David Simmonds

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. After 20 years’ experience in local authorities on education and children’s services and as a father of young children, I have had the opportunity to see the best in both the private and state sectors. I declare an interest as someone who will be impacted by the policy. I agree with everything that has been said about the educational impact, so I will focus my remarks on the financial angle of the Government’s proposals. Representing a constituency with six mainstream independent schools and numerous small SEND providers, I can clearly see that there is a huge amount of anxiety among mums and dads and school teachers about the impact the policy will have. The first key factor is that where private schools are full, the state schools are usually also full. Parents are finding that if they need to move, there is simply not the capacity in the state system locally because of the demographics of pupils. We have to ask ourselves: does the harm done by this policy produce a benefit in the state sector that would justify it to our constituents? The Government’s proposal amounts to less than half of the cost of a single classroom teacher per state school across the whole of England—not even sufficient to make up for the numbers of children displaced by the impact of this policy. So it is no great financial gain for state schools that may be feeling pressed—and, as has been said, it makes us the only country in the developed world to tax schooling. More concerning, however, are two impacts. The first is the reclaimability of VAT that bringing schools within scope entails. It is likely that the Government will have to repay far more VAT to independent schools than they will raise by this policy. Secondly there is the impact of business rates; we have not spent a lot of time on them in this debate, but, at a time when we know that the average state school in England has a surplus balance of more than £162,000, we have to ask whether, given the harm it does to the sustainability of our private sector, this policy is possibly justified at a time of declining state school roll numbers.