HEAD OF PRIVATE SCHOOL BLASTS LABOUR'S PLANS TO CHARGE VAT

The headmistress of the private school that Sir Keir Starmer’s wife attended has branded Labour’s plans to charge VAT on its fees as ‘short-sighted in the extreme’.

Lady Victoria went to Channing School in Highgate, North London - which costs £23,970 a year for juniors and £26,490 for seniors - before studying law.

If VAT is charged, the additional 20 per cent would land the parents with a daughter at Channing from the age of four with a bill on top of current fees of about £70,600.

Headmistress Lindsey Hughes said: ‘Charging parents VAT would make our education unaffordable for some and risk their children having to leave the school.

‘This would cause significant disruption for children forced to leave the school, but there should be even more concern about the capacity of local state schools to absorb the ensuing increase in pupil numbers.

‘This would come not just from Channing, but also from other independent schools in the area.’

Sir Keir Starmer has claimed the policy will generate £1.7 billion to spend on state education.

Mrs Hughes, writing in her local newspaper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, added: ‘At a time when budgets are in crisis, enacting a policy that would cost state schools money to educate more pupils without raising the funds needed to cover this seems short-sighted in the extreme.’

While estimates on how many pupils across the country will be pushed into the state sector by Labour’s policy have varied, one prediction from the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year suggested that it could be up to 40,000.

Shaun Fenton, the headmaster of Sir Keir’s alma mater – the £22,995-a-year Reigate Grammar School in Surrey – has also condemned the plans to add VAT to fees, telling The Telegraph last month that the tax raid on independent schools would ‘inevitably’ lead to thousands of private pupils seeking places at ‘already oversubscribed state schools’.

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2024-06-15T21:57:07Z dg43tfdfdgfd