That this House takes note of the contribution of independent schools, and any potential effects that changes to the VAT exemption for independent school fees could have.
My Lords, I sought this debate because our country’s independent schools—of which there are some 2,500 in total—face an imminent and dramatic change in their circumstances, which will have serious and far-reaching consequences. The Government are to put VAT on their fees in fulfilment of a pledge given in Labour’s recent election manifesto. This education tax, the first to be introduced in Britain—and, apart from a disastrous recent experiment in Greece, the first in Europe—is being imposed on schools with extraordinary haste.
At the very end of July, the Government announced, wholly unexpectedly, that their education tax would come into effect at the very beginning of next year. Now, 1 January 2025 is just under four months away. Schools and parents have made their plans for the academic year that is now beginning. How on earth do the Government imagine that these plans can be swiftly and easily rearranged? It is of course impossible, and it is quite wrong that schools and parents should have been plunged into such difficulties. Acute concern has naturally arisen. Many parents are deeply worried. Many schools, particularly those of small size which account for the overwhelming majority in the independent sector, face an uncertain future.
I stress one point above all: the effect that the rapid introduction of the tax will have on thousands of children, their well-being and their life chances. They should surely be at the forefront of our minds and, indeed, our hearts during this debate. The number of Peers taking part in it testifies to the strength of concern that exists across the House.
I declare my interests as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies. I naturally judge the issues which arise in this debate from their perspective, to which I will return.
Words matter. Labour’s leaders have become fond of saying that they will recruit 6,500 more teachers for state schools
“by ending tax breaks for private schools”.
This clearly implies that independent schools now enjoy some kind of special exemption from tax that they do not deserve. The truth is that all those who provide educational services have always been exempted from VAT, as they should be. That exemption is now to be removed from independent schools, and from independent schools alone, at least for the time being. The current tax regime has helped independent schools to thrive, a state of affairs that the Prime Minister has said enjoys his full approval. Last September he told Jewish News:
“We have got fantastic independent schools, I want them to thrive”.
With this VAT proposal, he is perhaps going a strange way about helping schools to fulfil his ambition for them.
My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register. I have been lucky enough to play a role in the governance of both state and independent schools. From 2016 until recently, I was chair of Young Epilepsy, which, among many other things, runs a wonderful special independent school in Surrey, called St Piers, for both day and boarding pupils. I am currently a board member of the Lift Schools multi-academy trust—formerly AET—which runs 57 state schools across the country. So noble Lords might think I would find myself somewhat torn when considering the arguments for and against charging independent schools VAT and spending the money generated by so doing on state schools—but I am not.
At Lift Schools, I can see at first hand just how vital that extra injection of money is. In the words of our inspirational chief executive:
“We simply don’t have enough teachers in our schools. This is down to absolute numbers, but it is also down to the fact that the role of a teacher has been stretched beyond anything imaginable 10 years ago. No longer simply an educator, they are social worker, mental health first aider, a parent for some. One of the casualties of this raid on discretionary effort is the wider enrichment that is the norm in independent schools and should be for state schools too—the music, sports, art, drama, debating, foreign trips and field trips”.
As for St Piers and all those other independent schools meeting the needs of children with education, health and care plans, the Government have made crystal clear that fees for these children will be exempt from VAT.
The independent schools that will have to pay VAT are not special schools like St Piers but the ones whose parents choose to pay for their children to have a more well-funded education than the state can afford to provide. I do not criticise parents who wish that the fees they pay to private schools were not going to rise further as a result of the ending of the VAT exemption—of course I do not. But, if we look at the issue in the round from the perspective of the nation’s children as a whole, rather than from only the one in 15 who attend private schools, what do we learn?
My Lords, this is a debate that I never thought I would be taking part in, the tone of which we should note. We on these Benches do not like what is going on here in education. Different bits of the education sector are being taxed differently. With special educational needs, you can claim some of the money back. Well, that is always going to run smoothly; there will never be a cashflow problem and nobody will ever get it wrong. Also, it is dependent on that wonderful thing, an education and healthcare plan.
If there is a more unloved bit of the education sector than the education and healthcare plan, I have not seen it. It takes about two years to get—if you have the right lawyer and the right type of parents, who fight for it. Schools are blocking it because they do not want it to go through. The weirdest thing about it is that we have broken the £100 million barrier of public money going into resisting it and going to tribunals. Some 90% plus of the tribunals are granted—it is almost a rite of passage.
If the Government had said that they would help the private sector in dealing with special educational needs, having dealt with this first, they would be getting a much more favourable hearing from me. It is an absurdity to base an exemption on something that favours—guess who?—the educated, wealthy parents who can afford the legal fees to get through. There is something fundamentally wrong here.
I am in favour of making sure that we get better provision in state schools to address special educational needs. However, the whole system has gone wrong. If it is based around this, I cannot see how it is going to happen. Let us remember that private education has been looking after X amount of those with SEN for more than half a century; it is a very established pattern.
Also, the schools doing this have a percentage of pupils who do not have the plan, often because their parents are not prepared to put themselves or their children through the delays and the process of getting that plan. They are creating a critical mass for the economic reality of that school. If we lose these, or a percentage of these, what happens to those schools?
My Lords, in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, to her new responsibilities, I also say at the outset that I am grateful to her for promising to respond, when she replies, to some detailed questions I have sent to her. I also thank the admirable noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for the customarily powerful and eloquent way in which he introduced today’s important debate. I agree with everything that he has said today.
For family reasons my Cross-Bench colleague and noble friend Lord Pannick is unable to be here today. He has looked at this education tax and its potential conflict with the European Convention on Human Rights. He tells me that it
“is strongly arguable that the imposition of VAT would breach Article 2 of the First Protocol read on its own (access to educational facilities) or with Article 14 of the Convention (arbitrary discrimination in the enjoyment of educational facilities)”.
I serve on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, whose mandate is to monitor potential conflict between government policies and the ECHR. My noble friend Lord Pannick says that
“it would be a very valuable service if the Joint Committee could look at this”.
I agree, and I hope that the Minister will assure us that the Government will not proceed if this is found to be in breach of the ECHR.
We need also to scrutinise some of the other claims that have been made, such as the impact on public finance. The Adam Smith Institute calculates that, far from generating revenue, the policy could lead to a staggering loss of up to £2 billion. The Minister has seen that assessment and the work of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, along with a Times editorial, which all question the Government’s assumptions about raising revenue. Let us also look at what happened in 2015 in Greece when a similar tax was introduced. Some schools were forced to close, while others inevitably passed on the tax to parents. The same thing is already happening here.
My Lords, the Government’s intention to levy value added tax in this area was a manifesto commitment at the general election. The Government entertain a well-evidenced belief that parents purchase an economic and social benefit for their children’s future through private schooling. Whatever the experience any of your Lordships have had of such schooling, the undoubted premium placed on forming character or the excellence in pastoral care that some of these schools exhibit, the Government nevertheless have a mandate for change. The noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey, underlined the pressing need for more teachers in our state schools.
However, who will and who will not be affected by this change is a worthy subject of debate. I am happy to say that both the boys’ and girls’ choirs at Southwark Cathedral are almost entirely drawn from state schools, and are consequently unaffected by the VAT change. Furthermore, a number of schools in my diocese offering provision for special educational needs and disabilities have their places funded by the local authorities. But there are cathedral and choir schools, and private schools, with provision for special educational needs that will be severely affected by the change that the Government intend. Many of these are small schools, and therefore the impact will be disproportionately severe.
The briefing provided by the House of Lords Library refers to some 20% of pupils in this sector receiving provision for SEND, which is of undoubted public benefit, but of these, only 6.9% have an education, health and care plan. This suggests that there is a significant element of special needs provision that is currently covered by private funding, and which cannot be absorbed by local education authority budgets if private places become unaffordable. Furthermore, if some small and medium-sized schools that provide SEND then become unviable, the general SEND capacity in the country, already overstretched, becomes yet smaller. A question, therefore, needs to be asked—and I ask it of the Minister—as to the appropriateness of removing the exemption at such short notice in January 2025, as other noble Peers have already said, with little time to adjust budgets.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for introducing this debate. No one doubts the strength of his feeling on the issue. I suspect that much of his speech overrated the problems that the private sector will face, and my view is that it will survive, but he quite rightly raised a number of practical issues towards the end of his speech which I am sure my noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern will address in her reply. I take the opportunity to welcome her to her place.
I speak as a parent but also as someone who had experience running a public education service, and that drives my view of the necessity for this measure. Of course, the actual discussion will take place when we get the finance Bill, when we will doubtless have this debate again, but it is entirely appropriate that we should discuss it now.
I want to stress that VAT is a tax—no surprise there, but there is a big debate within the public expenditure discussions about the appropriate balance between income taxes and expenditure taxes. There are those who believe that there should be a greater reliance on expenditure taxes. That is an issue, but it means that they are both providing the same function; they are both providing public revenue to provide public services. It is worth stressing that taxes are paid not as a fee for a service but as an individual commitment to society as a whole. It is no more reasonable for those who choose to spend their money on sending their children to private school to have a VAT rebate than for people to expect to get an income tax rebate.
The basic fact about this proposal is that it was in the manifesto. It was not hidden or avoided during the election campaign, and this party was elected with a commitment to implement it. Practical issues were raised, and I hope my noble friend will address them.
I have taken the opportunity to read all the submissions that were sent to me. There was a large number and I cannot claim to have read every last one or through each one entirely—there was a certain amount of copying and pasting—but I got a sense of the expressions of concern that were being made, almost entirely by parents. The issues on which I hope my noble friend will be able to provide some comfort are, first of all, children with special needs and, possibly to a lesser extent, military families.
My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Lexden for his determination to enable us to debate this issue.
The draft Bill which has been published is, to me, a blunt instrument. It treats the sector as a homogenous whole, so causing unintended consequences that implementing the policy in the middle of the school year will not enable us to unravel, let alone resolve. Time is of the essence, not least the limited time that we have to speak today, so I would like to request that the Minister convenes a round table to explore with interested parties the unintended consequences of the current draft legislation in greater depth.
I declare my interest as a former pupil of a specialist vocational performing arts school. I also have a child at a fee-paying independent day school in Scotland and a sister who is a teacher at another.
In the King’s Speech debate, I highlighted my worries about the impact on SEND children. Others have expanded on this, and I support them wholeheartedly. The Local Government Association has called for SEND provision to be reformed; I trust that we can explore this on another day with a little more time.
The first sentence of the Treasury’s technical note published in July states:
“The government is committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity”.
For our performing arts sector, and the schools which provide highly specialist training in music and dance, even the prospect of a VAT levy has created a barrier to opportunities. The schools that deliver training for the Music and Dance Scheme are currently able to offer places on assessment of talent, not ability to pay. This will not be the case if MDS schools have to levy VAT on any part of their fees. I urge the Government to work with the heads of MDS schools to explore the case for their exemption.
My Lords, I declare that I am an associate of the Girls’ Day School Trust. I am grateful for the many sacrifices my parents made to allow me to go to Wimbledon High School after I failed my 11-plus pretty badly. I have been the governor of Howell’s School in Llandaff, a Girls’ Day School Trust school.
We should not be pitching one sector against another, but we must realistically acknowledge the unintended consequences of the VAT proposals and the speed with which they are being introduced. Howell’s School, whose pupils come from all walks of life, estimates that 11% of families will no longer be able to afford the fees, causing disruption and distress to those forced to leave a school community where they are happy and established. Howell’s will no longer be able to provide bursaries that have tided children over when disaster struck, such as three siblings I knew well, who were suddenly left orphaned and completely destitute. Continuity of education at the school and care allowed them to achieve, against all odds.
When Ukrainian refugees arrived in Cardiff, the school welcomed eight students aged three to 17 into its community. Some spoke no English; many had experienced significant emotional trauma from leaving behind homes, friends, fathers, brothers and grandparents. All had individualised timetables with extra classroom support and access to a school counsellor.
English lessons were extended to the students’ accompanying mothers and grandmothers, who connected on cultural visits locally as they gradually integrated into the community. The school has, to date, waived £377,000 in fees and incurred an additional £57,000 in expenses to support these girls—and that support is ongoing. Only this week I had a letter from a disabled school leaver, who, with that school’s support, has achieved university entrance to study law. I really doubt that she would have done it without being at the school.
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No one, I think, doubts the excellence that abides in our independent education sector. It contains some of the best schools in the world. The majority of their pupils find places at leading universities. They go out into the world well prepared for their careers in a meritocratic, multiracial society. They look to the future, not to a vanished class-ridden past, as is so often asserted by those blinded by prejudice against them. Four out of 10 places in the schools represented by the Independent Schools Council are filled by the children of ethnic-minority families. The Jewish and Muslim faiths are among those who run schools within the council’s ambit. More than 2,000 youngsters from Ukraine have been given places at member schools, and for the most part their families remain in their war-torn homeland. These are among the many valuable and socially beneficial features of life in our country’s independent schools today.
Nor should it be forgotten that independent schools make a significant economic contribution to our country. Research by Oxford Economics in 2022 showed that they add £16.5 billion to the UK economy, sustain 328,000 jobs, provide in one way or another £5.1 billion in tax, and save the education budget £4.4 billion by educating pupils who would otherwise be a cost to the state, a saving that must now be expected to shrink as pupils are forced out of independent schools by the imposition of VAT.
I referred at the outset to the two linked organisations with which I am connected: the Independent Schools Council and the Independent Schools Association. The council represents some 1,400 schools, where around 80% of the half a million pupils in the independent sector are educated—the children at the heart of this debate. The Independent Schools Association has some 670 of those schools, a big slice of the total, in its membership. It is among them that many of the small schools, so prevalent in the independent sector today, are to be found. Some flourish with no more than 200 pupils, others with far fewer. They include performing arts schools, bilingual schools and many special needs schools. They cater for the children of hard-working, local parents who have struggled to have their needs met in the state sector. Many are virtually unknown outside of their local communities, where they are highly respected. The important point is this: the 670 members of the association are far more representative of the true state of the independent sector than the comparatively small number of large, well-known schools—Eton, Harrow and the rest—which exert so much fascination over the media. Those schools are the exception, not the rule; they constitute no more than 10% of the total.
What all the diverse members of the Independent Schools Council have in common is a commitment to high standards for the sake of their children’s future and to working in partnership with colleagues the state sector in a whole host of different ways—from academic teaching, orchestral concerts, drama and sport. There are now well over 9,000 flourishing partnership projects. These typically involve several different strands of activity in and out the of classroom, in which state and independent schools work together for their mutual benefit—I stress mutual benefit. Full details can be found on the Schools Together website.
Meanwhile, independent schools have been widening their intake through fee reductions. In the last year, schools provided a total of £1.1 billion, much of it in the form of means-tested bursaries. How I wish it had been possible to induce our Governments over the years to back an ambitious wider access scheme, with places being made available at all levels of ability, co-funded by the Government, local councils, schools and benefactors. Winston Churchill sometimes spoke privately during the Second World War of constructing a great scheme of educational co-operation. How Churchill would have jeered at Labour’s attempts to depict our independent schools today as the exclusive preserve of the super-rich, in defiance of the facts that I have set out.
Most independent school parents are not rich, let alone super-rich. Labour blithely says that schools will not need to pass VAT on to parents but can absorb it all themselves. They cannot; only a handful have the endowments or reserves that would enable them to pay it themselves. Today, many parents up and down our country are looking at their family budgets and concluding that they will not be able to pay the higher fees that the Government will create for them. They will, with the heaviest of hearts, have to seek places in state schools.
Here is one example of what then will be the inevitable consequence. The head of a small school in Derbyshire with 80 pupils has written to tell me:
“it is clear from conversations I have had with parents that a significant proportion of our families will simply be unable to afford the increase. We could easily lose 17 pupils. This will have a devastating impact upon school income and will close us”.
Labour seems to think that school closures need cause no great concern. It says that over 1,000 independent schools closed during the 14 years from 2010. But some were mergers rather than closures and others were very small schools. Less than half were mainstream schools; schools delivering specialist provision are always prone to fluctuations, and Covid took its toll. There is also a world of difference between sudden state-driven closures and the closing down of schools for reasons of their own, with new ones opening probably in the vicinity. Who will want to open new independent schools today?
The prospect of losing smaller independent schools is simply appalling. So much invaluable support is provided in them for a huge variety of special needs. Many parents have since the election been making clear their heartbreak at the thought of being unable to afford any longer the place where their child with a special need has been wonderfully cared for. The Government-created fee rise will affect more than 90,000 families with special needs. Only children with hard-to-come-by education, health and care plans will be exempt from it.
A special needs co-ordinator who has worked in a state school for nearly 40 years writes:
“many private schools have been formed to cater specifically for special needs. They provide centres of excellence, often where there is a deficit regionally. Why risk losing them?”
Why indeed?
The government-created fee rise will make small community faith schools unaffordable for many Jewish and Muslim families. At present, some 370,000 children attend independent faith schools in England.
The prospect of this fee rise is a source of the greatest worry to our service families, who place our society so greatly in their debt. Some long-serving men and women in our Armed Forces fear that they will have to leave jobs they love. The 4,700 children for whom the continuity of education allowance is being provided must not be made subject to VAT.
It is very far from certain that, by slapping VAT on school fees, the Government will get anywhere near the £1.5 billion they seek to create new teachers for state schools. The additional resources that state schools will need to teach more pupils could absorb much of the revenue gained from the VAT charge, and perhaps even exceed it. Estimates of the number of children who will have to leave independent schools vary. The Government have not undertaken any assessment whatever. They are rushing ahead, without even waiting for the conclusions of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which they have pledged to respect.
I invite support for the following propositions. All children with SEND should be exempt from the VAT charge. It should not be applied to service families receiving the continuity of education allowance. Steps should be taken to protect small faith schools. Above all, VAT should not begin to apply before the start of the 2025-26 academic year. The date now proposed—1 January 2025—has been widely and rightly described as cruel. A full independent assessment of the implications of our first-ever education tax should be carried out before it is introduced.
Is it not our duty to do all we can to protect the interests of all children everywhere? One mother writes to me that
“my child sat and watched an interview with Rachel Reeves, in which she stated that she is concerned with the 93 per cent of children in state schools and not the 7 per cent in independent schools. My child turned and asked why the lady doesn’t care about me”.
Is that not a truly heart-rending comment? I beg to move.
We learn from the unimpeachable source of the impartial Institute for Fiscal Studies that the 14 in 15 who go to state school are falling further and further behind, compared with one in 15 at private schools, with their enviable resources. Private schools, the IFS tells us, spent 40% more on their pupils’ education than state schools were funded to do back in 2010—a pretty big gap, I am sure we can all agree. But now the gap is an incredible 90%; it has more than doubled since my party was last in power. In that situation can we really justify a continued 20% tax break for private schools? I think not. Why has the gap got so much bigger? Partly, of course, it is because the previous Government cut state school funding per pupil in the age of austerity, and their more recent increases only brought schools back to where they started in 2010. But it is mainly because private schools have increased their fees, which are 24% higher in real terms than in 2010. By the way, those arguing that charging VAT will mean pupils switching from private to state seem to forget that the 24% increase in fees has led to no reduction whatever in the proportion of pupils going to private schools, which is still steady at one in 15, just as it was in 2010.
But it is not really about the numbers, of course—it is about the children. Let me end by telling noble Lords about my daughter’s first day at her local comprehensive secondary school, and in particular about the instruction she and all new pupils were given that day: no running in the playground at lunchtimes. Why not? Because it was so crowded that they might hurt themselves bumping into each other. Why was it so crowded? Because this hard-pressed state school, desperate for extra cash, had sold part of its land to the adjoining private school. My daughter pressed her face up to the wire fence, gazing at the endless fields stretched out in front of her for the benefit of the one in 15, and thought that that was not fair. She was right: it was not, and it still is not, so let us do something about it.
I hope that the Government have, at some point, done an analysis of how many pupils they can lose from this sector. The Government have recognised that it is important, so I hope they have. For pupils who do not have a plan for leaving the sector or going back into a state school, it would help to know the economic benefit. I do not know what it is—is it positive or negative? It would help if we could find out.
This contribution from the independent sector is clearly necessary at the moment. I hope the Government will tell us what they are going to do that will mean it is not necessary. Can they please tell us how they will do this, and when it will arrive? I do not like the idea of people having to go to independent schools to get the education they need but, at the moment, it is clear that they do. Will the Government address this problem in the round, and will they tell us when they are going to get rid of the plan?
Driven by dogma, it is easy to say that this is all justified as a long-overdue attack on the ultra-rich. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, reminded us at the outset of the debate, this regressive double tax on people who have already paid for universal education through their income tax will not impact wealthy families who pay for education, often, through property purchases in sought-after school districts, merely increasing educational inequalities. This education tax will disproportionately impact middle-income families, such as those of the 168,000 children who receive financial support from independent schools or the 10,000 who pay no fees. These are the families who will suffer, many of whom have made great sacrifices for their children’s education, not those with ultra-deep pockets.
Those affected will include men and women in our Armed Forces—families who make use of the Continuity of Education Allowance. Some say that they are having to consider exiting military service as a consequence. How does the Minister respond to their appeals, and to professionals, including those working in education, policing and healthcare, who rely on the wraparound care provided by many independent schools; or to the single mother whose letter I sent to the Minister, and for whom independent schooling is the only way she can maintain her employment?
As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, reminded us, what about the impact on children with special needs or mental illness? The noble Lord gave a figure which I had not heard before that as many as 90,000 people will be affected by this. They will have chosen an independent school because of its particular expertise or focus on those children.
Finally, introducing this tax midway through the school year, on accelerated timeframes, will adversely affect children, who may struggle to integrate into new schools, with some forced to change curriculum, exam boards or subjects. Top of our concern, and at the heart of this policy, must be the impact on children. It clearly is not. This taxation is punitive, unjust and unfair, may be in breach of the ECHR, and will worsen educational inequalities. For all those reasons, I hope the Government will think again.
Finally, there is the distinctive yet gloriously diverse world of cathedral and choir schools, which continue to safeguard and feed the English choral tradition. They are intimately bound up with their localities, drawing choristers from a wide social background, and have a very significant impact on the choral and musical life of this nation. I will cite some detail from one of them: a 100% bursary fee remission for local children who are very talented musically but whose parents cannot afford any fees, with numerous other pupils who are in receipt of 75% or more remission—the focus now being on remitting fees, rather than on awarding scholarships, to increase social inclusion.
I am a grammar school boy and I could not sing the “Eton Boating Song” if you paid me, yet I am deeply concerned about the adverse and unintended consequences which this manifesto commitment will have unless it is applied with much greater sensitivity—and possibly also phased in—affecting, as this does, the enormous variety of private school provision, about which we have heard and which is committed to public benefit.
I want to conclude with a point that makes me angry—so far none of the speakers against this proposal has made the fatal mistake of making this point—and that is the idea that parents who choose to send their children to private school care more about their children than those of us who choose to send our children to state schools. The last Prime Minister made that classic mistake, in answer to Questions in the House of Commons, so noble Lords should not dismiss it. I hope no speaker in this debate will give that idea a scintilla of justification.
Question 5 of the current Treasury consultation asks:
“Does this approach achieve the intended policy aims across all four UK nations?”
I argue that it does not. The education landscape in Scotland is different. We have no academy schools. We have a different curriculum, which in some schools can force children to limit their choices to six subjects at age 14. Thanks to devolution, unlike in England, the Government cannot control how any money raised would be spent in Scotland. That would be a decision for the Scottish Government. There is no guarantee that it would be spent on education. Given the current state of the Scottish Government’s finances, it is likely to be repurposed, like many other programmes, such as the provision of digital devices to pupils. In Scotland, independent schools have been subject to more scrutiny by the Scottish Charity Regulator than any other part of the sector, with regular reviews to ensure that they meet the “charity test”, a process which does not happen south of the border.
The Government’s policy on VAT was announced in the middle of the Scottish school holidays. The allocation of places happens in April each year, but with one in three secondary schools operating at over 90% capacity, there is no space in the Scottish state sector to accommodate even a small proportion of the pupils who may need to move. Schools and families have not had time to prepare. With the changes being introduced midway through the academic year, the disruption for all will be significant. Already, two independent schools in Scotland have closed. I urge the Government to pause the implementation of this policy until the beginning of the 2025 school year and to use that time to explore with us the many complex issues raised today.
Around 10 % of the school’s applications for places come from children who have struggled in a maintained school because of bullying, anxiety and other mental health problems, a lack of support with additional learning needs, or other reasons. This is similar to figures from across the UK. Parents and grandparents desperate to keep their child going to school do without for the child to have a tailored approach to academic and well-being support, a reduced timetable, and a calm, quiet space of safety.
The fee-paying schools in Wales are integral to their local communities. They are smaller on average than those in England, and they estimate that between 10 % and 36% of pupils will have to move to state schools, suddenly putting pressure on the state sector, with between 3,700 and over 6,500 extra children, and requiring £35 million in pupil funding. Education is fully devolved, but VAT receipts are paid directly to the Treasury. Can the Minister clarify whether the whole of the predicted £1.7 billion revenue has already been allocated for England’s use, or whether it covers England and Wales, and other devolved nations? Can she confirm that funds needed to meet Welsh schools’ needs will come from the additional revenue raised and will include the Barnett uplifts?
I wonder whether the Minister will accept the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, as outlined by my noble friend Lord Alton, to refer this to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, particularly in relation to devolved nations.