Classroom doors at the £18,000-a-year Catholic Alton School will shut for the final time this summer as a result of Labour’s plans to charge VAT on private school fees. The Telegraph has more.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned tax raid on private education has claimed its first victim with the closure of a private school where parents faced paying thousands of pounds extra every year.
Families with children at Alton School in Hampshire, which last week announced it would shut this summer, have blamed the Labour Party’s tax policies for forcing parents to remove their children and place them in the state sector.
The school said in a statement on its website that “adverse political and economic factors” had drained pupil numbers, leaving it “unviable” to run.
Classroom doors at the £18,000-a-year Catholic school, which caters for 370 pupils, will close for the final time at the end of the academic year.
The school has suffered from dwindling pupil numbers in recent years, but the likelihood of a Sir Keir victory in the general election is said to have exacerbated the issue, with parents describing it as the “final nail in the coffin”.
Labour has doubled down on its commitment to apply VAT “straight away” on private school fees if it wins the keys to No. 10 in July.
Parents and headteachers across the country fear the 20% tax will spark an exodus of pupils as families struggle to afford fees. The hike could have added as much as £3,600 to Alton’s existing fees.
A parent of two pupils at the school said: “Labour’s VAT plan has clearly had a pretty terrible impact on intake for September.
“It seems like it’s been the final nail in the coffin. It’s been a topic of conversation for quite some time, and with Labour looking more and more likely to get in, it’s become more relevant.
“I know a decent proportion of parents are now looking at the state sector.”
Pupils, parents and staff were told of the impending closure last week as headmaster Andrew Reeve informed them “it is with a very heavy heart that we cannot continue”.
Mr Reeve was hired last year in an attempt to steady the ship at the Alton, but a letter from trustees admits this “has not translated into higher pupil numbers”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Private schools must make cuts to cope with Labour’s planned VAT raid, just as the state sector was forced to by the Conservatives, Rachel Reeves has said. The Telegraph has more.
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The socialist scum won’t care if education suffers due to private school closures. They are motivated above all by the politics of envy.
I think they use the politics of envy and imaginary/perceived unfairness to get power. It’s weird but in general all the working class less well off people inknow
are right wing and most of the comfortable middle class people I know are lefties.
Many of them had private education but see no reason why anyone else should get it. Meanwhile state schools stress all the issues parenmts don’t want and do not do the things they do want. A very few exceptions deserve credit for hanging in there – Labour will soon destroy them!
Equality of outcome is the cry, but the result is to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator. What a stupid and selfish way of handicapping children for ideological reasons.
Many of these private schools are Catholic. Sent mine to one. They are expensive but the benefits are what you don’t necessarily learn in class – character, honesty, a belief in causes higher than yourself, morality etc.
Shutting down these ‘disinformation sites’ fits nicely into the overall plan they have.
Being in state school in the seventies was not perfect, but we all wore the uniform, there was a semblance of order. I kind of felt I was in an educational environment. teachers were strict but mostly fair, there was no chaos. About 10 years after I left that school I noticed kids were arriving with no uniform, and I even saw articles in the local paper that parents were kicking up a fuss that they “couldn’t afford the uniform” and their children should be allowed to wear what they want. I realised immediately that this was the start of the deterioration of standards and I feared for the worst. Today speaking to teachers I realise that the “worst” is now here. Classrooms are a disorganised rabble, and children are running amok. One teacher I spoke to said they are not even allowed to tell pupils to “shut up”. In all walks of life, I came to realise a very long time ago that there is nothing that government does that cannot be done better and cheaper by private individuals. Private school costs money some will say, yes but we are all paying for the state schools as well. When we get everything from government we pay a heavy price but not just financially. But also in the quality of the service.
Other people spending
Other people’s money on what
Other people tell them are
Other people’s problems.
Recipe for disaster.
And Rachel Reeves says public spending went down under the so-called “Conservative” government, when in reality the opposite happened and she knows it. She is an utterly awful piece of work.
In all walks of life, I came to realise a very long time ago that there is nothing that government does that cannot be done better and cheaper by private individuals.
This must be the reason why we’re all paying record-level prices on utilities and transport. It’s all so much better and cheaper when vulture capitalists are extracting shitloads of money from captive customers to ensure their ROI targets are being met.
Off-T
Some good news – a court in the Philippines has banned the planting of Golden Rice, a seriously dangerous GM crop which far from improving health is likely to be a killer.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/25/greenpeace-blocks-planting-of-lifesaving-golden-rice-philippines
Thousands will die from vitamin A deficiency as a result. You think that’s good news?
“Thousands will live from Glyphosate deficiency as a result. You think that’s good news?”
There. Corrected for you.
Keir Starmer was the recipient of a free education at an elite school. Many others have also benefitted from the VAT free charity status of schools. Now, no child will be like Starmer and all children will suffer.
Think about it: most state classrooms are already overcrowded and now they will have tens of thousands more pupils to accommodate.
Many of the schools will close forever so what happens to the tax take? Firstly, this act of child brutality will raise next to no money. Secondly, and more importantly, the economy will, forever more, be damaged by the lack of opportunity for children like Starmer. In a state school would he have reached the depths he has and been knighted? Not a chance.
As Peter Hitchens points out, “free of charge” state schools can be very hard to get into if they are considered “good” – they tend to be in already expensive areas and those areas get more expensive because of the school.
TY’s former alma mater is an example (albeit having known people with kids there more recently I don’t rate it- best results in the borough but a
lot of the kids are rich and getting tutored privately).
Off-T
Another one.
https://www.sciencealert.com/microplastics-found-in-blood-clots-in-heart-brain-and-legs
More cover being found for the clot shots.
Yet, the real problem isn’t restricting the avenues rich people can take to ensure their children remain rich, it is opening up more avenues for poor people to become less poor. After four years of obvious elitist tyranny, what seems crystal clear to me is that expanding the division between rich and poor is instrumental to their agenda. The real divider is not gender or race, it is class. It is class that generates the financial wealth that creates not only a contrast of wealth, hence, lifestyles, but also a contrast of opinion and values. Ultimately, what is created from superior wealth is the false sense of superior opinion. The problem, therefore, is not reducing opportunity to the already privileged, it is increasing opportunity to the impoverished. Labour (now the party for pretentious latte-swigging, middle-want-to-be-upper-class, woke, EU-loving, Guardian-reading morons) will never do anything meaningful to address this division because, of course, the entire political system now exists to maintain and grow the division of wealth and class and keep it safely within the hands of elites. By doing so it becomes easier and easier to control, both physically and psychologically, the proles. And their justification for control of the inferior is, paradoxically, moral superiority. None of the outcomes that make the rich richer and the poor poorer (e.g. the supposed pandemic, the gradual expansion of the welfare state, the climate nonsense etc) are a coincidence. They are a required outcome.
Whatever you think about Labour’s VAT plan, that Telegraph story was utter nonsense.
The key paragraph is:
“The school has suffered from dwindling pupil numbers in recent years, but the likelihood of a Sir Keir victory in the general election is said to have exacerbated the issue, with parents describing it as the “final nail in the coffin”.”
In other words, this particular school has been heading for closure for a long time, but some random Tory-voting parents have been found by the Torygraph to blame it on Labour’s plans.
Note that odd phrase “a Sir Keir victory”. Most people would have said “a Labour victory”, but of course Tory campaign strategy is to make it a pseudo-Presidential contest between Rishi and Keir.
The decline has been “in recent years”, as the article says. So they might equally have said that the school is a victim of economic failure under 14 years of Conservative rule.
The problem is clearly the fees are too low @£17,000 pa. That is what I was paying 15 years ago.
Knee-jerk politics of envy.
A guaranteed way of increasing the state education bill and removing lifelines for pupils with problems.
Yes, gifted children for decades have suffered in the state education system.
Our brightest and best had one lifeline – private schools – if their parents could afford it.
Well done Labour.
They scare the shit out of me.
And Fuehrer Wes Streeting more than most.
The National Socialists are well and truly in the hen-house.
If you go to his website you will see he tries to persuade you he worked his way through university and that he had a real job before politics.
“I funded myself through college and university with retail jobs and I spent my professional career working outside politics in the voluntary sector.”
The truth however is different – how could you ever have guessed.
His ‘real‘ job in the ‘voluntary sector‘ was with Stonewall. Yes really. That was not a real job. Before that he was NUS president – another not real job.
And Cambridge University deters its students from working their way through their degrees – and Wes provides no details of where he supposedly worked.
I don’t believe him.
I asked Keir Stammer and each one of all Labour’s shadow education frontbench what is Labour’s policy on the role of the independent sector in the UK’s education system.
That was months ago and still no answer – because Labour does not have a policy.
It proves Labour is irresponsible at the highest levels and not fit for government.
And that the VAT raid is pure knee-jerk politics of envy.
They have no clue about why the independent sector is so important as a lifeline for so many gifted children let down by the State sector.
Hard pressed parents scrape the money together to meet the fees whilst at the same time being taxed as if their children were in the State sector.
And it shows how Labour is only interested in equality and fairness for LGBTQ+++++ and not for the majority.
Parents who send their children to private schools should get tax relief on the fees to account for the fact their children are not in the State sector.
I suppose even though the tax raid is not officially in effect yet, it might as well be since if labour victory is a foregone conclusion and Keir has vowed to embark on this ruinous course of action, the schools have to look ahead to the September intake and increase the fees that they quote for prospective students.
Yet another reason to vote for ANYTHING other than Labour (one amongst many). They are so myopically focused on the so-called virtue of equality, that they make things worse for everybody. Tax the private school sector such that only the elite can afford it and you simply increase the burden on state schools and the taxpayer
What’s next, tax private hospitals and increase the NHS waiting lists?
This enrages me.
Labour has long had private education in its sights. It is better that all fail than some succeed = equality.
Go offshore. Ships maybe, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar.
Time for some innovative thinking.
The people in power have only one reason to live: to stay in power over the people that elected them. And the electorate is too stupid to know any better.
And here across the pond…..
https://www.wnd.com/2024/05/watch-public-schools-closing-school-choice-takes-off