What should be asked of the independent sector?

Seasurfer1

Perhaps the Charity Commissioners, who are being kicked by Brown, should remember that Independent Schools require Fees to be payed by Parents on which TAX has already been paid.

David Lindsay

As a supporter of State action in the economy, I often note how many ostensible opponents of that position were educated at, and/or send their own children to, institutions that simply would not exist without gigantic public subsidies. So staff from fee-paying schools are to be drafted in to tell those from the state sector how to do their jobs? Why? Apparently on the automatic assumption that they know better, rather than just that they have never had to deal with ... well, pretty much anything at all, really.

Danvers

There will come a tipping point when it is cheaper for fee paying parents if a private school drops its charitable status and charges 17.5% VAT on fees rather than comply with the increasingly onerous demands of the Charity Commission (which must be paid for via fees). Once this point comes there will be no incentive for private schools to assist the local community. A lose/lose situation all round except for the Exchequer. However, maybe it would be possible for a private school to have a trading arm and a charitable arm and come up with a clever way around this lefty attack.

Henry Rogers

Without taking sides, here at any rate, I would dearly love to know what the net effect on non-state school fees would be of a universal voucher scheme applicable to all schools, state or non-state, removal of charitable status from non-state schools and complete cessation of 'good works' by non-state schools. If practical details like that are not widely known the debate is likely to be monopolised by ideologists on one side or the other. It's reasonable to suspect that the real issue isn't money at all, but without a few facts that can only be a guess. David's point about state action is fair enough in some fields, nobody wants private armies and everybody wants a successful NHS (including enough dentists to go round should that prove to be possible) but state action hasn't been a universal triumph everywhere.

Charlotte Edwardes

"There will come a tipping point" .... and it's not too far away I think. As a parent paying out large sums each year to educate two children in the independent sector, I am very conscious that not only is this money from taxed income, but that the tax paid contains an element to pay for state education. Therefore I am paying for education twice. My choice because I do not trust the state to educate my children properly. However, now the government's latest proposals threaten to dilute and dumb down the independent sectors' achievements. Outcome? Eventual collapse of the independent sector through state interference. Machiavellian but short-sighted methinks.

J H Holloway

Can't imagine what has come over Seldon Man - the biggest fit of middle class guilt yet recorded? Independent schools do not hoover up the best teachers. A friend who teaches at a fee payer told me that when he started out all the new intake - bar one art teacher - had been plucked straight from Oxbridge. They only later had to take a PGSE while on the job. The majority of private school teachers would not teach in ordinary comps.
Still, with the independent sector about break ranks and adopt the pre-U, the educational divide will split right open.
There's a genuine crisis in state schooling and blinky Ball's attempts to destroy what's left of A-levels and subsume exams into one giant mush that prevents direct comparisons being made between the able and unable, is just a giant distraction.
A chunk of the student population has started to slide backwards and I wouldn't trust Labour politicians to arrest it.
And yes, I went to a comp. And three Polys.

Fergus Pickering

What should teachers be expected to deal with? When you see on television what an ordinary comprehensive appears to be like - bedlam - you wonder who on earth could be expected to cope with it. Maybe they are not really as bad as that. But maybe they are. Because I live in Kent my two daughters were educated at a grammar school. My sister moved from Kilburn to Barnet when her daughter was eleven. Why do you suppose she did that and what would you have done? I'm not greatly taken with public schools which are bastions of snobbery in my experience. But the ordinary comprehensive, bog-standard as Alistair Campbell said - I wouldn't want my children educated in one of those. I'd like them to go to the sort of school that exxisted in Edinburgh in the 1960s - small fees and lots of free places, girls and boys educated for the most part separately. But that's gone for ever.

Tom

The reason - dear Speccie readers - independent schools need their charitable status is not to protect fee income, but their endowments. As a charity, they benefit from receiving donations which are untaxed both at source and receipt. Without charitable status, such donations would not reduce inheritance tax liability, therefore being much less attractive to alumni etc. The Government has caused tremendous harm to the education of all people in our country, but independent schools are not perfect. Much of this is, of course, the fault of pathetic journalists who can barely afford private school fees and thus feel forced to ensure that they derive maximum benefit from this investment. In reality, most private school parents are thoroughly decent and likeable people who do not aspire to give their children anything other than a fair chance.