Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department will take steps to support children who receive bursaries and scholarships at independent schools who are adversely affected by the introduction of VAT on such schools.

The department is not expecting these changes to have a significant effect on bursaries across the private school sector as a whole. The department expects that charitable schools across the UK will want to continue to demonstrate wider public benefit through the provision of means-tested bursaries and through partnerships with state-funded schools after these changes are made.