Councils have to subsidise private schools to the tune of £144 million per year because of their charitable status, new research finds

26 comments

  1. Private schools in England and Wales receive public subsidy through local taxation relief, having to pay only 20 percent of their tax assessments as a result of relief on business rates. State schools, meanwhile, must pay the full rate.

  2. I worked in one in oxford. Charging students £10 per meal and £15,000 per year for their IB course.

    And it was a charity.

    Oh and they were pretty racist in terms of who they wanted as students.

  4. What a terribly written article.

    Alternative headline:

    “Charities don’t have to pay full business rates”

    There’s so much spin in this article that if we linked it up to a generator we could solve the energy crisis.

  5. >The shocking figures come as Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, earlier this week repeated his pledge to scrap private schools’ charitable status if the party comes to power. 72 percent of schools affiliated with the Independent Schools Council have the status of a charity. In England and Wales they are obliged to pay only 20 percent of their tax assessments.

    Nice one, Keir.

  6. Councils fund state schools in their areas. If the pupils at private schools all left, the councils would have to find their education.

  8. Yes but this should also be offset by the amount public schools save the state and the tax payer by educating children through private funding, as councils are also funded by tax. According to Google, approx. 615,000 children are privately educated as year, making up some 7 per cent of all British children and 18 per cent of pupils over the age of 16.

    £144,000,000 / 615,000 Children = £234.15. I am guessing it costs a lot more than £234.15 to educate a child for a year. So the state makes a net saving due to private individuals meeting the costs of the children’s education rather than the tax payer. The money used to pay school fees is also after tax, public school fees are not tax deductible, and so the state still gets a taste on that as well.

    You might not like public schools, but accusing them of being a burden on the tax payer is somewhat unfair.

  9. State schools pay full business rates to the local authority, the local authority that runs the state school and pays the rates bill.

    Isn’t that money going in a circle, so the local authority gets nothing from state schools (they just get back what they paid), but they at least get 20% from private school and they don’t have to pay to educate those children.

  11. Let’s put this into some kind of context.

    Those schools HAVE to use their charitable status to provide bursaries to help the children who apply to said schools and can’t afford the fees.

    I am sorry to disappoint but Its not a one way street.

    My daughter went to one said school & we received a 60% scholarship, now we are a very ordinary family (I worked in a farm office, hub was a fireman) and due to the bloody awful drop in Scottish schooling standards I dug into it.

    My two eldest girls went to the local school all the way through and have great careers but when I saw what my youngest was being taught (or not being taught) throughout her primary schooling it was just unbelievable.

    So against the grain on this sub but would I change it if I could go back.

    Not in her lifetime.

    The standard of education was waaaay above what Nicola approved & she is on her way to having a doctorate in renewable energy.

    If you have a child that could excel in a place where they will encourage and develop said child, look into it.

    I fully expect to be downvoted to hell for this but those schools know how to educate and they have to provide places for those that can’t afford them but their children would truly benefit from being educated in a place that appreciates education.

  16. What shitty misleading article. A subsidy isn’t the same as tax relief. Councils aren’t being forced to give money to private schools. It’s biased and disingenuous and it doesn’t help start an honest debate.

  17. Last year there were 544,316 children at private schools. Average state school cost per pupil is about 5-6k to the tax payer. So if all those kids were at state school it would cost £2.9 billion

  21. As someone who went to a low-tier private school in the 90s, I hated the place. Academically indifferent, incurious, more bothered about cricket then computer science. The ONLY reason it was worth the fees is you make a network of friends so that you can maintain the shitty status quo in your medium sized city. They sell each other property, give each other jobs, a heads up if there’s a round of inspections coming etc etc. Its was basically a VIP resort for society, complete with total lack of culture, taste and interest in books.

  24. Gotta love the way language gets distorted in these things. They aren’t being subsidised, that would involve the state giving them money. Actually they are simply not paying commercial rates of tax, because they are a non-profit and thus have the same rules as every other non-profit. Additionally they actually save the council money because they don’t cover the cost of all the school places they are providing which they would otherwise need to do.

  25. Everyone is imagining Eton when complaining about this but seems to forget the same charitable status applies to Universities, Nurseries, Community Colleges and many specialised schools for those with special needs. It isnt just a few wealthy people benifitting, there is a widespread system designed to make education cheaper.

    Not to mention that the requirement for getting that charitable status is a certain level of commitment to Bursaries, Scholarships and public benifit. If you scrap their charitable status you don’t suddenly fix the education system inequalities; Private Schools will continue to exist, the rich will still be able to afford them, they will just stop giving out bursaries.

  26. OP and “leftfootfoward” need to look past ideology and open a dictionary to learn what “subsidise” means.

    How does crap like this is to the front page?

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