It's one of private education's dirty little secrets that it costs the taxpayer far more to subsidise a pupil at Eton than it does to finance a state school pupil directly.
Something of a killer fact
. Do you have, or know where I could find, the comparative figures, Perfect W?
The figures I have seen quoted for the Independent Schools as a whole is that they get tax breaks amounting to £88m a year. Divide that among their 440,000 pupils and that works out about £200 per pupil.
That's a lot (said he, speaking as one of the idiots who doesn't know how to avoid paying tax) and I can't myself see how it can really be justified but, even so, it can't possibly come near the cost to the taxpayer per state school place, can it? How does the Eton statistic fit in with this?
[A Non Public School boy, in case that helps give me street cred
]
George,
I've heard the £88m figure too - I'm not quite sure how it is calculated but potentially the tax break per pupil is very much higher than the average per capita expenditure in state schools - especially if one takes account of the zero-rating of VAT.
I got involved in these issues when I was a governor (and Chair of Finance) of a primary school, and remember being shocked at how cheaply we are getting state education in the UK. When I gave up being a governor, about four years ago, the average per capita income per pupil (in fact in accounting terms, schools here in Brighton do not have pupils or students, but age-weighted pupil units) was about £1600. It's higher in secondaries - a quick check on the budget for my daughter's school reveals funding in 2005-6 of just under £4m for 1600 pupils - an average of about £2500 each. Brighton and Hove is quite a good example since its total level of funding is more or less dead average.
Annual school fees of £10,000 are not uncommon in the private sector - and school fees have risen considerably faster than inflation (and you may recall that there have been persistent allegations of price-fixing). Covenanting for schools with charitable status allows those schools to reclaim income tax against those fees at the standard rate - so £2300 on our notional £10,000 fees. On top of that, school fees are zero-rated for VAT - another £1750 in effective subsidy for parents, given that private organisations are not usually exempt from VAT in this way (public bodies are not usually required to levy VAT). This of course won't figure in the £88m because it is tax revenue forgone from parents (although I'll bet there's someone counting it in the Treasury), rather than a tax break to the school. So the taxpayer's contribution in total in our notional case is more than £4000.
Now of course not all parents covenant, and parents at independent schools might be more likely to have, shall we say, creative tax arrangement which make covenants irrelevant. But even so, the average £200 figure seems intuitively rather low.
