“It is keeping people awake at night, for sure,” explained Louise Gibson, who has three children at Heriot’s, where senior school fees are currently £17,426 a year.
Mrs Gibson, who is self-employed and runs her own recruitment company, will have to pay an extra £700 a month if the school passes on the full VAT rise to parents.
“I’m not pretending we are one of the families worst affected, but we’ll have to massively reduce our consumer spending,” she said, and added that she’ll be cutting back on holidays and paying into her pension.
George Heriot’s had already increased fees by 6% for the 2024/25 year, and while it’s unclear what will happen with the VAT increase, the last letter it sent to parents suggested the school won’t absorb all of those costs.
Mrs Gibson set up a Facebook group for parents concerned about the fee hike, which attracted more than 1,000 followers in the first day. It’s littered with comments from parents despairing at the policy and wondering how they will afford the increase.
“I’m realistic, I don’t think there is much sympathy for people in this situation, but there is a real lack of understanding of private schools and the people who go there,” she said.
“There are plenty of families at these schools who don’t go on foreign holidays, who scrimp and save to pay for children go to them because they feel it is the right thing for them – and that choice is now under threat.”
Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank in 2022 said 75% of children at private school came from families in the wealthiest 30% of households, with most of those coming from the richest 10% of households.
Despite parents' concerns, the IFS has this year said predictions the VAT policy spells the end for independent schools are wide of the mark.
The IFS predicts the VAT hike will lead to a reduction in private school attendance of somewhere between 3% and 7%.
But this figure is disputed. The Independent Schools Council points to a 2018 report, drawn from surveys of tens of thousands of parents in around 150 UK private schools, which suggested 10.7% of pupils were likely to be withdrawn by the end of the first year of VAT being introduced, with a further 6.4% drop-off over the next four years.
In truth, it remains unknown just how many parents will pull their children out of private school or will be put off sending their children to them in the first place.
The IFS report found the number of private school pupils has been largely stable in recent years despite what it says was a 20% real-terms increase in average private school fees since 2010, and a 55% rise since 2003.
In Edinburgh, many of its private schools have put their fees up at above-inflation rates in recent years. George Watson’s College, Scotland’s largest private school, is one high-profile example, after it announced a 9% rise in May.
However, this has not deterred many parents. Fettes and Merchiston, Edinburgh’s most expensive schools, have boarders and attract both UK and international students. Around 20% of pupils at the schools are from neighbouring local authorities, external and commute to Edinburgh - with some filling coaches of pupils every day.
A decade ago, warnings were being issued about how private school was an increasingly unaffordable option for many in the UK, with increasing numbers of students coming from overseas and fees have continued to climb ever since. In 2021, figures showed that school fees had grown 20% beyond inflation since 2009. However, student numbers have not diminished as a result.
Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the IFS, said most people paying school fees have simply been able to absorb these increases as they are wealthy.
He said: “We have seen this huge rise in fees and we haven’t seen a massive shrinkage of the sector which might suggest that the price of private education going up does not drive people out in large numbers."
The IFS estimates the policy will generate an extra £1.3 to £1.5bn for the UK government. Mr Adam says it reached this figure by calculating that parents who stop spending their money on private school fees will eventually spend the extra money on other goods and services, generating extra VAT revenue.
The spectre of state schools unable to absorb an influx of children who would otherwise have been at private school has been raised by some of those critical of Labour’s policy.
According to the IFS, an ongoing decline in birth rates means there will be fewer children who need to fill school places - this is predicted to be a drop of 700,000 pupil places between now and 2030.
“The birth rate and the number of kids at school is going to fall by quite a bit in the coming years so actually even if there is a large number of people moving from the private to state sector then that’s only going to fill in a fraction of the gap in state school places caused by the previous fall in the birth rate,” he said.
Mr Adam acknowledged the one big caveat to this drop is the reduction will not fall evenly across the UK, adding “geographically there might be pinch points where it is an issue”.