As a mother, my concern and the reason behind this petition is that I believe the Rachel Reeves policy to implement VAT on independent schools within the academic year, is a calculated move designed to deliberately harm hundreds of thousands of blameless young children.

Rachel Reeve's policy will have a known and avoidable outcome of requiring significant numbers of young children to leave their educational settings in-year due to the short notice of the sudden hike in fees within the academic year. This policy is likely to force many of the 640,000 children currently at fee-paying schools to change to non fee-paying schools at a critical time in their academic journey, including many in the midst of exams. Such disruption, as several Labour-controlled councils, including Haringey, Lewisham, and Newham, publicly state on their websites right now, can present numerous difficulties and distresses for the affected children.

These children have not made the choice about their educational settings, yet they will be negatively impacted. Picture hundreds of thousands of young children in tears, trying to grasp why they are leaving their educational settings as well as friends and teachers they love. Some of these children may have been in the same educational settings their whole lives. The level of planned harm and disruption for these children should not be underestimated. 

The forced short-notice transfer of hundreds of thousands of young children presents a clear safeguarding failure, designed to cause damage that is both known and avoidable. In short, the government is deliberately planning and ploughing forward with a policy it knows will cause harm to significant numbers of young children. 

We must hold Rachel Reeves accountable by asking parents to use this petition to express a formal safeguarding complaint about Rachel Reeves' policy and planned actions to harm children. The hope is that this petition will show a public count of such safeguarding concerns and will shine a light on the gravity of the issue. By recognising and recording this in a public forum, we can attempt to ensure the safeguarding of these children and their reasonable requirement to continuous care and uninterrupted learning at their educational settings.

Please lend your voice to this cause by signing this petition. We should not stand by and do nothing while more than half a million young children in the UK are at risk of harm due to callous and deliberate actions of The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

In signing this petition we express our belief these actions by Rachel Reeves constitute safeguarding failures designed to deliberately harm significant numbers of children. This is our expression of a formal complaint of this safeguarding failure by The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.