 2,500 schools, whose median average size is under 300 pupils and which serve a customer base as diverse as the country, with motivations just as differing. There are some storied names among those 2,500, but overwhelmingly these are small, tightly-budgeted schools.
The IFS’s recent report makes the conservative estimate that 40,000 children will be directly impacted by Labour’s proposals. Other, more severe projections exist; the IFS’ is merely the best-case. And we know how those go.
Let’s be clear about what that means: after the imposition of 20 per cent VAT, the parents of at minimum 40,000 children will no longer be able to afford their school’s fee and the child will be forced to leave, with all the social and psychological upheaval this suggests, served with a slice of financial shame on the side.
