‘My own country can't serve my child': The families fleeing Labour's school tax raid

Telegraph

20-02-2025

Jemima's promotion came at what she thought was a fortuitous time. After half a decade of living in Hong Kong, she was ready to bring her four-year-old twins back to London and take on a new, bigger role at her consultancy firm. But after crunching the numbers and contacting schools in Britain, she realised that what she had assumed was a crystal-clear plan to come home was now impossible.
Jemima's daughter has a genetic disorder that causes muscle weakness. As a result, she physically needs more care than the average child, including help climbing the stairs and going to the bathroom. In Hong Kong, she attends a mainstream private school with a high teacher-to-child ratio, but the recent imposition of VAT on private schools means Jemima can no longer afford fees in the UK.
'I'm a single mother and the 20 per cent increase took the fees from being a very large expense to unaffordable,' she says. 'I have twins, so I'd either have to separate them and give the healthier child fewer opportunities, as with the hike I cannot afford to pay for two, or send them both to state school.'
To explore the second option, Jemima – who owns a flat in London – contacted Tower Hamlets council to see if the local comprehensive could accommodate her daughter, but was blocked at every turn. 'Because she's not in a wheelchair and so couldn't tick that particular box, they more or less said no to everything. It felt like they were trying to get rid of me.'
In the end, Jemima turned down the promotion. 'It's maddening that I can't go home,' she says. 'The whole dialogue has made me angry. They make me sound like some kind of elitist person, but I went to a state school myself and I'd be delighted to send the twins to one if it was any good. But when my own country can't serve my child and yet also taxes me so much that I can't afford to serve her myself, then I have no choice but to stay abroad.'
For an increasingly large cohort, Labour's VAT charge on private schools has made Britain as a place to live and work a far less attractive prospect. More than a quarter of wealthy parents - those with investible assets of more than £250,000 - are now considering moving abroad within the next 12 months in order to keep their children in private education, a new survey has found.
Among the respondents who had children already in private education, 42 per cent said they would face disruption as a direct result of the VAT increase, the bi-annual Saltus Wealth Index revealed. One in nine of those surveyed said they were planning to move their children into the state sector as a result of the policy, while seven per cent said they would keep them in private education, but required financial support from family or friends to cover the additional costs.
Labour, which introduced the VAT hike in January, claim the policy will raise £1.8 billion a year by 2029-30 and help fund 6,500 more state school teachers. Critics argue it will prove disastrous, leading to the closure of well-established schools and heaping pressure on an already stretched state sector.
'Not a hope in hell of paying for private school'
For some, moving abroad to find cheaper schooling alternatives has been the impetus to start a new life, for others, it is the reason to delay coming back. But whatever their circumstances, many would argue they are the exact demographic Britain needs to hold onto: high earners who prop up the economy and contribute far more than they take out.
'VAT is absolutely on people's radar,' agrees Ed Richardson, the managing director of Keystone Tutors – a company that works with parents both abroad and in the UK. 'I didn't expect this but I'm seeing it in conversations with families in Asia and the Middle East. Suddenly, they're asking whether the value judgement for going to the UK is worth it. It's not as if school fees haven't been increasing for years – but because this is such a high rise, it's having a real impact.'
Amelia and Francis are one such example. They have been living in Singapore for over a decade and had always planned to bring their daughters, currently nine and seven, back to Britain for senior school. Now, they have changed their minds.
'The tax on fees has redirected many people's lives,' says Amelia. 'We are 100 per cent staying here for this reason – two years ago we could just have scraped the money together but now there's not a hope in hell we could afford to privately educate the girls at home.'
As the financial director of a successful company, Francis has a very good salary but worked out that in order to send just one daughter to Sherborne Girls as a day boarder – the Dorset school near where they'd planned to live in the UK – he'd need to earn an extra £74,000 a year pre-tax; for the Tanglin Trust School school in Singapore, he needs to make less than half that.
'The reason many of us were here in the first place was for the low tax salaries, so we could save to move home and send kids to good schools,' says Amelia. 'But now the goalposts have moved, it's out of reach. It's great for us because it means our friends won't disperse like they otherwise would have done. But it's a huge disappointment for all the grandparents at home, who ultimately miss out on having the depth of relationship with their grandchildren.'
'Drowning in tax'
Europe, too, is seeing an influx of Britons. 'Our clients used to come mostly from the US and Israel but we have seen a very noticeable rise in British families enquiring about schools over the past year,' says Naomi Crompton, who runs Alesco – an education consultancy in Portugal. 'The international schools here provide a high-quality education at what is now a significantly lower cost than the UK.'
Even the family members of former prime ministers are feeling the pull. For Max Johnson – brother of Boris – whose three-year-old daughter has a place at both a private school in west London, which costs around £30,000 a year, and at St Julian's in Cascais near Lisbon, which is closer to £12,000, it's an easy choice. 'I went on a tour of St Julians and I thought it was brilliant,' he says. 'It reminded me of a school I went to called The Dragon [in Oxford] – it has a lot of history and tradition and even follows a British curriculum.'
Johnson repeats a sentiment that every parent I interview for this piece echoes – despite being among some of the most privileged people in the country. 'Life in Britain just feels too hard when you're drowning in tax and getting very little back,' he says.
For Kate and Alex Kindersley, who were living in the Cotswolds with their four children just over a year ago, everything felt like a struggle after their mortgage quadrupled overnight. Once they realised that school fees were also likely to skyrocket when Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, they decided to move their family to Cape Town – a city they had both lived in during their 20s.
Alex runs a handful of companies in east Africa and Kate owns popular interiors brand Hadeda. Their three sons currently attend a school in Constantia which costs around £8,000 a year-per-child. 'I love it,' says Kate. 'The head teacher knows everyone's name, they run around in bare feet and do so much sport and seem so happy and healthy. And we've worked out that educating them all here will cost about a quarter of what it will in Britain.'
'Seeing the children really flourishing, I just can't imagine going back and taking them away from what they now have,' she adds.
Bad deal Britain
Sophie Gamborg, who works in property and now also lives in Cape Town, is in a similar situation. She and her husband Tom, who runs drinks brand Van Hunks, left London for what was initially supposed to be a few months during her second maternity leave two years ago. They extended their stay a few times until they realised that the VAT increase meant that they could never afford the life they wanted in Britain.
'We suddenly thought – there are such amazing schools here, why leave?' she says. 'Our son is in a small class and is taught to have excellent manners and gets so much attention from teachers – every day he plays golf or rugby, cricket or goes swimming.'
Unsurprisingly, private schools in Cape Town are now oversubscribed and are having to tell parents to sign their children up at birth. 'We are seeing a lot of South Africans coming back from the UK,' says an admissions officer from one prestigious institution.
The parents – she explains – tend to be leaving jobs in London where, despite earning high salaries in finance and consultancy and working at firms like Goldman Sachs, they find they cannot afford to give their children the education they had planned. Losing them means permanently losing people who would have ploughed money into the UK – in income tax and stamp duty, yes, but also in propping up local high streets and entertainment.
Of course, the question many readers will ask is why these people don't just send their children to a comprehensive like 90 per cent of the population. But the truth is that when you are earning a six-figure salary, you tend to have more options than most – options that make Britain feel like a bad deal.
'All my children started at state school and if there had been an outstanding state locally that would have continued,' says Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who moved her family to Dubai late last year.
'But our local primary school was in special measures and so I have had to, for many years now, pay well over £100,000 a year in school fees out of highly-taxed income – something that has almost broken me financially. Since the VAT rise, it has become completely unsustainable. Private education is a wonderful thing but everything has a ceiling.'