This week, Kate Bailey’s* eldest child will, like thousands of other children across the country, start at a new school. It is not, however, the school his parents had originally planned for him.
The 13-year-old had been due to start Year 9 at Pangbourne College, an independent co-ed in Berkshire, where fees are £9,900 per term for the senior school. But when the new Labour government announced on 29 July that VAT on private school fees would come into effect from January, Kate and her husband realised that, with three other children at private prep school, despite having paid a term’s fees in advance, they wouldn’t be able to afford it.
“I emailed the one state school we liked best that evening,” she says. “They had one place left and I have to say, they were amazing. They processed the whole thing immediately and my son was in.”
She is, she says, “reasonably happy” with the choice of school, although her son will be joining a year group that’s been together for two years already. “Luckily, he’s the most laid back of all my children and thinks it sounds great – no Saturday school and he finishes at 3pm and not 5.45 like his prep school did,” she laughs ruefully.
Kate recognises he won’t have many of the extra-curricular activities he loves – his new school does not, for example, teach the bassoon, the instrument he learns.
To ensure he doesn’t feel left out, she plans to pay for extra tuition, music lessons and sports. She is still smarting from losing a term’s school fees, given that when she and her husband signed the terms and conditions, “they hadn’t even called a general election at that point, so we thought if we had until September [2025].”
With the deadline for state school applications – 31 October for secondary and 15 January for primary – long gone, local authority and school offices shut for the summer holidays, schools as well as parents across the country have been caught on the hop.
“There’s a lot of upset, especially from people who’ve already paid for the September term and don’t want to lose a term’s fees,” says Dean Piper of the parental lobby group Education Not Taxation. “There is pressure on parents to act quickly and local authority and school admission processes aren’t set up to support it.”
The parents he is largely referring to are the ones who are just about managing to put their children through private school: they live in modest-sized houses, forgo holidays and drive beaten-up old cars. Most had no idea how much their school would be adding to fees and this summer found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place: sacrifice the fees for this term to try and find a state school place as soon as possible or try and muddle their way through.
Lisa Phillips* is one such parent. Until now, the entirety of her civil servant’s salary has gone on funding her two daughters’ fees at an independent prep school in Somerset, a sacrifice she felt was worth it given her own “horrible” experience at state school.
But last week she and her husband put their house on the market: their plan is to buy within the catchment area of an Ofsted outstanding secondary school to get their eldest, who is currently in Year 5, in for Year 7.
“We planned to stay in a smaller house and invest in the girls’ education, but the VAT announcement completely scuppered that,” she says. This way, she adds, they can increase their mortgage and buy a bigger house – but she acknowledges the move will contribute to the general increase of house prices in the area.
Research compiled by the online estate agency Yopa last month found that it already costs an average of £116,000 more to live near an “outstanding” school than an “inadequate” – a gap that seems only likely to increase, even as Ofsted does away with one-word grades.
And what of the schools themselves? State schools in Surrey received almost 600 queries in the two weeks following the election; minutes from council meetings in Worcestershire, Hertfordshire and Coventry all show concern about the increased number of requests for school places and the potential need to deploy temporary bulge classes housed in Portakabins. Leicester Council closed phone lines on Tuesdays and Thursdays to work on the surge of state school applications it has received since the election.
One mother trying to get a Year 8 place for her daughter in Buckinghamshire to start this September told me there were only three places available in the entire county, all well over an hour away by public transport and one was a Sikh faith school.
Another reported that their nearest (oversubscribed) state sixth form offered places first to applicants from state schools within the city, then from certain parts of the county, so even applying in the right time frame and living a five-minute walk away wouldn’t help him. “I’ve got four times as many applications for year 7 than I’ve got space for; I just cannot take any more,” one secondary school head in the northwest told me days before the election.
As for the private schools, “there are a good number of schools that are passing the entire amount on [to parents], which seems to discredit Labour’s argument that the schools don’t have to pass this on,” says Piper.
Last week Eton announced that it would be passing on the full cost of the VAT to parents from January, pushing its annual fees up to £63,000, urging struggling parents to apply for bursaries. Two private schools in Scotland have closed since Labour came into power, citing uncertainty over the VAT policy as the contributing factor; another in Staffordshire this week announced its closure in December.
Other schools have announced smaller increases of 10-15 per cent – but had already previously hiked fees for this new academic year by 5 or 6 per cent, leaving parents squeezed already.
