Can private schools survive Labour?

0:04The Telegraph.

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1:21The super rich have found a way of getting around Labour's tax grab on private education. We talk to Julie Robinson of the Independent Schools Council, who tells us that it is people on modest incomes who are just trying to do their best for their kids who are getting hurt the most. And Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney has been outed as a Republican following her viral denim jeans campaign. We'll be talking about what celebrity endorsements really mean in politics. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Cleo Watson. And with me, Tim Stanley.

2:04Cleo, the Telegraph has always said that this tax would be a disaster, and it is. Over 50 private schools have now shut. It is predicted that 100 could possibly close in the next three years. It's disproportionately affecting kids with special educational needs or who are disabled. And it's estimated that 9 ,000 to 10 ,000 children have joined the state sector, adding to the burden of the common purse. And this is perhaps the most important thing of all, which the Telegraph investigation has shown. it doesn't even meet the purpose it was designed to meet because it isn't working as a tax raiser.

2:43No, it's not. And not only that, it's not translating into the six and a half thousand new teachers we were meant to be getting. That was the whole point of the hike. And we've actually lost 400 teachers in the state system. So altogether, it's been a disaster. But But the worst bit is, as ever, it's been a perfect sort of whacking stick for the big, famous private schools, your Eatons and Winchesters and Brighton Colleges, which charge very expensive fees. And it's those parents who've been able to prepay five years in advance. as ever it's actually hit less well-off aspirational parents who've chosen smaller independent schools exactly as you say often with children with special educational needs or disabilities who are in real trouble now they've got fewer choices depending on where they live and where their children are now going to go to school and this 20 percent hike is killing these small schools off.

3:49So the part of the conversation we always want to come back to is I think the Eatons will always survive, but these smaller schools, which really have allowed people choice, which actually charge, relatively speaking, really quite low fees, they're going to die off. And where are these children going to go? To break it down, because this is a wonderful example of perverse incentives and taxation. Labour clearly thought, impose a VAT tax on fees, everyone will be forced to pay it. And because only posh, rich people send their kids to private schools, they'll all cough it up. They've got the money, and that'll be more money in order to provide teachers.

4:25What they didn't reckon on, it seems, is that people can, in some places, pay their fees in advance. And, of course, if you're very rich, you can afford to pay many years in advance and thus afford the VAT increase. So to give examples, the top 50 schools collectively have received£550 million in upfront fee payments. That's a rise from£121 million in 2023, potentially saving them nearly£103 million in VAT. Brighton College, its advance payments went up from 86 pupils paying in advance in 2023 to 819 pupils paying in advance. Eton College, its advance receipts rose from£16.6 million to£52.7 million and Winchester from£4.4 million to£19 million in less than a year.

5:19And experts say this means you'll get less revenue to go towards the teachers, but also local authorities might take legal action to try to get that money back. Absolutely. And actually, the bit that really matters here is the shiny announcement from Labour that this is a tax on the super rich isn't working because they've got canny accountants. They've always been able to find ways. That's why they're super rich. That's why they're super rich. And guess what? That's why I'm not super rich. Well, exactly. But that's why middle class and actually lower middle class parents, they won't be able to get around it.

5:54These are dual income families who scrimp and save to send their children to low fee paying day schools. They haven't got, you know, the big sports pitches. They haven't got hounds and polo ponies and squash courts. and in many cases these are small settings that cater for children with very specific needs. Let's talk to someone who can tell us about those sorts of people. Absolutely. So we're going to speak to Julie Robinson who's the Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Schools Council. Hi Julie, thanks for joining us. Thanks very much for having me. So Julie, what are you hearing from your members?

6:32Well, you might know that the typical independent school across the UK is a really small school, just a few hundred pupils, probably primary phase day school. And for those, there's a lot of concern about how parents are coping with financial pressures. And the heads have felt under a lot of pressure over the last year or so. So they had a huge shock this time last year when it suddenly came to light that VAT was going to start on the 1st of January. This was a big shock to schools because heads had already set their budgets for the following year. So there was a lot for them to do during the summer last year and for school bursars and finance managers to start dealing with all the detail.

7:18Because it was a very, very short lead-in for what was in fact a big tax change. and then for the parents suddenly recognising that in January there was going to be an extra 20 % levied on their school fees. Now, we know looking back that on average schools managed to reduce their fee by 5 % over Christmas in the lead into January. But even so, this has put extra financial pressure on parents. And again, we know the typical parent is from a dual income household, their families who don't necessarily find it easy to afford the fees. So such a big jump in their outgoings has caused a lot of anxiety for a lot of people out there, I'm afraid.

8:05Julie, there's been a lot in the news about children and SEND, special educational needs or disabilities, because of the debate around welfare reform. We're just conscious that more children are being classed with send than ever before. Is there a tension between society saying lots of kids have send and imposing fees which affect schools that many parents send their children to because they are best placed to help kids with send? We know from our Independent Schools Council census that over 100 ,000, it's about 117 ,000 pupils in independent schools have special educational needs. Only a small proportion of those have education healthcare plans.

8:52And I think what we see from that is that parents quite often, they look around at what schools are available locally, and perhaps they find the smaller class or the particular culture of a local independent school that they would have to pay for just suits their children. And this might or might not be a severe special need. It might be a particularly sensitive child for some reason. And I've spoken to parents who have said they are so, so grateful to a local independent school for just being a smaller environment that got their child back on track. And this is not to criticise the state sector.

9:34We know that state schools are underfunded and they're under lots of pressures of their own. There is great teaching in state schools. But independent schools can offer something a little bit different. And parents then can find a way of keeping their child in the right environment. So I've spoken to parents who say their child would have been a school refuser if it weren't for this opportunity to go into an independent school. Now, these little schools and these parents who might have several children, they might not be on the highest of salaries. Those are the very families and the very schools who are being hit the hardest by the government's triple whammy of tax.

10:17The schools are having to review their structure. I mean, really, most of their outgoing is on staff. So they're looking at staff restructure, frankly, these smaller schools. And the parents are looking at whether or not they can keep their child in that school. So you've got vulnerable children there, families who have taken great care to choose a school and to pay fees. Now suddenly the government is imposing an extra fifth on top of that fee and they feel they're being displaced. And that means that child will go to a different school. Now, we recently went to court over VAT on fees and the court judgment included a commentary about special needs children and said actually that it was clear that there would be severe detriment to children with special needs who are displaced from independent schools into state schools where there isn't the full range of provision for them locally.

11:14Thank you. I think that's a really interesting answer because very often when people talk about private schools, the left wing labor perspective is people do it because it's something rich people do. It's a snob value thing or you're buying your way out of what they think are inferior schools or whatever. But the way you're putting it, no, these are quite ordinary people who are making choices that are specific to their children's needs. And in the course of doing that, perhaps even alleviating a little bit of burden from the state sector. And if you then go to war with those people, those particular challenges are then just going to be passed back onto the community to look after.

11:49Yes, I mean, the way we see independent education across the UK is that it offers greater capacity and specialism across the education landscape. We're all on the same side here. All teachers want to teach and support children, care for families. So we want it to be seen as one education system. We don't like the idea that there might be some playing off of one aspect of the sector with another type of school. We all want to support together. And independent schools have done so much good, especially the larger schools, in terms of partnership work. So it's not just schools who contribute more broadly.

12:33In their local area, independent schools provide partnership working, community work. They do lots of teacher training. There are bursary schemes. These are all things that heads and schools want to protect. We want to be part of the broader educational landscape. I think the intention behind this policy originally was that VAT on school fees would be affordable because, as you say, there was an assumption that all parents who pay fees are super wealthy, so they can afford an extra 20 % and the whole system would yield an extra 20%. Now, the government actually predicted that 3 ,000 children would leave independent education this academic year.

13:19So they based the income that would be raised, the revenue that would come from this tax on that basis. Their sums were based on 3 ,000 children move. Or we know that many more than that have moved, at least four times as many children have moved. And that means that it's unlikely this policy is going to actually yield funding for the state sector. at the same time as it's damaging part of education in the round. So it's really, really frustrating to see the pressures that some schools, the smaller schools and families are under. So some schools are absolutely fine, but those are not the schools we're worried about.

14:05They're not the norm in terms of school funding. And it all comes back to this suggestion, this expectation that independent school families, those who can afford fees, they must be really, really well off. Well, actually, the fees are across a very wide range. There are some schools who charge£75 a week. There are plenty of independent schools who charge less than the annual per pupil funding the local authority gives to a state school child. It's just not as simple as to assume in some way taxing independent school fees is a wealth tax. It's far more nuanced than that. I'm glad you mentioned teachers there because we have been trying to contact some of the schools that are closing down and some of the teachers and headteachers and the phone lines are dead.

14:53They are gone. And we've been wondering what happens now. The pupils presumably may find another independent school or more likely are now joining what is already a very burdened state sector. What happens to those teachers? Yes, I've spoken to several heads of schools who have had to wind up their operations some of them in short time frame. I mean, we're expecting more of this over the coming years. And it's really tough for them because that school community is more than just a job. You know, teaching is a vocation and the teachers and the children they teach have a really close working relationship.

15:32So for the heads and all the school leaders, the governors and the bursars, it's a really, really tough time. I know that their main focus in the last few months is helping staff to find alternative employment and they can support that and very much helping families find alternative schools for their children. And of course, how easy that's going to be depends on the area and the country, depends on other local options, and depends crucially on whether there is space in the right locality for the right age groups to find schools. So the focus for these schools have been very outward focused. It's sort of supporting staff into alternative employment, helping with references and trying to help place the children as well and supporting the parents because it's a big shock.

16:30It's really, really tough on a school community to suddenly find that they've got to think again. Julie, I think we can reasonably infer that Labour's reforms are going to hit people on modest incomes, smaller schools the most. Are there other ways you can imagine that the big, super rich schools will be able to get around this? Are there other wheezes they can pull to avoid this tax attack? No, you can't avoid VAT. The government is imposing 20 % on top of whatever the fee is, and any parent paying the fee is liable. The school has to collect that 20 % for the government and pass it on. That's the rule.

17:12That's HMRC. So schools have looked at reducing their own costs in order to keep the fee down so that parents don't have such a high fee to pay. That's what a lot of smaller schools have done. But no, I mean, the bigger schools, you may have seen there's a once you can charge VAT, you can also reclaim VAT. So a school which has done lots of building recently will be in a position to reclaim more. So it's been said that the larger, wealthier schools who have done more building work recently, they're in a stronger position because they can reclaim more VAT against the books. But of course, the schools I'm talking about, the typical schools, they've been under financial pressure for some time.

17:58There was Brexit, there was cost of living crisis, there was COVID. You know, we've all lived through this. these small schools, as organisations, they've had to manage those additional costs. And now VAT, loss of business rates relief and national insurance going up. But also the parents who are paying the fees have struggled with those extra costs too. So no, there is not a way around it. VAT being imposed by the government, it has to be paid. Julie Robinson, thank you very much.

18:35I really thought that was fascinating, Tim. Julie sounds so frustrated and it sort of tallies beautifully with this new story that's come out today, which is Neil Kinnick has said to Rachel Weaves that the same kind of levy should go on private health care, that private health care should no longer be VAT exempt. And again, it conjures up this image that the people who are using private healthcare are exclusively rich people who are, I don't know, getting Olympic jabs or they're having, you know, C-sections at private hospitals, not actually people who have reasoned something out and thought this is a bit expensive, but I'm going to have a procedure done because I can afford to and it's going to take forever.

19:22Or actually people who are on a two-year waiting list for something like a hip replacement and they're scrimping and saving, they're borrowing money from their families to get it done, which not only allows them to get a procedure done that they need, but they're avoiding burdening the NHS with more treatments that they can't do in a timely manner. And I always think that this issue with private school fees is that parents already pay the taxes that would allow their child to go to a state school. They're paying on top of that to in some ways take them out of the system, give the system a bit of breathing space and that now isn't going to happen from September we're going to have over 10 ,000 more children join the already creaking state system I just think Labour sees us as walking talking bags of money I don't mean us personally but they just look at every human interaction and think is there some way in which we can skim a bit of money off that to go towards the public sector they treat health and education private health and education as a luxury or some way of jumping a queue or getting around things.

20:30It doesn't occur to them that there are people trying to do the best for their kids or because like me with my tendinitis, I'm just trying to get some care that if I didn't get it from a private osteo, I'd have to join a long NHS list, which means my foot would get worse, which means in the long run, I'd go on painkillers and I'd be off work and I'd be getting pips. I'd get some lovely pip cash. So they don't realise that actually, it's a social good, people using these things. And then if you tax and destroy them, then people just fall back onto the public purse instead. But it's bad politics too.

20:59So they're managing to upset middle-income families here who might from time to time use private healthcare. They might save and put money into Bupa. They might use a low-fee independent school where they are. But they're also going after people who are on welfare legitimately and they are going after people on winter fuel payments legitimately. Yes. And I just don't understand how they've managed to sort of lose twice. Yes. Yeah. I think some of it is the politics of sheer envy. I think some of it, as I say, is bad economics. And some of it is they just hate aspiration because by attacking modest people trying to send their kids to schools, they're killing the bit of the system which is aspirational.

21:43And this is always the irony of socialism, isn't it? That ultimately, as we said, super rich can get around things because their money is movable. You can move. You could just take your kids abroad, go and live in Dubai like some columnists seem to be doing. Where these schools have set up shop. Where these schools have set up shop. And it's actually the people who just want to work a little bit harder, to spend a little bit more money, to get a little bit extra something out of life. They're the ones who end up being hurt by this. So who really is Labour's constituency? The super rich and the super, super sick and poor.

22:15Those are the only two people who they're speaking to right now. Yeah, who make up famously large swathes of the voting population. in the good old Red Wall. Next, we are going to talk about something very different, but I think equally fascinating and perhaps of a world importance, celebrity endorsements in politics.

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24:28I'm not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans. And I definitely won't say that they're the most comfortable jeans I've ever worn. Or that they make your butt look amazing. Why would I need to do that? But if you said that you want to buy the jeans, I'm not going to stop you. But just so we're clear, this is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans. Sidney Sweeney has very keen. You see what I did there, right? Cleo, who was that? Tim, I know you've been up a mountain in Wales for the last week. Where have you been? With no TV. No TV. I have board games, but no TV. That was Sidney Sweeney.

25:09Now, some of our listeners may have heard that name floating around the internet the last few days. Why is everybody talking about her? She's an actor. She's been in The White Lotus, The Hammy's Tale, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She's a big star, a big emerging star. And she has suddenly come into the spotlight sort of twice. There's been a second wave for her. The first is she is in an advert for American Eagle. They make denim jeans. And as you heard from the clip, there's a clever little pun on jeans with a J, jeans with a G. Right. That has triggered a slightly fascinating backlash in the States about eugenics.

25:52The idea that her genes being great imply that white genes are better than black genes and so forth. And there's been an interesting backlash in turn to that with people saying this is greatly overblown. Yeah. It's just a denim advert. And in fact, there is a similar advert with Calvin Klein in the 1980s based on the exact same premise. Right. The reason there's been a second wave is because it has since emerged that Sweeney is a registered Republican in Florida. Wow. And now the president of the United States, Donald Trump, cannot get enough of it. After Sidney Sweeney, it came out to speak that she was a registered Republican.

26:32Any thoughts on that? And who was? Sidney Sweeney. She's a very hot actress right now. She's a registered Republican? Yes. Oh, now I love her ad. Is that right? Is Sidney Sweeney? you'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans. That's what I wouldn't have known, but I'm glad you told me that. If Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic. Okay, thank you very much, everybody. We should say that one thing Trump loves saying is she's got great genes. I've got good genes. I can imagine he doesn't look good in jeans, But he does have an obsession with human biology.

27:14He talks about people as if they're animals. It's a bit creepy. It's true. There's much debate on one side of the internet, obviously, about how canny a marketing campaign this is from American Eagle. And their stock price has shot up 20%. So they've done a fantastic job. But it has got us thinking about the use of celebrity endorsements for politicians and political campaigns. And in America, in the last year, of course, we had Kamala Harris getting every kind of endorsement you can get under the sun. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Elon Musk. The difference is the Democrats, there is a line of people to endorse a Democrat candidate.

28:00The Republicans, there's only ever in a season half a dozen people like Dean Cain, John Voight. They all tend to be older, over the hill. So it's more of a case of the Democrats can pick and choose. And they often deploy celebrity endorsements strategically to signal to different parts of the population the kind of vote they want, like your wheel out Oprah. You can be more tactical with it. With the Republicans, they take whoever they can get because they're the ugly people at the party, right? That's true. But also, I think within Democrat politics, there's a lot of pressure on celebrities to come out and that silence is in some ways cowardly.

28:38So Taylor Swift was under a lot of pressure to eventually endorse Kamala Harris. Yes. And actually, the evidence suggests that celebrity endorsements do not actually help the outcome for that particular candidate, but they do help with voter engagement and voter turnout. They're one of the best voter turnout sort of tools that you can have. So a perfect example of this in the UK is in 2019, which was a conservative landslide. But on the day that Stormzy came out to endorse Jeremy Corbyn, voter registrations went up 283 % in the UK. OK, that's interesting. It didn't actually help the candidate, but it did help with voter engagement.

29:20Yes. OK. And I've got a few, I've got some anecdotal evidence of this myself. From the campaigns you've worked on. Some of the campaigns I've worked on, in particular the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, which supports my thesis that celebrity endorsements not only in my view don't help, they can actively be unhelpful. Right. I'm just surprised any celebrity endorsed Vote Leave. I didn't know there were any. We had Tim Martin off of Wetherspoon. OK, that's not a celebrity. I don't mean businessmen, entrepreneurs. those i mean tv radio film no we didn't and actually we actively didn't really try and seek people out it was desperately unfashionable right in kind of cool media circles to be interested in leave and we had a few people we'd whose names i shall not reveal who we quietly spoke to but they didn't feel comfortable yeah coming out and and supporting us but if you remember the remain campaign had every kind of business person you can possibly imagine.

30:20They had Keira Knightley, Benedict Cumberbatch. And at the time, we just weren't really concerned about this. So for business leaders, sort of cutting it into two piles, for business leaders, they were able to come out with lists of hundreds of business people writing letters to the Times saying this is what must remain in the UK. And the next day, we would look at local business people who'd write letters in their local newspapers. So we try and find the biggest employer who supported us in Leicestershire. And actually that had much more impacts than someone that people slightly equate with the 2008 crash and a lot of their problems.

31:00They do, they do. And we had the same thing with celebrities. So, you know, do you remember Keira Knightley did that advert saying, don't F with my future, which was a kind of get the youth vote out for remain. And it just had a horrible, horrible backlash because people thought this person doesn't use the NHS. This person doesn't use the kind of parts of life that are important to me every day. They have no idea what it is to struggle and to worry and to, in their view, deal with the impact of immigration coming to a town like, I don't know, Rotherham or Grimsby. They don't understand what it is to have industrialisation in my part of the world break down altogether.

31:45They only see the benefits of EU membership. They don't see the problems as what I feel in my community. And the Remain campaign never understood why these endorsements just didn't work. And I remember speaking to the director of that kind of external outreach after the campaign was over. And he said, I never understood how we were able to get these incredibly high profile celebrities and business people and experts to come out and speak on Remain's behalf. And the next day, Vote Leave released a press statement saying something like, people don't trust celebrities. People don't trust experts.

32:31People have had enough of this. And it was completely right. And we also just didn't therefore waste a load of time and energy trying to get these endorsements, which arguably happened all over again with Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris, which was a huge emphasis on trying to get these people to come out for them. And it only works internally, I think. The big celebrity intervention last year that actually had an impact on politics was George Clooney writing an open letter saying Joe Biden has to go. Yeah. And that did not help. And that's internal politics. That wasn't about shifting votes.

33:09That was about changing the conversation with the Democratic Party. Yeah. I suppose the real problem is, what does this mean for Sydney Sweeney? Is there a reverse problem here, which is her being associated with the Republicans? Will that affect her career in Hollywood? I think the interesting thing about Sydney is that she's good looking, and most Republicans are not. If you were to say Republican celebrity, you think of Roseanne Barr. Megyn Kelly. I don't even know where Roseanne's politics are right now. But usually, Republicans, as I say, are older, less good looking, whereas beautiful people tend to drift towards the Democratic Party.

33:44And that's one reason why they're not very good as an endorsement. There are some liberal endorsements, which I think do, if not make a difference, they add to the brand. Bruce Springsteen. If you can get Bruce out, that directly connects you to working class voters. If you can deploy Oprah, that probably helps with mobilizing African Americans. But also, there's an aspirational quality to Oprah. Just everyone kind of likes her. She's an everyman kind of figure. Whereas the problem with most people in Hollywood is they are where they are precisely because they're beautiful. Also, actors are quite often thick.

34:14So the last thing you want is some dumb actor coming out to endorse you because it doesn't really add anything to it. I think the really interesting thing about the Sydney story is it demonstrates that woke is dead in advertising. This jeans company have decided, we want just a beautiful blonde star. We want her to say something semi-racist. And their stock has shot up 20%. So that to me is the interesting thing as the cultural tide has turned in that. If you compare it to the infamous Jaguar ad, which is the highly multicultural ad where everyone came out in different colours, sort of dressed like abstract shapes.

34:51It was always a hideous rebrand. It was just bad. It was just a bad rebrand. But it was like the last gasp of woke. Whereas putting Pretty Girl and a pair of jeans and saying, I'm anatomically perfect. Seems to be what people are buying. It's a very fine line because American Eagle have been able to come out and say, this is just about the jeans. We didn't mean for this to explode in the way it has. It's managed to cause debate without any real backlash. People are not saying we need to throw bricks through American Eagle store windows. They've not had to take anything down. it's sort of the perfectly crafted marketing campaign where there's been backlash just the right amount.

35:30I don't think they were expecting this second wave. That's the question. With Donald Trump's intervention and Sydney being outed as a Republican, what does that mean for her? I wrote a book on Hollywood politics. You can't buy it. Don't buy it. You can't buy it. It's all been remaindered and pulped. It was a total failure. But one thing I will mention that's pointed out in it, we assume that politics is liberal in America, but almost all the successful people who've transitioned from Hollywood to politics have been Republican. Not the other way around. Ronald Reagan. Sonny Bono. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

36:09Arnold Schwarzenegger. The strange thing is, is actually the people who have made a success as actors in politics have been right wing, not left wing. Well, on that note, Tim, I know that you've got to run to catch a train to Ipswich for a very special interview. I'm interviewing Dr David Ball, the new chairman of the Reform Party. And that'll be out in the next couple of weeks. Very exciting. I have to run, but I've got tendinitis, so it's going to be more like a skip and a jump. It's embarrassing. But thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

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