Backlash over Corbyn’s plan to charge VAT on school fees
He wants more free school meals but experts slam his ‘dodgy maths’
JEREMY Corbyn was last night accused of trying to shut down private schools by stealth, after he unveiled plans to charge parents VAT on fees to fund free meals for all primary pupils.
The Labour leader claimed the tax changes would end a ‘subsidy to the privileged few’ – but headteachers warned the £1billion scheme would punish hard-working parents trying to do the best for their children.
Mr Corbyn wants to expand the controversial free school meals scheme – introduced for pupils aged four to seven by former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – to all children up to age 11.
The Labour leader and his education spokesman Angela Rayner said a pilot study showed the policy would improve attainment.
But their claims quickly unravelled as one of the report’s authors said more research was needed.
Mr Corbyn suggested that as well as charging VAT at 20 per cent on private school fees, the party could remove their charitable status. ‘We have not made a decision on that yet,’ he said.
‘Nothing is ruled out but there are tax breaks that do need to be challenged.
‘We are not proposing to close down private schools ... but we are saying we want to raise money to ensure every child gets a decent school meal.’ Private schools last night warned parents would not be able to afford extra charges.
Mike Buchanan, chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference and head of Ashford School in Kent, said: ‘This policy is based on dodgy maths, myths about independent schools and misunderstandings about the types of parents who typically buy private education these days.
‘It will drive tens of thousands of pupils into the state sector and I haven’t seen any analysis by Labour as to what would be the cost of the tens of thousands, maybe even 100,000 pupils going into the state sector. If there were 50,000 extra pupils that move into the state system because their parents can’t afford it, the net effect of that would be a cost to the state of up to £1.5billion, they could not possibly do it.
‘It would mean there are fewer private schools – that might be the underlying desire of Labour but it would mean only the very wealthy would occupy those schools that remain.’
He added: ‘At my school I’ve got no highly affluent parents at all, you are more likely to come across taxi drivers and tradesmen than titans of industry and they all fall into the category of hard-working adults trying to put their children through private education.
‘They are the people that will be hurt, not this mythical überwealthy family that Labour and others have in their minds.’
Labour said a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies backed its claim that the policy would raise standards.
The 2012 study was based on a pilot scheme in Newham, east London, and Durham.
However, the report’s co-author Lorraine Dearden yesterday said she had found a ‘slight improvement’ on attainment – but ‘we certainly do not know if this impact will replicated nationwide’. She added: ‘We definitely concluded that we needed more work.’
Asked whether the findings justified rolling out the scheme, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘It would be overstating it by quite a bit and in the report we said this is very, very expensive to roll out nationally – we estimated around £1billion a year.’
A Tory spokesman said last night that a Labour government would ‘wreck the economy ... meaning there would be less money to spend on our schools, not more’.
‘This policy is based on myths’