Private schools ‘will adapt’ to VAT tax

One of the parts of your manifesto that I find quite interesting that I haven't spoken to you about before is your commitment to put VAT on private schools. It feels like that's a row, you know, you're quite happy to have. And if I'm honest with you, I'm a bit confused by some of the arguments against this, right, Saying that private schools will close, for example, if if it's introduced, why wouldn't private schools just increase class sizes or cut staff and make, I guess the kind of economic decisions that the state sector has to make all the time? You know, do you think that actually, yeah, private schools should have to make the kind of. You know, cut a cloth in the same way that all the other schools do. Yes, I think they will adapt and they've had lots of increases in costs over the last 1014 years and they've accommodated it. And there's no evidence to show that these schools will close. They don't have to pass the cost on to parents. But it is a tough choice. It's a difficult choice. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that this is ideological or easy because I do understand that many parents work hard and save hard to send their children to private school, but every because they've got aspiration for their child. But every single parent has aspiration for their child, including every parent of a child in a state secondary school. And at the moment we don't even have teachers in core subjects in secondary school, state secondary schools, in subjects like maths. So we've got PE teachers and supply teachers teaching maths to young people in our state secretaries. That's not on because it's going to hold them back. And one of the things I made absolutely clear is I'm determined to stop the over alliance we have where too many children, their future is determined. By the income and salary of their parents rather than their talent. I've absolutely got that in my sights as something we are going to change with an incoming Labour government. It's quite popular policy polls quite well. Do you think that some of the backlash against it has been because there's so many people in Westminster, in the media who either went to private school or send their children there? I think there's an element of that. But I do, I mean, parents across the country do say to me if they've got children in private school that they're concerned about it and I go through. The reason why we're doing it with them, explain to them that schools don't have to pass it on to them. So I'm not going to pretend it's not a bad thing if if both schools have to make economies, it's a difficult choice. But you know their businesses in the end, and they're very successful in the round. Actually, under this government, 1000 private schools have closed because their business didn't work. Now I want them to thrive, but we need to make this difficult choice because in the end, if I want the teachers we need in our state secondary schools, I have to answer the question which you would put to me, which is how are you going to pay for that? Gonna pay for that by getting rid of the tax breaks for private schools and use it to invest in the teachers we need in our state secondaries.