Rhubarb 2024

our approach to education or our strategy for the School. We remain completely committed to widening access to Teddies through the provision of financial support.We continue to work with local schools, charities and other organisations in and around Oxford: the partnership programme for pupils now starts in the Shell and we have just started “Teddies Up!”, a new Saturday school for children from local primary schools in which our teachers and pupils are actively involved. Above all, with the price set to rise in January, we are committed to adding even more value to a Teddies education. That greater value will come from the new exchange programmes which we are developing this year with schools in America, India and Australia. It will come from the creation of even closer connections with Oxford University, from more academics coming to talk at societies and more postgraduate students working alongside our teachers than ever before. It will come from the expansion of the co-curricular programme to include new sports and activities as well as more Sports Days, House Plays and – if it ever stops raining – the return of the bumping races on the river. It will come from even greater guidance on careers, from the Employability Morning for the Lower

FROM THE WARDEN

Sixth, the Enterprise Day for the Fourth Form, the Careers Day for the Fifth Form, the Careers Festival for the whole school and the new professional networking events for OSE, all of which we have run for the first time within the last year. It will come from further investment in our existing buildings and facilities as we finish the upgrading of the boarding houses and turn our attention to the refurbishment of the teaching departments. It will come from the creation of new facilities, such as the remodelling of the entrances to the School this year and the realisation of our plans for new sports facilities on the Field side in a few years’ time. Despite the difficulty of the political present, those plans will be the building blocks of the School’s successful future. History is full of grand designs which were not realised or which did not last.Those follies of ambition failed because their foundations were not secure, because they were not grounded in ethos and culture.With your support, with the participation of parents and with the enthusiasm of pupils, we will be able to realise all our plans and to ensure that, whatever the political weather, the children of St Edward’s continue to flourish. I hope in the meantime that you enjoy reading this edition of Rhubarb, and that you will visit Teddies again soon. Most importantly, thank you for all your support for St Edward’s; thank you, in the words of the School Song, for your pietas.

From the BURSAR Edward Hayter T hese are difficult financial times for independent

Why should state boarding school fees be exempt from VAT? We have not heard back with many answers, but we are continuing to ask those questions and to hope that the Government will eventually see the weaknesses and the inconsistencies which make their policy so wrong. Hope is not a strategy, and we have at the same time worked hard to ensure that we can help parents, present and future, to the fullest possible extent.We want to make sure that admissions to Teddies remain strong, that access to the School remains broad and balanced, that VAT does not change Teddies for the worse.The Warden has written in his introduction about the need to make sure that the value of a Teddies education does not go down when the price is going up, and about the ways in which we are going to meet that objective. In the Bursary, we have also been working hard to ensure that the price does not go up by more than absolutely necessary.Through a combination of VAT recovery and cost savings achieved by bringing more training in-house, by delaying some discretionary spending and by putting more pressure on our suppliers, we have limited the total increase in the fee in January to 14%. compromising pupils’ experience of Teddies is to make more money from other sources.We have grown our commercial income by 50% in the last three years, and we now make more than £1m per year from letting our facilities during the school holidays.We are also working on plans for new St Edward’s schools in other countries, and we are aiming to announce our first international school next year. It will take several years, but our objective is for commercial income fully to offset the impact of VAT. Together with the growth in the school roll and our sharp focus on costs, those new revenue streams will allow us to keep Teddies,Teddies. With the payroll accounting for two thirds of the School’s costs, the only way to take more pressure off the school fee without

schools.The biggest challenge is the Government’s plan to impose VAT on school fees. Other challenges include the loss of business rates relief and higher National Insurance contributions.Those challenges are all the greater because they come so shortly after a period of very high inflation. Our first priority has been to engage in the national debate about the rightness of the new Government’s policies affecting independent schools.We have written to parliamentarians and to government departments.We have worked with national organisations such as HMC (the Heads’ Conference), the ISC (the Independent Schools Council) and ISBA (the Independent Schools Bursars’ Association) to make the case against these new policies.We have given interviews and written articles to point out the unfairness and the inconsistency of the Government’s plans.We have questioned the rightness of taxing education at all and the fairness of taxing twice those parents who educate their children at no cost to the state.We have asked more specific questions too.Why should the cost of providing healthcare in a school be subject to VAT when it is not taxed anywhere else? Why should dance classes, sports club memberships and private tutoring outside school not be taxed in the same way as the fees which cover the same provision in an independent school?

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