Last week at County Hall there was a discussion about Labour’s disastrous plan for independent schools, and the huge impact removing their VAT relief would have on children – all children, across all kinds of schools - in terms of planning for school places in Nottinghamshire.
There are over 4,000 children in Nottinghamshire at independent schools. That’s thousands of children out of the state school system but thousands of parents still paying into it through their taxes.
Labour’s plans could lead to these parents needing to pay an 20% in fees to continue sending their kids to independent schools, but in truth many of those parents are already making huge sacrifices to fund it and couldn’t pay the extra 20%.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that 7% of those parents would be driven to the state sector if these policies were introduced, which for Nottinghamshire would mean we’d need to find over 300 extra places for displaced children pretty much overnight. That’s not feasible, and there’s no money to do it. Labour have given no indication of how they’d pay for it.
It’s incorrect and a stereotype to compare all independent schools with Eton or Harrow. Instead, most are small businesses with tight margins, most play an active role in the community, supporting neighbouring state schools, and are major local employers.
Mansfield’s own independent school is a case in point, Savile House in Woodhouse, which recently closed due to lack of funding. That just illustrates how additional costs could be detrimental for these schools.
As someone who went to both an independent school and a comprehensive one, I know the sacrifices my parents made in order to send me there, downsizing their house, selling their car, cancelling holidays - all to give me the fresh start I needed at the time, and another shot at education in a different environment.
Under Labour’s plan they simply wouldn’t have been able to make it work.
Not only that, it’s counter-productive and will only exacerbate financial divides in our school system.
It will drive up competition for our selective Grammar schools, inflate house prices around the best state schools, and so return us to a postcode lottery where only affluent families can afford to live near these schools.
At Nottinghamshire County Council we’re investing heavily into new school places, and in more places for children with SEND too. We’ve got a new 160 place school being built in Ravensdale next year, and Government have just announced even more funding for another school in the county.
We’re working incredibly hard to deliver these places and to drive up standards across all our schools. But Labour’s plan for independent schools would make our job so much harder, driving up demand for no discernable reason other than left-wing ideological dogma.
They have no plan on how to fund the 30,000 additional state school places across the country that the IFS says we’ll need, and as a council it would be impossible for us handle such a rise in demand.
So I remain hopeful that when faced with these realities, should we be unfortunate enough to end up with a Labour Government, that they won’t be mad enough to implement such a policy. They think they’d just be taking money from ‘rich people’. In reality their plans would have a detrimental impact on ALL schools, and ALL families.
