Diversity across UK Independent Schools

One of my greatest frustrations about the ongoing debate around the introduction of VAT on private school fees is a repeated failure of participants to acknowledge the enormous diversity across independent schools within the UK, and the families who use them.

Everyone knows about Eton and Winchester, with their £50,000 fees, and extremely wealthy families. Far fewer people are familiar with Ysgol Gymraeg Llundain, a independent Welsh-language school in London, or Emmanuel School, Walsall, a Christian School in the West Midlands, both of which charge annual fees of around £4,000.

I recently provided some quotes for a Sunday Times article on the topic of VAT on fees, but was disappointed that they decided not to include many of my comments about this diversity.

So, without another immediate outlet for these observations, I have decided to publish them for myself here.

My Background

I’m the Chair of Governors at Sands School, a small democratic school in Devon. We have around 80 students, and our fees are around £11,000 per year.

Over the last couple of months, I have been reaching out to other small independent schools up and down the country. There are 300 independent schools with fewer than 150 pupils. Of these, 40 schools have come back to me with detailed information about their fees, and the impact that VAT is going to have on their school communities.

My main goal in reaching out to these schools was to find other schools facing the same challenges as us with this policy, so that I could speak in broader and more general terms about the damaging impacts that it is likely to have on small schools such as ours, that don’t often feature in the media.

What I have learned is that there are wonderful small schools, up and down the country, doing amazing things to offer a diverse range of educational opportunities to families from across the income spectrum.

Diversity of Fees

Across the 30 schools I surveyed, the average annual fee was £10,000. 30% of these schools had fees below the £7,500 it costs annually to educate a child within the state system, and the lowest annual school fee was below £4,000.

So when people claim that independent schools spend roughly three times the resources per-pupil as state schools, that’s true on average, but it’s absolutely not true for all schools.

There are some independent schools where the per-pupil resources are actually lower than within the state system. There are some independent schools where the per-pupil resources are similar to the state system, and plenty more where the resources per-pupil are somewhat higher than the state system, but not very substantially higher.

But why would parents pay money to send their child to a school with fewer resources than their local state school?

To understand that, we need to look at the diversity of reasons that parents have for educating their children at independent schools.

Diversity of Reasons for Choosing an Independent School

Why do some parents send their children to independent schools?

Most people would probably say that it’s because they want their children to have access to a better education than is available within the state system. And by “better”, they would be thinking about an education with greater resources — the “3 times more resources per-pupil” that independent schools supposedly provide.

All of this is broadly correct for many of the parents who send their children to independent schools. But not for all of them.

If the above was the whole story, nobody would be sending their child to the small schools with low fees that I surveyed. Yet people do. Why?

The main reasons become clear when you look at the kind of education that these schools provide. They all provide a different kind of education from that available within the state system, and for some parents, what matters more than the level of resources available to their child, is the manner in which those resources are provided.

Some schools offer biligual education for example Ysgol Gymraeg Llundain, mentioned above, or La Petite Ecole Francaise in Notting Hill. Some schools offer an education that is deeply infused with a particular religion, for example Christian, Jewish, or Muslim schools. Other schools follow a particular educational philosophy that is not available within the mainstream system. This includes Montessori schools, Steiner Schools. and democratic schools such as Sands, in which children are invited to be active participants in running the school, and shaping their own personal curriculum.

These schools are run by passionate educators, who believe strongly that the particular education they provide should be available to children and families in their area. They work hard to keep the costs of their schools as low as possible, so that as many families as possible are able to access the particular kind of education that they offer.

And families choose to send their children to these schools, despite the costs involved, and despite the fact that they aren’t getting access to any more resources than they could get for free within the state system, because they believe in the value that their children will get from this particular approach to education.

In some cases, they do so because they have already tried to use state schools, and found it didn’t work for their children. This is certainly true for us at Sands: a significant proportion of our students have previously attended state schools and found that they couldn’t fit in there. The different approach that we take, where they are empowered to make decisions about their own education and curriculum, often allows children who were disengaged with school and education, to become enthusiastic and capable learners and participants in our community.

So, to sum up, the question of why parents send their children to independent schools has many different answers, depending on the parents, and the school. Yes, many families that use independent schools are wealthy, and want their children to have access to more resources than the state system provides. But this is just one part of the picture, and far from the complete story in terms of why parents might choose to educate their children outside the state system.

Diversity of Family Incomes

Another widely held belief is that parents that send their children to independent schools are all rich.

In a BBC debate on the topic, Sam Freedman, arguing in support of the Government’s policy claimed that “most are in the top 1% or 2% of the most wealthy households”, apparently unaware of the mathematical impossibility of this claim (since 7% of families use private schools, it’s simply impossible that more than 2/7ths of them could be in the top 2% of the most wealthy households).

There is some uncertainty about the distribution of incomes of families using private schools, but one attempt to characterize this distribution has been made by researchers at UCL, and published in The Times.

I didn’t think much of the way they had chosen to present the data, so I created a different visualization of the same data:

Approximately half the families that use independent schools are in the top 10% by income. Yes, lots of wealthy families send their children to independent schools. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

But what about the other half? There’s a roughly three-way split:

• A third of them are in the 2nd income decile, earning incomes between the 80th and 90th percentile. The “not quite-so rich” rich.
• A third of them are between the 50th and 80th percentile. These are families whose income is above average, but not particularly wealthy.
• A further third of them have below average incomes.

This final group of families is the group that are perhaps least represented in the debate around VAT on fees. 15% of families that use independent schools, around 90,000 of them, have below average household incomes. I have not seen any commentator on this topic acknowledge this fact.

Some of these families will receive bursaries or scholarships. In some cases, those will cover 100% of fees, but more commonly they will provide some proportion of the fees (which could be anything from 10% to 90%, depending on the school and the family’s circumstances). Also, many of these families will be attending independent schools with comparatively low fees, such as the small schools that I talked about earlier.

As families with below-average incomes, these are the families who might reasonably expect a progressive government such as Kier Starmer’s to look out for them, and improve their lot. Unfortunately, because of the non-conformist choice they have made to educate their children outside the state system, they are being told they have to pay substantial additional taxes.

Many of these families simply won’t have a way to find thousands of pounds a year in additional taxes. Some schools may be able to extend their bursary provision to help them with these costs, but ultimately that can only be achieved by passing the costs on to other parents, many of whom will be facing their own financial challenges, and will have little tolerance for covering costs for other people.

The consequence is that many of these families, along, perhaps, with some wealthier families, will transfer their children into state schools, at a cost of around £7,500 per child to the pubic finances. HMRC modelling suggests an aggregate cost of £650M. In the context of a £20B “black hole” in the public finances, that’s not a cost that the state can realistically afford.

SEND Diversity

The final topic I will look at is Special Educational Needs and Disability.

Sands, is not a “special school”, and only has a small number of pupils with EHCPs. However, we have a relatively high number of students with some form of identified Special Educational Needs. One particular concern we have, when we think about outcomes for pupils who may have to withdraw from our school due to the VAT policy, is whether state schools will be able to accommodate their Special Educational Needs as well as we have been able to. There are likely to be significant challenges here, most importantly for pupils trying to make their way in a new environment that may be less flexible and accommodating than they are used to, but also for schools who may not have the budgets and expertise to meet these pupils’ needs.

Given this background, combined with a reasonable amount of press discussion on this topic, I was keen to understand whether the issues we saw around SEND provision were reflected in other small schools across the country.

Among the 30 schools in my survey, 2 were special schools, with over 50% of their pupils having EHCPs, and over 70% having SEND.

Looking at the data for the other 28 schools, we found that the proportion of pupils with SEND was similar to the national averages

• 18% of pupils had some form of SEND
• 1.7% of pupils had an EHCP

So, within the schools in my survey, there is no evidence of a disproportionate number of children with Special Educational Needs that might overwhelm the state system if they should transfer. Nevertheless, the numbers of students with SEND are still significant, and if some of these children are forced to return to state schools due to rising fees, there will be additional costs involved in meeting their needs.

A couple of other important points came out from my survey

• 21% of pupils had previously attended a state school that had failed to meet their needs. This is higher than the number of pupils with recognized SEND, so it’s clear that there is a group of children that doesn’t have any recognized SEND, but for whom the state education system has failed to provide an acceptable education.
• Of the children with EHCPs attending non-special schools, just over half of them (58%) had their place funded by the Local Authority. The other 42% had their fees paid for by their parents, even though they had an EHCP. This shows that the Government’s commitment not to impose VAT on fees paid by LAs is inadequate in terms of meeting needs for pupils with EHCPs. There are significant numbers of children with EHCPs, whose special educational needs are being met within an independent school, for whom VAT is going to be chargeable.

Concluding Comments

There is no doubt in my mind that the debate around VAT on independent school fees has been harmed by failures to acknowledge the diversity of independent schools.

Whenever you have a diverse group, and you attempt to characterise it using “averages”, you risk substantially misrepresenting parts of that group.

Yes, the average independent school fee is £15,000, but that number masks a vast difference between schools whose annual fees are less than £4,000, and those whose fees are £50,000 or higher.

Politicians often pick out small subsets of this group when it suits them to illustrate a point, but that usually consists of them taking a subset from the wealthiest part of the independent sector, and presentiing that as illustrative of the whole picture, whether it’s Bridget Phillipson choosing to quote the average boarding school fee of £37,000 (rather than the average fees across all independent schools), or the Guardian measuring the vast land holdings of the 351 elite HMC schools, and presenting it as if it was representative of independent schools in general.

But the 500 boarding schools in the UK, or the 351 HMC schools are no more representative of independent schools in general, than the 300 schools with fewer than 150 pupils that I invited to participate in my survey, and whose average annual fees are around £10,000. Unfortunately, their extremes of wealth make for the best headlines, and hence these caricatures dominate discourse on this topic.

At the top of this article, I talked about the Sunday Times article that I contributed to, and my disappointment that my comments around the diversity of independent schools were not included.

However, I am optimistic that the points raised in that article could open up a new side of the debate on this topic.

The article highlighted HMRC analysis that considered a potential £650M cost to the state, arising from parents transferring their children back into the state system, from independent schools, due to fee increases arising from the introduction of VAT on fees.

This would imply some 90,000 children switching back to the state system.

If we start to look at who these children might be, we’ll probably find that most of them aren’t enrolled at Eton or Winchester, or indeed any of the boarding schools, or the elite HMC schools. I’m not saying there won’t be parents sending their children to those schools who might find it difficult to cover fee increases. But they are most likely to “downgrade” to a less expensive independent school, rather than transferring their children into the state system.

They will instead find that these children come from families with household incomes outside the top 20% (many of them from the group with below-average household incomes that we discussed earlier). And most of them probably attend schools with below-average fees, perhaps £15,000, £10,000 or even as little as £5,000. Some of those schools will be the small schools involved in my survey.

And when we shine a light on these families, their schools, and the diverse range of reasons why families with relatively modest means might be choosing to pay for something that they could get for free, then I hope people will start to see the problems with the Government’s one-size-fits-all policy to apply VAT on all independent school fees, regardless of the school’s fee levels, size, or parental incomes.

My hope is that Government will see that a policy that has been formulated based on a particular idea of private schools as institutions of vast wealth and privilege, will cause irrevocable harm and damage when unleashed on small schools that are already struggling to make ends meet, trying to offer a diverse range of educational offerings to families who are looking for something different from the default offering provided by the state.