Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 11 March 2025 to Question 35073 on Private Education: VAT, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential impact of the additional independent school closures over the next three years on trends in the number of (a) teaching and (b) non-teaching staff job losses.

As made clear in the HM Treasury impact assessment, the introduction of VAT is anticipated to have extremely limited impact on the number of pupils in private schools. The department has not seen any evidence that contradicts the expectations set out in the government’s impact assessment.

It is a commercial decision for individual schools to decide how they will fund the additional costs around the VAT policy. There are a variety of ways in which a school may choose to do this, including reducing their surpluses or reserves, cutting back on non-essential expenditure and increasing fees.