No Apologies - I'm Getting Political - VAT on school fees

I am fiercely proud of Clifton Hall School, a Scottish educational charity, bound up in long held traditions of hard work and kindness. I have been lucky enough to be the school’s Headmaster for 19 years (with a little under 2 to go, having recently turned 60!).

I have never been political in the sense that I follow one party and one party only. I listen to the arguments put forward by all sides and come to a reasoned decision. In the 42 years I have been entitled to vote, I have voted Liberal (old money), Conservative, Labour and the SNP. I point this out to highlight my view that society often needs a change of direction.

Of course, ‘change’ was Labour’s pre-election war-cry. All good so far. No increase to taxes of working people – seemed fair, even though Labour couldn’t really define who was a ‘worker’… and then, sadly for me, the decision to add VAT to independent school fees which killed off my interest in voting for Labour this time around.

Since the election, I have come to realise that this particular iteration of Labour is not a particularly pleasant one. On the one hand, happy to accept gifts aplenty from friends in high places, only to hit pensioners hard with cuts to the winter fuel allowance. Happy to raise 40 billion in taxes despite their promise to galvanise business and foster growth. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no member of the Treasury has ever created and developed their own business from scratch.

This Labour is clearly anti-aspirational. They have hit independent schools like mine with a VAT surcharge, making us the only country in the western world that taxes education, passing it off as ‘removing an exemption’. On top, they have increased Employers’ National Insurance rates, costing my school a further ￡80 000 per annum.

‘Quite right,’ say the ‘private school haters’, but my school is not-for-profit, and, like it or not, operates as a charity, under the strictest guidelines of financial probity. In addition, schools in England and Wales have lost business tax relief (which Scottish Independent Schools lost a number of years ago) and all of these changes have occurred midway through an academic year.

Many colleagues throw their hands up in the air, questioning what we can do about it. Legal challenges will commence. Children will be removed from schools. Children who would have joined us, won’t. The Independent Sector will suffer hugely but it will be State schools that are left to pick up the mess.

Ah, but 6500 new teachers say the Government. Good luck with that. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

No, the real reason for a mid-year triple whammy is ideological. This is no more than ‘abolishing private schools by the backdoor’. This has, very clearly, been the aim all along but no one has had the sincerity to be honest about that long-held ideological ambition.

But even if you don’t have any sympathy with our school’s predicaments, I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that if business is the sacrificial lamb for improved public services, growth will stagnate, further tax rises will be required and schools like mine will become over elitist, not through choice but through political interference.

And for all those who do not see it the way I do, the proof will be in the pudding. Let’s wait and see how our State Schools, much maligned but actually doing a fantastic job, improve with the extra funding promised. By the way, if Labour is right about how much these policies will bring in, every state school in the country can look forward to an annual uplift of around ￡37000.

Transformative? A drop in the ocean that will deliver zero improvement, but at least they’ve done what they actually set out to do and decimate the independent education sector.

Makes me wonder why they haven’t gone after private healthcare…?