I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
I mean, of course there will be techniques that can be taught to answer these questions. It's not like people will answer them by magic.
But I've had some exposure to being on the teacher side of the teacher-student interaction, and there are definitely variations in people's ability to learn. If a test is measuring that, instead of innate intelligence per se, then that is not in itself obviously valueless.
Trouble is as some have been tutored and some haven't you aren't comparing like with like. Fine if none aren't tutored or all are. Someone with a low IQ won't pass and someone with a high IQ will pass regardless, but in between will be useless.
I also had to pass the IQ test I was setting when I joined the company. Obviously I passed. I never found out my result but it had to be in excess of 130 to get an interview. I failed my 11 plus.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
Good morning all. This thread has certainly generated a considerable amount of quite bitter dissension. Is that a good thing; possibly, possibly not. All I would say, on topic is that almost 80 years ago those of us in the top stream of the primary school I attended were quite ruthlessly coached to 'succeed' (as I did) in the 11+ examination. In the mid to late 70's my children didn't have as much, largely because grammar places had been considerably cut back and there were, and still are, good comprehensive schools locally. I'm not in favour of private education, or selective schools. I am in favour of provision being made for SEND children, especially while the effects of Covid are still working through.
I remember being coached for the 11+ by my mother - who was a primary school teacher. Indeed I had already had the privilege of being taught by her in what we then called Year 3 (now I think Year 5).
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
I hope I captured fairly the augments of those supporting VAT exemption for private schools. My point is they need better arguments.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
If IQ is inherited and genetic, how come there is such a difference in scores between those from a certain part of South Asia who came here directly and their 3rd/4th/5th cousins who came here via East Africa? The latter scoring higher.
Clearly they don't score highest, otherwise it wouldn't be Chinese British pupils also at the top for average GCSE and attainment 8 scores. Again because the Chinese and East Asians have the highest average global IQ
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is (Well would be argued to be) 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
I’m assuming you are talking about former private school children trying to get into a State School outside of the normal admission points. That’s going to create that sort of issue because the good state schools are not going to be full with an existing waiting list that takes priority over long standing residents wishing to get a place.
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
No. They're arguing, if what I've been told is correct, that it's a human rights issue because it will affect religious schools and mean parents can't send children to a school compatible with their religious beliefs.
That's nonsense on stilts. Even though I think this is a dumb policy, I can't see how anyone could say taxing a service is a breach of human rights.
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is (Well would be argued to be) 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
The timing is insane - but I doubt any court will care given that it’s going to be 2+ years before this gets to a tribunal.
But for Vat purposes the delivery of the service is going to be that day at school or the first day of term in January it’s not going to be September unless the contract is always for a full year
Private schools foster and propagate inequality, that's the whole point of the sector. It's a mechanism by which affluent people seek to lock in advantage for their offspring. Removing the tax incentives is the very least I'd expect from a Labour government.
Labour governments propogate mediocrity. That is why it was the Wilson Labour government that started closing grammar schools and is why Labour also oppose free schools as well as reducing parental choice and access to private schools. It is also why Labour governments also lead to brain drains and our most talented and successful often moving abroad as they tax business and high income earners ever more (with the rare exception of Blair's New Labour)
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is (Well would be argued to be) 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
The timing is insane - but I doubt any court will care given that it’s going to be 2+ years before this gets to a tribunal.
Might be 2 years before it gets to a court but whoever submits the VAT returns for the school could try and force the issue the other way if they're feeling brave !
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
I hope I captured fairly the augments of those supporting VAT exemption for private schools. My point is they need better arguments.
I think the truth is, rather, that there is a convincing argument for taxing private schools - but this isn't it.
The argument is, 'there's a free alternative and we need the money because we're so skint as a nation we need any money we can lay our hands on, and although it will have significant downsides in terms of school closures, need for greater capacity in the state sector in places etc these can be lived with for the greater good.'
What's been put forward instead is, 'this is needed for raising X to be spent on Y. And private schools are all filthy rich and can afford it and no parents will go elsewhere so it will raise the money so there will be no negatives and everyone will be happy and everyone saying otherwise is a filthy bourgeois liar...'
Which is manifestly not true and just makes the government look shifty. And when you add in that their sums are reminiscent of Liz Truss, it comes out badly on all levels.
They haven't even made a decent argument on social justice, because it's the schools that do most to entrench division in the socioeconomic elite that will be least affected. Taxes are not the way to deal with that issue. Smaller class sizes in the state sector would be one possible way. An outright ban on private education another. This won't do either.
So, not surprisingly, some of the arguments against look a bit daft as well (and some of them are daft).
Sadly, it merely confirms that our politicians are a bit naff.
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is (Well would be argued to be) 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
The timing is insane - but I doubt any court will care given that it’s going to be 2+ years before this gets to a tribunal.
But for Vat purposes the delivery of the service is going to be that day at school or the first day of term in January it’s not going to be September unless the contract is always for a full year
A contract in a private school is always in my experience for a full year, with heavy penalty clauses for leaving early.
The majority pay by the term, or even by the month, but not by any means all.
I'm not sure how that would apply in practice, but insisting it be levied on fees paid the previous summer seems to me to be a departure from usual practice.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
Some coaching is beneficial, so that your child is familiar with the format of the questions and how to answer them. But beyond that I think all the extra tuition is a waste of time and money for old rope for the teachers providing it. The brightest will pass anyway, maybe on the borderline it might make a difference. My primary school made sure we all had adequate exposure to mock papers ahead of the 11+; if all primaries do that in grammar school areas then most of the advantage of private coaching is removed.
I have a friend whose son is being coached within an inch of his life (at her husband's insistence, he seems to think that if you go to the local Comprehensive you will automatically end up being a builder). There are only a handful of state grammars in Essex, competition is fierce, and I am absolutely sure that her son will not pass, however much more coaching he gets.
There is a serious danger that the lad will end up a) failing and b) consequently develop feelings of academic inadequacy. Our younger son was, at 10 or so, one of the three brightest boys in his class. Unfortunately in our part of Essex then, only two boys per school could go to the two boys grammar schools in neighbouring Southend.... one to each school. On the day our son had a bad cold and was third, so no grammar school place. He was bitterly disappointed, although we'd made it clear that we weren't worried. I rang the Education Office and the strong impression I was given was that had he been at another school his marks would have been enough; however NO. It wasn't until several years later when he didn't do well in his A levels that he said 'what do you expect; I failed the 11+' and it all came out!
Indeed - he feels the pressure on him.
In fact this is exactly how my brother was for a long time, failed his 11+ unlike me and had a chip on his shoulder for a long time. Despite this - perhaps because of it - he has done alright in lief subsequently
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
I wondered about that too, so I googled it, upon which I learned:
"The classical twin design compares the similarity of monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. If identical twins are considerably more similar than fraternal twins (which is found for most traits), this implies that genes play an important role in these traits. By comparing many hundreds of families with twins, researchers can then understand more about the roles of genetic effects, shared environment, and unique environment in shaping behavior."
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
I’m assuming you are talking about former private school children trying to get into a State School outside of the normal admission points. That’s going to create that sort of issue because the good state schools are not going to be full with an existing waiting list that takes priority over long standing residents wishing to get a place.
No. People applying for their kids to go to secondary from a state primary school (well, several). And yes, it is an issue.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
Just for info, there has been a lot of research for various reasons on identical twins split at birth compared to those kept together. Not just IQ but for all sorts of reasons. It is such a useful group to study that a lot of effort is put into finding them. Don't know the numbers without looking it up, so don't know if results of the studies are statistically significant or just interesting.
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
It gets worse than that, because a number of private schools have already decided that to mitigate the VAT rise on fees, they will no longer provide the public benefit that they do now. At the ground floor, this means no more local community use of the sports facilities.
Whoever it was at the FBI that rushed to say it wasn't a terrorist attack should be sacked immediately. They clearly aren't objective.
Who cares? What does terrorist attack even mean in the age of the lone wolf killer? A pound to a penny we are looking at self-radicalised attackers whose affiliation with ISIS was unknown in the Middle East until ISIS watched Al Jazeera's midday bulletin.
A fine Texas born ex-military citizen of the USA it appears - lots of elements of this for the usual suspects to gnash their teeth in frustration over. His military roles were in IT & HR, then on to run an unsuccessful estate agency therefore several signs of sociopathy already present. There seems a general movement in the West among the disaffected and deranged to take whatever means are at hand to take it out on the rest of us. Those societies with limited gun ownership definitely at an advantage in those circs.
Not much of an advantage, not since that guy in France killed almost 100 people by driving into a holiday crowd. That's more than any American spree-killer or school shooter has despatched, and without needing to make explosives.
In Britain, kitchen knives are more popular but a determined terrorist could kill dozens by swerving into a bus stop around school chucking-out time. No expertise or training required. Heck, not even any planning: just a snap decision while driving home.
The reason this does not happen here might be that for Islamist terrorists, the reward is instant admission to paradise when shot by police, but our police are unarmed and life in Belmarsh holds less appeal.
The French attack was with a 16-tonne lorry. He killed 86. The worst mass shooting in the US, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, killed 60. They’d not too far apart.
Most driving attacks don’t kill that many. The problem in the US is the sheer number of shootings. Wikipedia lists 56 school shootings in 2024 alone.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
Still can't. You (quite rightly IMV) flagged up foetal environment (nutrition anyway). Edit: Maternal smoking/passive smoking is another example. And birth plus - often - early infancy will be the same for twins even adopted ones.
There is also an obvious and common confusion between 'variance' and the actual variable in question. Not to mention between IQ and general intelligence. Note that HYUFD claims that a study *claimed to prove that most of the variance is down to genetics* is evidence that most of general intelligence is genetic. That's two key differences.
HYUFD also BTW carefully omitted the next sentence from what was a press release not an actual paper. "Studies of the DNA of hundreds of thousands of unrelated people suggest that only around 30% of the variation in intelligence is inherited. This differences between these percentages between the results of twin studies and genome studies has become known as the mystery of the missing heritability."
Edit: TBF the study in question is later claimed to have resolved this. But early days yet. And the point about confusing variance with total stands.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
You can look at the difference between the difference between identical and non-identical twins.
But, yes, studies looking at twins adopted into different families would be very valuable.
Did you read the article and find out what they did?
I have some sympathy with anyone on a middling income faced with a difficult choice, however this is so full of holes and misinformation.
1) They are businesses. They sell a service to customers. They are however, mainly incorporated as charities. They are charged business rates but got an 80% relief (no an exemption).
Churches, Youth clubs and the CAB are not in any way businesses. The comparison is ludicrous
3) The effect of any change in taxation will result in some behavioual changes. I'd agree that it won't likely raise the full amount. Most private schools are situated in areas where there is an alternative private school. The 50 miles away example is surely an edge case.
4) The policy has been highlighted by Labour for several years, was in the manifesto and was announced formally om the 29th July. It has not been backdated at all and only applies from 1st Jan 2025.
To claim it's been applied retrospectively is pure nonsense.
5) We should have a plan to recruit and retain teachers. We should have a plan on how to fund that. Nothing controversial at all.
Point 4 is incorrect, because it is applied to any monies paid for the term when it came in even if they had been paid in advance. That is a serious point because large numbers of private schools did discounts for paying a year in advance and then suddenly found their figures were all wrong due to a change in fee structure announced part way through the year and applied to matters dated before the start. That is the very definition of a retrospective application.
5) Yes, but this isn't a good plan from that point of view because it rests on lots of optimistic assumptions. It therefore is a reckless policy and moreover a high risk low reward one. It's hardly controversial to draw attention to that. Moreover, as I explained in a different header that TSE may or may not decide to use Phillipson's actually making things worse, not better, on teacher recruitment and retention. And that's separate from the funding.
Your argument on 4 is wrong - due to how VAT is handled payments in advance are being handled in the exact same way a company that starts to charge VAT needs to handle such advanced payments.
That's not my understanding of how VAT normally works. My understanding is that if a company has been paid for a service in advance even if VAT subsequently becomes levied on that service or a different rate charged they would not normally be liable for it as it had already been paid for under the old rules.
I may be wrong, I'm not an accountant. But it seemed (and still seems, for the matter of that) a silly way to introduce it and an unusually aggressive one.
Again, though, we come back to this isn't about the money.
VAT is due upon the point of receipt of the goods. The only way I can see prepayments not coming under Reeves' remit is if the argument is made that a period of years has been paid for as a product in itself, say someone has paid for 5 years for Jimmy Jr to attend school X when they were 11 in 2023 then the VAT won't be due.. I expect where this will fall down is that fees are generally set and paid annually or schools would lock themselves into not being able to raise with inflation. Still if someone has an invoice dated prior to (No sneaky backdating at the back please) Jun 2024 for a block of years say for 11 to 16 for say £80,000 for their child's entire secondary education at a school then they might be able to argue it doesn't come with VAT for that period. It's not going to be a generally available argument though with the normal setting and charging of fees; VAT inspectors are going to be on any private school like a tonne of bricks trying it on retrospectively with that arrangement for parents.
That's where the issue arises. (I take it 'goods' means 'services' in this context?)
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
Yes, bringing it in from 1st January is a nonsense I think Labour could well lose in the courts and lose the VAT (& further could lose "purchase" VAT reclaims ) for VAT from 1st Jan 2025 to August as the point of service is (Well would be argued to be) 1st September, 2024. AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
The timing is insane - but I doubt any court will care given that it’s going to be 2+ years before this gets to a tribunal.
But for Vat purposes the delivery of the service is going to be that day at school or the first day of term in January it’s not going to be September unless the contract is always for a full year
A contract in a private school is always in my experience for a full year, with heavy penalty clauses for leaving early.
The majority pay by the term, or even by the month, but not by any means all.
I'm not sure how that would apply in practice, but insisting it be levied on fees paid the previous summer seems to me to be a departure from usual practice.
Out of interest does anyone here have an invoice (Relating to academic yr 2024/25) for a private school and was it for the whole year, just a term and what VAT is/was explicitly on the invoice ?
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
Some coaching is beneficial, so that your child is familiar with the format of the questions and how to answer them. But beyond that I think all the extra tuition is a waste of time and money for old rope for the teachers providing it. The brightest will pass anyway, maybe on the borderline it might make a difference. My primary school made sure we all had adequate exposure to mock papers ahead of the 11+; if all primaries do that in grammar school areas then most of the advantage of private coaching is removed.
I have a friend whose son is being coached within an inch of his life (at her husband's insistence, he seems to think that if you go to the local Comprehensive you will automatically end up being a builder). There are only a handful of state grammars in Essex, competition is fierce, and I am absolutely sure that her son will not pass, however much more coaching he gets.
There is a serious danger that the lad will end up a) failing and b) consequently develop feelings of academic inadequacy. Our younger son was, at 10 or so, one of the three brightest boys in his class. Unfortunately in our part of Essex then, only two boys per school could go to the two boys grammar schools in neighbouring Southend.... one to each school. On the day our son had a bad cold and was third, so no grammar school place. He was bitterly disappointed, although we'd made it clear that we weren't worried. I rang the Education Office and the strong impression I was given was that had he been at another school his marks would have been enough; however NO. It wasn't until several years later when he didn't do well in his A levels that he said 'what do you expect; I failed the 11+' and it all came out!
Indeed - he feels the pressure on him.
In fact this is exactly how my brother was for a long time, failed his 11+ unlike me and had a chip on his shoulder for a long time. Despite this - perhaps because of it - he has done alright in lief subsequently
Academically I would say my two sons have ended up in very similar places, although as I said, the younger was 'close' to grammar school material and his brother certainly wasn't, at 11.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
But this situation is inevitable when parents are able to choose schools. You end up with the good schools in the area completely filled, while the poorer ones have lots of places free. I suppose a solution to this could be to force schools to keep some places free for pupils transferring in the middle of the year, but that could be viewed as a waste of resources.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
Was it correct, or were you being credited with giving a quick answer?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Since British education is not perceptibly worse than international peers, it's hard to take seriously the idea that everybody involved in running it for the last century has been stupid and incompetent and that the for-profit businessman knows better.
It's equally possible that most of the fearmongering will come to nothing, and between the ability of schools to absorb the cost and the ability of many parents to pay extra, the tax revenues will come in and the number of pupils moving schools will be small.
Two points:
1.The money raised has not been hypothecated for schools so let's see whether it is actually spent there. 2. If the full amount is raised it is nowhere enough to pay for the things that Phillipson says she wants. So where is that money coming from?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
Since British education is not perceptibly worse than international peers, it's hard to take seriously the idea that everybody involved in running it for the last century has been stupid and incompetent and that the for-profit businessman knows better.
What about those for-profit businessmen that used to help run it?
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
It gets worse than that, because a number of private schools have already decided that to mitigate the VAT rise on fees, they will no longer provide the public benefit that they do now. At the ground floor, this means no more local community use of the sports facilities.
I don’t think schools let the community use their facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Round here you have to pay, and the amount more than covers the running costs.
Given that the majority of the costs of (say) a swimming pool are fixed, it makes financial sense to get the maximum use of them which includes renting them out.
(Source: mate of mine who plays water polo. I tried once. It was impossible)
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Yup. That's the point I was clumsily trying to make. No one gives a fuck about schools like that until their kids have to go to it.
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
I hope I captured fairly the augments of those supporting VAT exemption for private schools. My point is they need better arguments.
I think the truth is, rather, that there is a convincing argument for taxing private schools - but this isn't it.
The argument is, 'there's a free alternative and we need the money because we're so skint as a nation we need any money we can lay our hands on, and although it will have significant downsides in terms of school closures, need for greater capacity in the state sector in places etc these can be lived with for the greater good.'
What's been put forward instead is, 'this is needed for raising X to be spent on Y. And private schools are all filthy rich and can afford it and no parents will go elsewhere so it will raise the money so there will be no negatives and everyone will be happy and everyone saying otherwise is a filthy bourgeois liar...'
Which is manifestly not true and just makes the government look shifty. And when you add in that their sums are reminiscent of Liz Truss, it comes out badly on all levels.
They haven't even made a decent argument on social justice, because it's the schools that do most to entrench division in the socioeconomic elite that will be least affected. Taxes are not the way to deal with that issue. Smaller class sizes in the state sector would be one possible way. An outright ban on private education another. This won't do either.
So, not surprisingly, some of the arguments against look a bit daft as well (and some of them are daft).
Sadly, it merely confirms that our politicians are a bit naff.
I agree the counter argument for abolishing VAT exemption isn't particularly powerful either when you dive into it. The problem for those wanting to retain the exemption is that government policy is to remove and it's the weakness of the arguments deployed for retention that tell
There is an old saying that if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
And that saying reflects the fact that education is, in 1066 terms, a good thing. We need more of it. Will this policy help produce that? In theory, the answer is "yes" because those 6,500 additional teachers would benefit more students than the select few who go to private schools, whether on a fee paying or bursary basis.
But there are so many problems with that theory. As @ydoethur points out in most subjects there is a shortage of teachers so there are no more to be had. It is possible that wage increases might increase supply somewhat but this government has already gone too far in trying to solve problems by spending all the available cash on wages.
Secondly, if the result is that some kids come out of the private sector then the full cost of their education has to come out of the pot. Educating a child costs the local authority roughly £5k a year, a lot more for SEND children. So, if the consequence of the policy is that it would take 340k kids to transfer to exhaust the money. Given that 556k children currently go to private schools this seems wildly pessimistic but it is not as simple as that. Firstly, the distribution of those children will be extremely lumpy, depending on where schools close. Secondly, if even 100k transfer then something like 20% of the £1,7bn will be lost.
Thirdly, lets look at the reverse. If 100k of those children end up in state schools that is going to cost local authorities something like £500m.
Finally, the sad truth is that too many of our state schools are simply dysfunctional. Having more children attending those schools instead of (generally) better private educational establishments, particularly children who need a lot of help, is going to result in a less well educated workforce going forward.
This is a stupid policy based on jealousy and prejudice. The number of people adversely affected by it are not likely to be politically significant but it will diminish our total spend on education, it will reduce the average quality of that education and it will hurt many vulnerable kids. Stupid.
I am not jealous of you sending your children to private school, that is your prerogative. If I had been so minded I would have done so myself. However I don't want my taxes subsidising your choice.
My choice subsidised your children's education (or at least would have done so if they attended schools in Dundee). There is a saving to the State if people choose to go private, just as there is in private medicine. The subsidy is all one way.
Thank you for your contribution, it was greatly appreciated. You won't mind adding another 20% to the pot then.
Now you are just being greedy. Remember that these fees were paid out of highly taxed income.
Thankfully, all my children have completed their school education and 2/3 have completed their university education too. Pretty soon I will be able to start saving for a pension.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Private schools foster and propagate inequality, that's the whole point of the sector. It's a mechanism by which affluent people seek to lock in advantage for their offspring. Removing the tax incentives is the very least I'd expect from a Labour government.
Simplistic bollox, no doubt largely motivated by the very large packet of McCains sitting on both your shoulders.
I went to a "bog standard" comp. I sent my kids to a very good independent school, though probably not one that most would have heard of. The latter had massively greater diversity in virtually ever protected characteristic that can be defined. It had a large number of children that would be defined as SEND, whereas the former simply bullied such kids and left them on a scrapheap of failure.
There is more than one measure of "equality" and "inequality". Those of us that are not speaking out of a champagne socialist arsehole who actually understand diversity, also refer to "inequity" not "inequality". They are somewhat different. I suspect that comprehensive schools rarely reduce inequity or inequality, particularly those where wealthy accountants send their children.
This nasty vindictive policy will not achieve anything other than a group envy-wank for the likes of those that "liked" @Kinabalu's ignorant post.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
The real problem in your area is that the rate of housebuilding is not being matched by rate of provision of infrastructure.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
You were likely above average even when you took the 11 plus, just not quite high enough in IQ at the time to make the grade for a very selective grammar school. Had you taken the entrance at 16 for sixth form after your O levels you would likely have got into the grammar school
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Then that is what the state - which is responsible for state schools - should do.
But oddly enough, they rarely do it.
I think the reason is that almost everyone involved in the education system would like kids to do well. They would like awake, attentive kids who have had a good breakfast and actively want to learn. But parents need to ensure that their kids go to bed at a decent time, get enough sleep, and have breakfast. They need to ensure that the kids have access to books and other learning materials that can capture their imagination. They need to spend time with their kids. But many parents are not like that, and the kids suffer. And where you have a lot of these together - often deprived areas - you will get schools that will struggle, because the kids are not getting the basics at home.
And you know what? I really admire kids who do well *despite* failing parents.
My son has a friend whose mum is, IMO, really struggling. He misses loads of school, allegedly often because his mum cannot get him out of bed. He's started coming the mile into school on his own, but has been missing some school, apparently because his bike has a flat tyre. Which it has had for weeks. I have offered to help change the tyre, but his mum refused. She refuses all help aside from play dates at our house. (The school are aware of the issues, but I don't know what's being done about it).
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
It gets worse than that, because a number of private schools have already decided that to mitigate the VAT rise on fees, they will no longer provide the public benefit that they do now. At the ground floor, this means no more local community use of the sports facilities.
Quite right. If they are not treated as charities why should they act like them?
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
It gets worse than that, because a number of private schools have already decided that to mitigate the VAT rise on fees, they will no longer provide the public benefit that they do now. At the ground floor, this means no more local community use of the sports facilities.
I don’t think schools let the community use their facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Round here you have to pay, and the amount more than covers the running costs.
Given that the majority of the costs of (say) a swimming pool are fixed, it makes financial sense to get the maximum use of them which includes renting them out.
(Source: mate of mine who plays water polo. I tried once. It was impossible)
Previously, to qualify as charities and be exempt from VAT and business rates, schools were required to show a community benefit.
This was most often things like letting the local state school use the swimming pool for free or at marginal cost, as well as renting out facilities to community groups such as sports clubs or elite programmes.
Many of them have decided that if they don’t need to show the public benefit any more, then they’re not going to bother, and the local users can either get lost or be charged full commercial rates.
Yes, water polo is one of those things that looks easy enough when watching it at the Olympics, but is pretty damn impossible in reality! They move astonishingly quickly in the water.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
And there you have the positive feedback loop. Those parents most concerned about their child's education do everything, including moving house, to get their kids into the best schools. So those schools end up with the most motivated pupils and also attract the best teachers. So those schools get even better, while the poor ones get worse.
So you end up with the same situation replicated across the country where each area has a number of decent schools that are packed full, and one or two poor schools that everyone desperately tries to avoid sending their kids to. That's the inevitable consequence of allowing parents to choose their child's school. It's elementary game theory.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Can’t we clone Katharine Birbalsingh, and send her to run every school that fails inspection?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
If teachers were highly motivated by pay, they wouldn't be teachers. Most teachers will want to teach the brightest, most well-behaved children, because that's going to be the more pleasant working experience.
It's why my mother ended up teaching the bottom set in the secondary modern when she was a newly qualified teacher decades ago.
It's extremely difficult to escape the sink school spiral.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
I hope you were on the ground floor.
If the correct answer was 'dead', perhaps the Headmaster felt Weston Super Mare was close enough.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
Was it correct, or were you being credited with giving a quick answer?
Surely the correct answer is on the floor outside the window with a broken ankle?
Whoever it was at the FBI that rushed to say it wasn't a terrorist attack should be sacked immediately. They clearly aren't objective.
Who cares? What does terrorist attack even mean in the age of the lone wolf killer? A pound to a penny we are looking at self-radicalised attackers whose affiliation with ISIS was unknown in the Middle East until ISIS watched Al Jazeera's midday bulletin.
A fine Texas born ex-military citizen of the USA it appears - lots of elements of this for the usual suspects to gnash their teeth in frustration over. His military roles were in IT & HR, then on to run an unsuccessful estate agency therefore several signs of sociopathy already present. There seems a general movement in the West among the disaffected and deranged to take whatever means are at hand to take it out on the rest of us. Those societies with limited gun ownership definitely at an advantage in those circs.
Not much of an advantage, not since that guy in France killed almost 100 people by driving into a holiday crowd. That's more than any American spree-killer or school shooter has despatched, and without needing to make explosives.
In Britain, kitchen knives are more popular but a determined terrorist could kill dozens by swerving into a bus stop around school chucking-out time. No expertise or training required. Heck, not even any planning: just a snap decision while driving home.
The reason this does not happen here might be that for Islamist terrorists, the reward is instant admission to paradise when shot by police, but our police are unarmed and life in Belmarsh holds less appeal.
The French attack was with a 16-tonne lorry. He killed 86. The worst mass shooting in the US, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, killed 60. They’d not too far apart.
Most driving attacks don’t kill that many. The problem in the US is the sheer number of shootings. Wikipedia lists 56 school shootings in 2024 alone.
Indeed. As I noted on the last thread, an American news article about one incident (that someone had posted) had around it links to any number of reports of shootings.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 12 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
My revolutionary headmaster during my interview aged 13 said to me and my parents that he doesn't do entrance exams he just does IQ tests and he can judge very accurately.
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
I hope you were on the ground floor.
If the correct answer was 'dead', perhaps the Headmaster felt Weston Super Mare was close enough.
Weston Super Mare might have been the location of the nearest hospital/morgue/funeral parlour.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Then that is what the state - which is responsible for state schools - should do.
But oddly enough, they rarely do it.
I think the reason is that almost everyone involved in the education system would like kids to do well. They would like awake, attentive kids who have had a good breakfast and actively want to learn. But parents need to ensure that their kids go to bed at a decent time, get enough sleep, and have breakfast. They need to ensure that the kids have access to books and other learning materials that can capture their imagination. They need to spend time with their kids. But many parents are not like that, and the kids suffer. And where you have a lot of these together - often deprived areas - you will get schools that will struggle, because the kids are not getting the basics at home.
And you know what? I really admire kids who do well *despite* failing parents.
My son has a friend whose mum is, IMO, really struggling. He misses loads of school, allegedly often because his mum cannot get him out of bed. He's started coming the mile into school on his own, but has been missing some school, apparently because his bike has a flat tyre. Which it has had for weeks. I have offered to help change the tyre, but his mum refused. She refuses all help aside from play dates at our house. (The school are aware of the issues, but I don't know what's being done about it).
Anyway, rant mode off.
One of the interesting aspects of the Oxford admission system is that applicants were not measured against each other in absolute terms but in comparison to their cohort at that school. If they stood out there they certainly had a chance. This requires a huge amount of information about pretty much every school in the country but it does reduce (if not eliminate) the bias that would otherwise exist to those at better schools.
I remember thinking at the time that information really should be better used
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
If teachers were highly motivated by pay, they wouldn't be teachers. Most teachers will want to teach the brightest, most well-behaved children, because that's going to be the more pleasant working experience.
It's why my mother ended up teaching the bottom set in the secondary modern when she was a newly qualified teacher decades ago.
It's extremely difficult to escape the sink school spiral.
It does seem a quite bizarre situation. The most difficult schools, which are most in need of the best teachers, end up with the most inexperienced staff.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
And there you have the positive feedback loop. Those parents most concerned about their child's education do everything, including moving house, to get their kids into the best schools. So those schools end up with the most motivated pupils and also attract the best teachers. So those schools get even better, while the poor ones get worse.
So you end up with the same situation replicated across the country where each area has a number of decent schools that are packed full, and one or two poor schools that everyone desperately tries to avoid sending their kids to. That's the inevitable consequence of allowing parents to choose their child's school. It's elementary game theory.
The alternative would be to allow no choice, and have kids sent to the nearest school, always. Including, as an example, SEND pupils.
Your post shows the problem: it's impossible to get an even playing field when you have some parents willing to help their kids, and others who, for whatever reason, are not able to help their kids.
To show one side of the problem: nearly 9% of older kids do not have a book of their own at home. It's even worse for younger kids. Books are accessible, even through charity shops. So why do they not have at least one book of their own at home?
As an aside, we moved into this house before the secondary school was even built...
The actual NorK losses are allegedly an awful lot more than the junior Russian officers in charge of them are willing to send up the line to the generals.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
You were likely above average even when you took the 11 plus, just not quite high enough in IQ at the time to make the grade for a very selective grammar school. Had you taken the entrance at 16 for sixth form after your O levels you would likely have got into the grammar school
Whilst I agree with some of your general criticism of Labour's educational policies, I am sorry to tell you you are wrong to have so much faith in the reliability of the 11+.
Assessments of this kind are notoriously unreliable even in adults, let alone children. They also risk failing many individuals who are highly intelligent but may have neurodiverse conditions that result in high levels of anxiety brought on by such testing. People can most definitely be coached to the test to give an appearance of a higher IQ.
Anecdotally, one highly intelligent and eye-wateringly wealthy individual of my acquaintance was not only massively successful in business, but also achieved a PhD in engineering and an MBA at top universities.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
If teachers were highly motivated by pay, they wouldn't be teachers. Most teachers will want to teach the brightest, most well-behaved children, because that's going to be the more pleasant working experience.
It's why my mother ended up teaching the bottom set in the secondary modern when she was a newly qualified teacher decades ago.
It's extremely difficult to escape the sink school spiral.
It does seem a quite bizarre situation. The most difficult schools, which are most in need of the best teachers, end up with the most inexperienced staff.
Is the pupil premium not supposed to help with that a bit? I certainly agree teachers at poor schools should be better paid than those who have cushier berths.
Why should those MOST ABLE be able to get a VAT exemption that others can't get. To build Polo pitches, to maintain Golf Courses, to have Olympic quality Swimming Pools that 99% of the population cannot access. The majority of those Private Schools claiming to be losing pupils (although they never provide evidence of it) claim to be in debt. If they are it's because they have poor management and unsustainable gluttony for spending money they don't have. Well done Labour...A MANIFESTO COMMITMENT acted upon.
I have no problem with Labour imposing VAT on this service provided. My query is the pop at business rate avoidance. If the school is a charity they don't pay business rates. You can question if a school - which now provides a vatable service - should be a charity or a business. Valid question. But AIUI the minister is providing a simplistic attack which doesn't stand up to a moment's rational thought. So simplistic you'd almost think she was a Tory minister.
This is kind of what I was getting at earlier when suggesting that VAT was a minimum-effort policy that falls far short of what many, including perhaps the minister if one reads between the lines, would like. It does not abolish public schools. It does not deny public school leavers access to public universities or civil service jobs. It simply puts up prices that were rising anyway.
VAT is a no-brainer really. The upset is that their nice exemption has been removed. I get the upset, but we can't afford it any more. As for the "more kids will end up in your pleb schools so there" argument, great! I support comprehensive education.
It's a straightforward attack on those who try to do the best for their children rather than let them rot in the state sector
A very revealing but appalling attitude towards the 93% of kids and parents who use the state sector.
It is not just that PB is short of Everyman posters it's the arrogance of their posts which shows that Thatcherism is more alive than many of us would have hoped
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
And that's getting close to the heart of the matter.
Improving schools from here is difficult. @DavidL (?) was right to highlight the cheerful incompetence of many schools a few decades back, when it was possible to do a two year exam course without having even a nodding acquaintance with the syllabus. That's basically been league-tabled and inspected out of the system over the last few decades.
The low-hanging fruit of school improvement, of which there was a lot, has largely been picked. (Which is one of the reasons that Ofsted had to get a bit underhand in finding new candidates for acdemisation.) What we're left with is mostly gradual iterative marginal tweaks. Which are fine in most places, but leaves a smallish tail of schools that are failing and haven't responded to the jump juice of academisation. And the sort of funding changes that might make a difference (double the spending per pupil, say) are not going to happen.
The improvements in London were, in part, driven by gentrification and changes in the ethnic mix that favoured education. That isn't a model that rolls out everywhere.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
Has it been tried?
It’s the whole principle behind special measures and forced academisation.
Hose the place with money, change the staff, bring in talented outsiders. Change the name and mentor everyone within an inch of their lives.
And I’ve known that change OFSTED ratings but I’ve never known it make a real difference to the school.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
And there you have the positive feedback loop. Those parents most concerned about their child's education do everything, including moving house, to get their kids into the best schools. So those schools end up with the most motivated pupils and also attract the best teachers. So those schools get even better, while the poor ones get worse.
So you end up with the same situation replicated across the country where each area has a number of decent schools that are packed full, and one or two poor schools that everyone desperately tries to avoid sending their kids to. That's the inevitable consequence of allowing parents to choose their child's school. It's elementary game theory.
The alternative would be to allow no choice, and have kids sent to the nearest school, always. Including, as an example, SEND pupils.
Your post shows the problem: it's impossible to get an even playing field when you have some parents willing to help their kids, and others who, for whatever reason, are not able to help their kids.
To show one side of the problem: nearly 9% of older kids do not have a book of their own at home. It's even worse for younger kids. Books are accessible, even through charity shops. So why do they not have at least one book of their own at home?
As an aside, we moved into this house before the secondary school was even built...
Life would certainly be easier if kids simply went to the nearest school. They wouldn't have to go so far to school, the schools would all have a few places free for mid-year entries, and there wouldn't be so much of a positive (in the scientific sense) feedback effect driving standards apart between schools.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
The real problem in your area is that the rate of housebuilding is not being matched by rate of provision of infrastructure.
Partly, yes. But it's made worse by the fact that incomers tend to be slightly higher earners than in many areas - a fair few parents are employees of ARM, or Qualcomm, Apple or Domino, as an example.
It is also not helped by the fact councils keep on allowing more houses, without investing enough, or at all, in infrastructure. Schools is just one example. TBF it can be quite hard in schools: if you are building 100 new houses, how many primary and secondary-aged kids will arrive when those houses are sold? 20? 50? 120? How many places do you create at the local school?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Surely a more practicable solution would be to invest more money in the failing school to, for example, pay bonuses to good teachers to teach there and raise standards?
Have you ever known that approach work?
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
If teachers were highly motivated by pay, they wouldn't be teachers. Most teachers will want to teach the brightest, most well-behaved children, because that's going to be the more pleasant working experience.
It's why my mother ended up teaching the bottom set in the secondary modern when she was a newly qualified teacher decades ago.
It's extremely difficult to escape the sink school spiral.
It does seem a quite bizarre situation. The most difficult schools, which are most in need of the best teachers, end up with the most inexperienced staff.
Is the pupil premium not supposed to help with that a bit? I certainly agree teachers at poor schools should be better paid than those who have cushier berths.
Doesn't it pay for more TAs to help those with SEND ?
The case for exempting VAT on private schools rests on two basic arguments I think. Unfortunately for the people making them, neither quite stacks up.
Argument 1 is that private education is a societal good. It promotes aspiration and should be encouraged. The problem with the argument as it applies to VAT is that the encouragement of aspiration is limited to those who can afford the very expensive school fees today but not 20% more than that. We can assume the wealthy don't need the aspiration boost. Implying to the vast majority who can't afford the privilege, they don't need the aspiration but should support those who can afford it, isn't a compelling argument to that vast majority.
Argument 2 is that private education fills in the gaps in state provision. Removing the VAT exemption is counterproductive as it would force some currently privately educated students into the state sector. The issue here is that those implementing the policy have numbers to show they will get more revenue than additional costs incurred. Those numbers may or may not be correct but this is a general tax payer question; school fee paying parents don't get to decide.
So they are left I think with a hybrid argument. While exempting VAT on private education may not do anything for most people, it doesn't do them much harm either. Meanwhile it means a lot for a small number of people and for that reason it should be retained. It isn't a very powerful argument.
Argument 1 is more completely that such schools are generally charities, and there is already law that should ensure that these schools provide a public good, which extends beyond those who can afford their fees.
It seems reasonable to look at whether you could tighten up these rules - lord knows there are plenty of charities more generally that would benefit from a bit more scrutiny - and perhaps charge VAT on schools that do not qualify as charities. But I'd suspect they most private schools would pass a test of providing a public good as a charity.
It gets worse than that, because a number of private schools have already decided that to mitigate the VAT rise on fees, they will no longer provide the public benefit that they do now. At the ground floor, this means no more local community use of the sports facilities.
Cutting their nose off to spite their face. If the schools stop providing a public benefit, then they stop being charities. So they lose corporation tax relief, are no longer exempt from CGT etc, and must pay inheritance tax on legacies and bequests.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Can’t we clone Katharine Birbalsingh, and send her to run every school that fails inspection?
Perhaps we should get Jordan Peterson and David Starkey involved, maybe even Neil Oliver as well!
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
The real problem in your area is that the rate of housebuilding is not being matched by rate of provision of infrastructure.
Partly, yes. But it's made worse by the fact that incomers tend to be slightly higher earners than in many areas - a fair few parents are employees of ARM, or Qualcomm, Apple or Domino, as an example.
It is also not helped by the fact councils keep on allowing more houses, without investing enough, or at all, in infrastructure. Schools is just one example. TBF it can be quite hard in schools: if you are building 100 new houses, how many primary and secondary-aged kids will arrive when those houses are sold? 20? 50? 120? How many places do you create at the local school?
The 1970s solution to that was portakabin classrooms -- the village primary I went to had at least four to handle the bulge in pupil numbers resulting from the village being massively expanded by new housing development...
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
How is it possible that some schools have ended up rife with drugs and violence?
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
You were likely above average even when you took the 11 plus, just not quite high enough in IQ at the time to make the grade for a very selective grammar school. Had you taken the entrance at 16 for sixth form after your O levels you would likely have got into the grammar school
Whilst I agree with some of your general criticism of Labour's educational policies, I am sorry to tell you you are wrong to have so much faith in the reliability of the 11+.
Assessments of this kind are notoriously unreliable even in adults, let alone children. They also risk failing many individuals who are highly intelligent but may have neurodiverse conditions that result in high levels of anxiety brought on by such testing. People can most definitely be coached to the test to give an appearance of a higher IQ.
Anecdotally, one highly intelligent and eye-wateringly wealthy individual of my acquaintance was not only massively successful in business, but also achieved a PhD in engineering and an MBA at top universities.
You guessed it, he failed his 11+ !!
11+ identifies 90% of those with the highest IQ they need for admittance, that doesn't necessarily mean others with drive can't become successful businesspeople etc. High IQ generally only identifies future academics, doctors, lawyers etc.
There is also of course the 13+ and sixth form entry into grammars now too for those who do very well at GCSE
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
The real problem in your area is that the rate of housebuilding is not being matched by rate of provision of infrastructure.
Partly, yes. But it's made worse by the fact that incomers tend to be slightly higher earners than in many areas - a fair few parents are employees of ARM, or Qualcomm, Apple or Domino, as an example.
It is also not helped by the fact councils keep on allowing more houses, without investing enough, or at all, in infrastructure. Schools is just one example. TBF it can be quite hard in schools: if you are building 100 new houses, how many primary and secondary-aged kids will arrive when those houses are sold? 20? 50? 120? How many places do you create at the local school?
The 1970s solution to that was portakabin classrooms -- the village primary I went to had at least four to handle the bulge in pupil numbers resulting from the village being massively expanded by new housing development...
We had a 25th birthday party for our Portakabins when I was at primary school. Partly tongue in cheek of course, but there was cake.
Behind Rawls' Veil of Ignorance, any of us could be born to feckless, impoverished parents. That's why every child should be offered the same educational opportunities, from early years onwards.
I was lucky. My parents were aspirational for me, and helped and encouraged me to make the most of my abilities.
Kids from council estates ending up with three types of balsamic is what social mobility is all about.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
How is it possible that some schools have ended up rife with drugs and violence?
They found it the easiest bit of the public school ethos to copy?
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
That's not great, but....someone has to go to those schools.
I think I will probably never forgive you for this, because you’ve just made me find myself in full agreement with Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
Can’t we clone Katharine Birbalsingh, and send her to run every school that fails inspection?
It would mean not just cloning KB, but also the staff and (more challengingly) the parents. It's one thing to achieve impressive outcomes when you start with a blank sheet and parents know what they are signing up to... Quite another to do so with an existing community.
James Carville on what Dems need to do now. Back to pocketbook issues.
"Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast."
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
The real problem in your area is that the rate of housebuilding is not being matched by rate of provision of infrastructure.
Partly, yes. But it's made worse by the fact that incomers tend to be slightly higher earners than in many areas - a fair few parents are employees of ARM, or Qualcomm, Apple or Domino, as an example.
It is also not helped by the fact councils keep on allowing more houses, without investing enough, or at all, in infrastructure. Schools is just one example. TBF it can be quite hard in schools: if you are building 100 new houses, how many primary and secondary-aged kids will arrive when those houses are sold? 20? 50? 120? How many places do you create at the local school?
The 1970s solution to that was portakabin classrooms -- the village primary I went to had at least four to handle the bulge in pupil numbers resulting from the village being massively expanded by new housing development...
We had a 25th birthday party for our Portakabins when I was at primary school. Partly tongue in cheek of course, but there was cake.
I can confirm they were still in use at my (private !) school in the nineties.
Have to say I'm really enjoying Elon Musk trolling the Labour government and ministers. It's very enjoyable seeing the boot on the other foot after 14 years of Labour surrogates in the BBC, charities and think tanks attacking the Tory government under the guise of neutrality. Hope he keeps it up and uses the giant bully pulpit of Twitter to constantly hurt Labour and Starmer.
I also enjoyed the usual suspects taking aim at Elon Musk for the cybertruck explosion and blaming Tesla. It actually seems to be the case that the cybertruck contained the explosive devices and minimised the damage and potential loss of life.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
You were likely above average even when you took the 11 plus, just not quite high enough in IQ at the time to make the grade for a very selective grammar school. Had you taken the entrance at 16 for sixth form after your O levels you would likely have got into the grammar school
Well that is clearly not the case because:
a) I didn't just fail the 11 plus, I failed it convincingly because as I mentioned we were streamed based upon the results of the 11 plus and not only was my result not high enough to get into the grammar school, but I was no more than average of the failures because I was in stream 3 of 5 of the group that failed. That was a class expected to leave school without taking any exams. Not that I have any memory of taking an 11 plus.
b) After my O levels I went to the grammar school and was at a level where I was fast streamed with just 3 other grammar school boys out of the whole year and took an A level early.
So I had gone from being an average 11 plus failures (so well below average) to being at the very top of those that passed the 11 plus. That clearly makes no sense whatsoever. I might have been an extreme example but there were plenty more examples of boys who moved across and outperformed the grammar school boys and plenty from the grammar school who crashed and burned.
Selection at 11, particularly using an IQ test is plainly nuts.
PS I note also Kazuo Ishiguro has just got a new honour in addition to his knighthood and noble prize. He was at the same school as me and in my A level year and was not a spectacularly special student. Not fast tracked, however people just develop at different rates and should be streamed and set accordingly and not have some random judgement made at some random age.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
But it's like everything else- once a measure becomes a target, it stops working as a measure.
There are only so many questions you can ask in IQ-like tests, and coaching and familiarity with them increase performance a lot. (If it didn't, the entire education system might as well pack up and shuffle off home.)
Grammar schools do continually tweak their admission tests to try to stay one step ahead of the coaching industry. They generally fail in that endeavour.
Without needing to pull apart HYUFD's notion that IQ is "largely inherited and genetic", the point is that all one needs to get into a grammar school is to be scored that bit better than the pack, given IQ is a statistical construct based on a distribution around the mean. And that's what coaching gives.
If you are below average IQ no matter how hard you are coached you will likely never get the above average numerical and verbal reasoning scores to get into grammar school
Utter rubbish
Unless they found twins that had been brought up separately (which must be rare) I don't see how they could successfully eliminate environmental factors.
Even that wouldn’t work - I know multiple sets of identical twins that have ended up in different situations as things played out
James Carville on what Dems need to do now. Back to pocketbook issues.
"Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast."
Have to say I'm really enjoying Elon Musk trolling the Labour government and ministers. It's very enjoyable seeing the boot on the other foot after 14 years of Labour surrogates in the BBC, charities and think tanks attacking the Tory government under the guise of neutrality. Hope he keeps it up and uses the giant bully pulpit of Twitter to constantly hurt Labour and Starmer.
I think it’s an interesting evolution. He’s basically turned it into a traditional paper with an editorial line, whilst trying to keep it as a “paper of record” with its place in society. He wants it to be the Thunderer of old, but internationally.
I also enjoyed the usual suspects taking aim at Elon Musk for the cybertruck explosion and blaming Tesla. It actually seems to be the case that the cybertruck contained the explosive devices and minimised the damage and potential loss of life.
Yup. People don't like to be told what to think! SO they say as they object to EVs. Then they parrot a load of fear uncertainty and doubt (such as "the battery will explode" and spew them out, exactly as the people who fed it to them wanted
I also enjoyed the usual suspects taking aim at Elon Musk for the cybertruck explosion and blaming Tesla. It actually seems to be the case that the cybertruck contained the explosive devices and minimised the damage and potential loss of life.
The initial media reports all ignored the video and went straight to trying to smear Musk for making a crappy truck that catches fire. They really, really don’t like the guy.
I have a grand daughter who cannot be placed by the State Sector, they have no vacancies. As a result she is now out of school, 2 years before her GSCE's, ( is it still called that?) Phillipson should be sacked, Labour have lost their left already to Farage and the Greens, so she will not be missed.
The state has a duty to offer your GD a place in a school. What I suspect you are really saying is that the place offered is not the preferred option of your family. Which is quite different.
And if you care for your child, and they 'place' your child in a sink school rife with drugs and violence, many miles away from your home? Oh, and you cannot drive...
This is reality for some.
You immediately leap to a worst case scenario. Most options are alot more nuanced.
It is happening to parents in my village. Not many, but some.
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
And there you have the positive feedback loop. Those parents most concerned about their child's education do everything, including moving house, to get their kids into the best schools. So those schools end up with the most motivated pupils and also attract the best teachers. So those schools get even better, while the poor ones get worse.
So you end up with the same situation replicated across the country where each area has a number of decent schools that are packed full, and one or two poor schools that everyone desperately tries to avoid sending their kids to. That's the inevitable consequence of allowing parents to choose their child's school. It's elementary game theory.
You can have selection by application or selection by house price. Either way good parents will endeavour to keep their children away from crap.
You went to a grammar school, you should also be supporting parental and pupil choice
Grammar schools are free at the point of use.
It's just all the private coaching ahead of the 11+ that costs a lot.
Most grammar school pupils are not privately coached, especially those that come from primary schools in all selective counties like Kent, Bucks and Lincolnshire. If you don't have an above average IQ you also won't pass the 11+ or 13+ however much you are coached
Coaching plays a huge part in IQ scores, whether by the school or private coach. Simply getting your head around how to do the different tests is a big part of it.
No it doesn't, IQ is largely inherited and genetic and the rest is based on logic skills. The 11 plus focuses on verbal and numerical reasoning tests so harder to learn the facts and answers for unless you can work out how to do them
And you can be taught how to do them. I know we have been around this loop before so I know it is pointless, but I believe @rcs1000 showed tuition can make a difference of 20 points which is huge. I used to have to administer the test as part of the recruitment of a very large computer manufacturer I worked for in the 80s. The questions only follow a small number of variations for which simple techniques can be applied. For instance in a number sequences if you can't get it then simply subtracting each number from the previous number and write it down below and between the two numbers so you get a new sequence and keep doing that until a pattern emerges. This will solve most. It probably takes about 15 seconds to do so easily within the time limit per question. So for all these questions there is now no test between someone with an IQ of 150 and 90 if the person with an IQ of 90 has been trained in the technique. Similar techniques can be applied for other tests eg the approximation questions and the shape questions.
So basically even you admit nobody with an IQ below 90, about a third of the population, could ever pass the 11 plus even if coached 24/7 for it.
Those with an IQ of 150 would of course pass with likely full marks even if never coached at all
Let's take a real example. The IQ tests I set for recruits required a score of 130 to get an interview. I took the same test before I joined. I was never given my score, but it had to be North of 130 to get in. I failed my 11 plus and I obviously failed badly as we were streamed and I went into the 3rd stream of 5 in the Secondary school, where I was expected to leave without taking any exams eventually. I got a degree in Maths from one of the top universities in the early 70s and top grades in all my O and A levels except O level English, which I still passed comfortably.
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
You were likely above average even when you took the 11 plus, just not quite high enough in IQ at the time to make the grade for a very selective grammar school. Had you taken the entrance at 16 for sixth form after your O levels you would likely have got into the grammar school
Well that is clearly not the case because:
a) I didn't just fail the 11 plus, I failed it convincingly because as I mentioned we were streamed based upon the results of the 11 plus and not only was my result not high enough to get into the grammar school, but I was no more than average of the failures because I was in stream 3 of 5 of the group that failed. That was a class expected to leave school without taking any exams. Not that I have any memory of taking an 11 plus.
b) After my O levels I went to the grammar school and was at a level where I was fast streamed with just 3 other grammar school boys out of the whole year and took an A level early.
So I had gone from being an average 11 plus failures (so well below average) to being at the very top of those that passed the 11 plus. That clearly makes no sense whatsoever. I might have been an extreme example but there were plenty more examples of boys who moved across and outperformed the grammar school boys and plenty from the grammar school who crashed and burned.
Selection at 11, particularly using an IQ test is plainly nuts.
PS I note also Kazuo Ishiguro has just got a new honour in addition to his knighthood and noble prize. He was at the same school as me and in my A level year and was not a spectacularly special student. Not fast tracked, however people just develop at different rates and should be streamed and set accordingly and not have some random judgement made at some random age.
So you certainly weren't in the bottom streams then and as you have said you were never as good at English as Maths so that probably dragged your average down a bit.
In any case as you said you went to grammar school after O Levels anyway and so ended up taking A levels early and at your top university from a grammar school sixth form regardless as most grammars have entry at 13 and 16 not just 11 as yours did too
Comments
It will probably affect around 20% of payments from what I have seen, but my figures aren't complete.
Which is one reason why, from every point of view, whatever the rights and wrongs of this policy it would have been smarter to bring it in from September.
I also had to pass the IQ test I was setting when I joined the company. Obviously I passed. I never found out my result but it had to be in excess of 130 to get an interview. I failed my 11 plus.
This is reality for some.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest/
By contrast I don't see any significant difference between British Indian pupils and British Tanzanian pupils of Indian ethnicity
AIUI this isn't the line Pannick and co are going down though ?
That's nonsense on stilts. Even though I think this is a dumb policy, I can't see how anyone could say taxing a service is a breach of human rights.
But for Vat purposes the delivery of the service is going to be that day at school or the first day of term in January it’s not going to be September unless the contract is always for a full year
That 11 plus wasn't exactly useful was it?
The argument is, 'there's a free alternative and we need the money because we're so skint as a nation we need any money we can lay our hands on, and although it will have significant downsides in terms of school closures, need for greater capacity in the state sector in places etc these can be lived with for the greater good.'
What's been put forward instead is, 'this is needed for raising X to be spent on Y. And private schools are all filthy rich and can afford it and no parents will go elsewhere so it will raise the money so there will be no negatives and everyone will be happy and everyone saying otherwise is a filthy bourgeois liar...'
Which is manifestly not true and just makes the government look shifty. And when you add in that their sums are reminiscent of Liz Truss, it comes out badly on all levels.
They haven't even made a decent argument on social justice, because it's the schools that do most to entrench division in the socioeconomic elite that will be least affected. Taxes are not the way to deal with that issue. Smaller class sizes in the state sector would be one possible way. An outright ban on private education another. This won't do either.
So, not surprisingly, some of the arguments against look a bit daft as well (and some of them are daft).
Sadly, it merely confirms that our politicians are a bit naff.
The majority pay by the term, or even by the month, but not by any means all.
I'm not sure how that would apply in practice, but insisting it be levied on fees paid the previous summer seems to me to be a departure from usual practice.
In fact this is exactly how my brother was for a long time, failed his 11+ unlike me and had a chip on his shoulder for a long time. Despite this - perhaps because of it - he has done alright in lief subsequently
"The classical twin design compares the similarity of monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. If identical twins are considerably more similar than fraternal twins (which is found for most traits), this implies that genes play an important role in these traits. By comparing many hundreds of families with twins, researchers can then understand more about the roles of genetic effects, shared environment, and unique environment in shaping behavior."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study
Most driving attacks don’t kill that many. The problem in the US is the sheer number of shootings. Wikipedia lists 56 school shootings in 2024 alone.
There is also an obvious and common confusion between 'variance' and the actual variable in question. Not to mention between IQ and general intelligence. Note that HYUFD claims that a study *claimed to prove that most of the variance is down to genetics* is evidence that most of general intelligence is genetic. That's two key differences.
HYUFD also BTW carefully omitted the next sentence from what was a press release not an actual paper. "Studies of the DNA of hundreds of thousands of unrelated people suggest that only around 30% of the variation in intelligence is inherited. This differences between these percentages between the results of twin studies and genome studies has become known as the mystery of the missing heritability."
Edit: TBF the study in question is later claimed to have resolved this. But early days yet. And the point about confusing variance with total stands.
But, yes, studies looking at twins adopted into different families would be very valuable.
Did you read the article and find out what they did?
'If you climbed out of that window' pointing to a window in his office 'and walked in a straight line where would you get to?'. I hadn't the faintest idea. 'Western-Super-Mare' I said without knowing where I was or where it was. 'Correct!' he said. I was then put in the highest stream of 12 streams that year.
Why should any child have to go to a bad school? Shouldn’t they all have a chance of a decent school?
If the school is so bad but nobody wants to go there isn’t that a sign rather that it should be closed and therefore capacity opened up for better schools to take over?
1.The money raised has not been hypothecated for schools so let's see whether it is actually spent there.
2. If the full amount is raised it is nowhere enough to pay for the things that Phillipson says she wants. So where is that money coming from?
It may happen to our son, if we are unlucky.
To give you an idea: my local secondary (a very short walk away) had 290 places. It had 299 first choice preferences, and 474 total preferences. The next closest (the same trust) had 275 places allocated, and 341 first choice preferences.
The majority of schools in the area are over-subscribed, some by quite a degree. The ones that are not are the ones parents do not want to send their kids to. Because they're cr@p.
Asking for a friend.
Given that the majority of the costs of (say) a swimming pool are fixed, it makes financial sense to get the maximum use of them which includes renting them out.
(Source: mate of mine who plays water polo. I tried once. It was impossible)
Thankfully, all my children have completed their school education and 2/3 have completed their university education too. Pretty soon I will be able to start saving for a pension.
I went to a "bog standard" comp. I sent my kids to a very good independent school, though probably not one that most would have heard of. The latter had massively greater diversity in virtually ever protected characteristic that can be defined. It had a large number of children that would be defined as SEND, whereas the former simply bullied such kids and left them on a scrapheap of failure.
There is more than one measure of "equality" and "inequality". Those of us that are not speaking out of a champagne socialist arsehole who actually understand diversity, also refer to "inequity" not "inequality". They are somewhat different. I suspect that comprehensive schools rarely reduce inequity or inequality, particularly those where wealthy accountants send their children.
This nasty vindictive policy will not achieve anything other than a group envy-wank for the likes of those that "liked" @Kinabalu's ignorant post.
PS great header @ydoethur
And that’s a serious question, because I haven’t.
But oddly enough, they rarely do it.
I think the reason is that almost everyone involved in the education system would like kids to do well. They would like awake, attentive kids who have had a good breakfast and actively want to learn. But parents need to ensure that their kids go to bed at a decent time, get enough sleep, and have breakfast. They need to ensure that the kids have access to books and other learning materials that can capture their imagination. They need to spend time with their kids. But many parents are not like that, and the kids suffer. And where you have a lot of these together - often deprived areas - you will get schools that will struggle, because the kids are not getting the basics at home.
And you know what? I really admire kids who do well *despite* failing parents.
My son has a friend whose mum is, IMO, really struggling. He misses loads of school, allegedly often because his mum cannot get him out of bed. He's started coming the mile into school on his own, but has been missing some school, apparently because his bike has a flat tyre. Which it has had for weeks. I have offered to help change the tyre, but his mum refused. She refuses all help aside from play dates at our house. (The school are aware of the issues, but I don't know what's being done about it).
Anyway, rant mode off.
This was most often things like letting the local state school use the swimming pool for free or at marginal cost, as well as renting out facilities to community groups such as sports clubs or elite programmes.
Many of them have decided that if they don’t need to show the public benefit any more, then they’re not going to bother, and the local users can either get lost or be charged full commercial rates.
Yes, water polo is one of those things that looks easy enough when watching it at the Olympics, but is pretty damn impossible in reality! They move astonishingly quickly in the water.
So you end up with the same situation replicated across the country where each area has a number of decent schools that are packed full, and one or two poor schools that everyone desperately tries to avoid sending their kids to. That's the inevitable consequence of allowing parents to choose their child's school. It's elementary game theory.
It's why my mother ended up teaching the bottom set in the secondary modern when she was a newly qualified teacher decades ago.
It's extremely difficult to escape the sink school spiral.
I remember thinking at the time that information really should be better used
Your post shows the problem: it's impossible to get an even playing field when you have some parents willing to help their kids, and others who, for whatever reason, are not able to help their kids.
To show one side of the problem: nearly 9% of older kids do not have a book of their own at home. It's even worse for younger kids. Books are accessible, even through charity shops. So why do they not have at least one book of their own at home?
As an aside, we moved into this house before the secondary school was even built...
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1874763802731835902
The actual NorK losses are allegedly an awful lot more than the junior Russian officers in charge of them are willing to send up the line to the generals.
Assessments of this kind are notoriously unreliable even in adults, let alone children. They also risk failing many individuals who are highly intelligent but may have neurodiverse conditions that result in high levels of anxiety brought on by such testing. People can most definitely be coached to the test to give an appearance of a higher IQ.
Anecdotally, one highly intelligent and eye-wateringly wealthy individual of my acquaintance was not only massively successful in business, but also achieved a PhD in engineering and an MBA at top universities.
You guessed it, he failed his 11+ !!
Improving schools from here is difficult. @DavidL (?) was right to highlight the cheerful incompetence of many schools a few decades back, when it was possible to do a two year exam course without having even a nodding acquaintance with the syllabus. That's basically been league-tabled and inspected out of the system over the last few decades.
The low-hanging fruit of school improvement, of which there was a lot, has largely been picked. (Which is one of the reasons that Ofsted had to get a bit underhand in finding new candidates for acdemisation.) What we're left with is mostly gradual iterative marginal tweaks. Which are fine in most places, but leaves a smallish tail of schools that are failing and haven't responded to the jump juice of academisation. And the sort of funding changes that might make a difference (double the spending per pupil, say) are not going to happen.
The improvements in London were, in part, driven by gentrification and changes in the ethnic mix that favoured education. That isn't a model that rolls out everywhere.
Brace.
Hose the place with money, change the staff, bring in talented outsiders. Change the name and mentor everyone within an inch of their lives.
And I’ve known that change OFSTED ratings but I’ve never known it make a real difference to the school.
It is also not helped by the fact councils keep on allowing more houses, without investing enough, or at all, in infrastructure. Schools is just one example. TBF it can be quite hard in schools: if you are building 100 new houses, how many primary and secondary-aged kids will arrive when those houses are sold? 20? 50? 120? How many places do you create at the local school?
A very expensive temper tantrum.
There is also of course the 13+ and sixth form entry into grammars now too for those who do very well at GCSE
But potentially, quite a humorous clusterfuck of a shit show (if the transition is anything to go by).
I was lucky. My parents were aspirational for me, and helped and encouraged me to make the most of my abilities.
Kids from council estates ending up with three types of balsamic is what social mobility is all about.
"Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/democrats-donald-trump-economy.html
https://x.com/adambienkov/status/1874796043088572741?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
a) I didn't just fail the 11 plus, I failed it convincingly because as I mentioned we were streamed based upon the results of the 11 plus and not only was my result not high enough to get into the grammar school, but I was no more than average of the failures because I was in stream 3 of 5 of the group that failed. That was a class expected to leave school without taking any exams. Not that I have any memory of taking an 11 plus.
b) After my O levels I went to the grammar school and was at a level where I was fast streamed with just 3 other grammar school boys out of the whole year and took an A level early.
So I had gone from being an average 11 plus failures (so well below average) to being at the very top of those that passed the 11 plus. That clearly makes no sense whatsoever. I might have been an extreme example but there were plenty more examples of boys who moved across and outperformed the grammar school boys and plenty from the grammar school who crashed and burned.
Selection at 11, particularly using an IQ test is plainly nuts.
PS I note also Kazuo Ishiguro has just got a new honour in addition to his knighthood and noble prize. He was at the same school as me and in my A level year and was not a spectacularly special student. Not fast tracked, however people just develop at different rates and should be streamed and set accordingly and not have some random judgement made at some random age.
Let’s hope these voices prevail over those who think the Dems should double down on the wokery and immigration, while calling the other guy Hitler.
I passed my 11+ and ended up posting on PB.
In any case as you said you went to grammar school after O Levels anyway and so ended up taking A levels early and at your top university from a grammar school sixth form regardless as most grammars have entry at 13 and 16 not just 11 as yours did too