What are Labour’s plans for schools?
Labour’s landslide General Election victory on 4th July will bring with it big changes for schools. In this blog, we…
Labour’s landslide General Election victory on 4th July will bring with it big changes for schools.
In this blog, we will explore the main components of the new government’s Children’s Wellbeing Bill, and what these mean for teachers, parents and children.
What are the big changes on their way for schools?
Labour’s manifesto – and the subsequent Children’s Wellbeing Bill announced at the King’s Speech on 17th July – contained a number of pledges relating to schools, from the controversial commitment to require private schools to charge VAT on fees, to less contentious policies such as creating more nursery places.
Let’s examine each of those commitments, and what has been done so far to implement them:
Adding VAT to private school fees
Labour’s flagship education policy was to make private school fees VAT-able – and the new government has wasted no time putting the policy into effect.
From 5th August 2024, fees paid for any private school terms starting on or after 1st January 2025 must have VAT applied. The government has moved quickly in light of an increasing number of schools advertising advance payment schemes to parents, hoping to stave off the application of the tax.
Those who paid in advance prior to 5th August should be safe from the taxman, as retrospectively claiming VAT is likely to be an administrative nightmare, according to tax experts.
The government has also exempted from the tax pupils with the “most acute special educational needs, where their needs can only be met in private schools”, or where a pupils’ education costs were funded by a local authority. In those instances local councils will be able to reclaim the VAT.
It’s unlikely that the state sector will be inundated with more pupils than it can handle, as a result of parents moving their children from the private sector. This is because birth rates in recent years are lower than in the 2000s, when schools expanded to create extra places.
The Financial Times analysed the 2022-23 figures from the Department for Education, showing that, for 85% of local authorities, available places exceeded the number of privately-educated students in the area.
Recruiting more teachers
The reason Labour has moved quickly to implement its new VAT policy is because it intends to use the money raised to pay for an additional 6,500 teachers in key shortage subjects.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has written to all staff, from early years to higher education, saying she wanted to “reset the relationship” with the sector. The Department for Education (DfE) said the letter was the starting point for recruiting 6,500 new teachers.
The teacher recruitment campaign Every Lesson Shapes a Life is to be expanded, according to the DfE. The campaign directs interested candidates to to the Get Into Teaching website, where they can find support and advice from teacher training advisers, a contact centre and a national programme of events.
Reforming Ofsted
The tragic death of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2023 after Ofsted downgraded her Caversham school from Outstanding to Inadequate brought the issue of single-word judgements into the spotlight.
The government proposes to reform the educational watchdog, replacing the controversial single-word grades with a new report card system.
The previous Conservative government had rejected calls to scrap single-word judgements, deeming them “a succinct and accessible summary for parents”.
Launching free breakfast clubs
In a welcome move for working parents, all primary schools will be required to offer free breakfast clubs for pupils.
Labour said the clubs will be introduced in every primary school so “every child is able to start the day with a healthy breakfast and parents are able to get to work”, but there is no indication yet of how long it will take to get every club funded, and up and running.
The government claims that its plans for primary school breakfast clubs would save families around £400 a year, with some families saving as much as £2,000 a year by cutting the need for paid wrap-around care.
Opening more nurseries
Labour has pledged to create 3,334 new nurseries using spare classrooms within existing primary schools.
The government aims to create 100,000 new nursery places, easing the chronic shortage of availability in the early years sector. As with the free breakfast clubs, there isn’t yet a timeframe for when the extra places will start to be made available.
Can Labour afford to fund its plans for schools?
Prior to the election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) published an extensive guide to inform the general election debate on school spending.
The top findings, which seem to indicate the government may find it challenging to fund its various commitments, state that:
- School costs have grown rapidly in recent years. Increases in staff pay and rising food and energy costs are likely to lead to a 4% increase in costs in 2024.
- There are several immediate spending pressures, including special educational needs provision, teacher pay, and repairs needed to school buildings.
- The number of pupils assessed as having the highest levels of special educational needs (i.e. with an Education, Health and Care Plan) increased by over 60% from about 220,000 in 2015 to about 360,000 in 2022, placing huge pressure on school spending.
- Average teacher pay across the UK in 2024 is expected to be over 6% lower in real terms than in 2010, and is at a similar level in real terms to that seen in 2001.
- Capital spending on school buildings is low in historical terms, as is spending on school maintenance and repairs. The three-year average up to 2023–24 is about 25% lower in real terms than the three-year average up to 2008–09.
However, the report also states that pupil numbers are expected to fall by over 5% or 400,000 between 2024 and 2028. This creates potential opportunities for savings in total school spending.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the ASCL school leaders’ union, said there was a “vital missing ingredient to these plans as they currently stand … That is the question of ensuring that schools and colleges are sufficiently funded not only to deal with the current huge financial pressures they are facing but in order to be sustainable in the future.
“We recognise that national finances are tight, but this nettle simply must be grasped when the government sets out its spending plans in the autumn.”
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