Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Polly Billington and Deirdre Costigan

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Ms Billington]

Q By how much?

Barnaby Lenon: I cannot answer that. We do not know, but I am quite confident that plenty of parents will have found it too difficult.

Simon Nathan: If you look at the number of pupils in independent schools over the last 10 years according to Department for Education data, on the face of it you could say, “Well, there’s 12,000 more,” but that is during a period when the overall school population went up by 800,000. The proportion of pupils educated in independent schools went down from 7% to 6.5%. There has been a proportionate decrease.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

Q Thank you very much for your evidence. I am a former chair of the governing body of a state school, so this is a really interesting conversation. Mr Woodgate, you mentioned that private schools might need to look at redundancies to absorb the impact of the measure. I understand that the student-teacher ratio in private schools is double that in state schools. It is something like 8.5:1 versus 18:1 in state schools, so there are significantly more teaching staff in private schools. If there were to be redundancies, have you made any assessment of whether the impact would be similar to the impact on state schools?

David Woodgate: Pupil-teacher ratios are increasing anyway. Many schools are much beyond that. That is not a typical pupil-teacher ratio in one of our schools. Many are going up towards 20—the same kind of number that you are talking about in the state sector. Inevitably, if there are redundancies, there will be fewer teachers to go around and they will be teaching more pupils.