Education access
Nostalgic as it was to read Lord Foulkes’ return to the political scuffles of the 1970s (“Why private schools harm our education system”, 2 December), it is a pity his historical recall is not a little more accurate.
He repeats the suggestion that the schools do not pay taxes, as if their current rates bill is meaningless, and conveniently obscures the fact that while education is an exempt supply, many costs incurred by schools attract VAT. Statemaintained schools benefit from an exemption by virtue of their statutory obligation to deliver education and so all VAT can be recovered on relevant expenditure. A recent independent economic impact report found that Scottish independent schools generate £246.6 million for the public exchequer.
He also makes tired observations about the background and motivation of the parents of the sector, and intelligence of their children, which reflect worse on him than they do on those families, and disparage the other 95 per cent of parents in the state sector by implication. Importantly, he conveniently avoids the fact that in 2005, the Scottish Parliament voted 98-0, as part of the Charities Bill, to introduce a specific public benefit test, which might be applied to bodies on the charity regulator, OSCR’S, new Charity Register.
If anyone doubts that independent schools were front and centre of the debate at the time, they need only go back and read the debates on the passage of the Bill from December 2004 to June 2005. While no presumption was made about which bodies would enter on to the new register, it was clear that independent schools would be specifically tested – as they were as a special priority group over the next ten years.
Through a rigorous process, all schools passed, some after further directions. The direct result is that means-tested fee assistance has more than tripled, so that hundreds of young people enjoy entirely free day or boarding education, while thousands more receive assistance from 80 per cent downwards, depending on means. Per capita, it is as big a widening access programme as any part of Scottish education has undertaken – the exception being that this is provided almost entirely out of parental income, and not a penny comes from the taxpayer. As the Parliament recognised at the time, the educational aims of the independent and state sectors are the same – it is their autonomous, selffunded, not-for-profit status that makes them different.
All of these schools provide up to £45m collectively in financial support each year, plus millions more in SQA support, shared subject teaching, sports coaching, careers events, and community and school use of facilities and staff – all as part of the charitable purpose Lord Foulkes finds so outrageous.
If the Barclay Review succeeds in removing rates relief for the sake of a sum which will do very little to raise “vital extra funds” then the process of the last ten years, undertaken in good faith, can only be put into question. Will Scotland prove to have legislated to widen access, only to narrow it again?
JOHN EDWARD Scottish Council of Independent Schools Dublin Street, Edinburgh