My son’s private school shut suddenly – the children are devastated

Laura Holden, 38, is a videographer living in Thanet, Kent. Her three-year-old son attended the private school St Lawrence College for preschool this year and was due to start reception in September. However, the sudden closure of the school over the Easter holidays dramatically upended their plans, as well as the lives of 500 other pupils and over 200 employees.

This makes St Lawrence College part of a trend of private schools closing after the introduction of a 20 per cent VAT charge on school fees. New figures released this week found that the number of children at private schools has fallen by 30,000 since the introduction of VAT. Here, Laura describes how the sudden closure has impacted her son, her family and the wider community in Thanet.

The school first announced a merger that was effectively a closure in late February this year. It was to be with Dover College which is almost an hour away to a much smaller site with far fewer facilities. St Lawrence’s has around 500 pupils while Dover College teaches under 300 – they didn’t have the space or staff, they literally couldn’t fit the children in.

This was announced completely out of the blue. Just the week before, we had our moving up meeting at school welcoming all the new joiners in reception, as well as the large bulk of the preschoolers, where we met teachers and so on.

It was such a tumultuous time for everyone: the staff, the parents and the students. The teachers were told there might be an opportunity to move some of them over to the new college, but that was absolutely not a given. And the timing was really awful as it was after the application dates for primary state schools in the next year. We were thrown into a system where there would be no options to choose from. There were people who had turned down scholarships and places at other schools who had to scramble to regain those places. St Lawrence is the only private secondary school in Thanet, and is one of only two private primary schools in the area. It left no options for older students and limited options for younger ones. It was crisis management for everyone.

The whole school community came together in response – not just the current parents and students but the wider community, as the facilities at the college, particularly sports facilities, were widely used by the community. About 30 clubs used their sports facilities and Thanet is not an area that is rich in those community resources. We held a protest which asked for clarity and answers from the school administration.

A small group of us were brought into a committee with the trustees to explore alternative solutions, but we were then told they’d decided not to go ahead with the merger as there was no longer a financial issue.

Then one day halfway through the Easter holidays, we got an email saying simply that the school has entered administration and that our children wouldn’t be returning.

It was devastating. The children left for the Easter holidays with no idea they would never go back. It was really hard for them: they were asking their parents if they were going to see their friends again and we couldn’t answer that question in good conscience. The uncertainty was so destabilising. After the U-turn on the merger we’d been saying to our son: “We think that you’ll be with Mrs Adams next year, you’ll still be with your friends.” Then we had to go back on that.

A lot of the children have been so upset. A parent of one of my child’s classmates told me her child said to her: “You lied to me, Mummy – you told me we were going back.”

They didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Even if they’d had the last term and ended with the summer holidays it would have been different.

We had two weeks of the Easter holidays left when this announcement was made, and we were scrambling to find places for our child to return to school after the holidays.

Our son had come to St Lawrence’s from a nursery where he’d had a really awful time. He’d disliked it so much he was having panic attacks. When we moved him to St Lawrence College it was like his safe place. Our child in particular thrives on the structure of a day at preschool rather than a nursery setting. Losing that was so hard for him.

We looked at the other private school local to us but we didn’t think it was right for him and decided to go with Junior Kings in Canterbury, though it’s a half an hour drive away. I know other children in his age group have been split between different schools and nurseries locally, while in other year groups some were turned away from the other private school – they were already at capacity.

He’s settling in now, but this has set a lot of things in motion for us as a family. We were supposed to move to Bath to be nearer to one set of grandparents, but we are now considering moving closer to Canterbury. The parents of one of our child’s friends had just signed a year’s lease on a house. There’s all sorts of individual circumstances where people have been affected so negatively. And St Lawrence College was a major employer in Thanet – 200 people lost their jobs overnight.

There are a lot of conversations going on between parents because the children are all so sad; it’s been so destabilising for them.

The school is now up for sale on Rightmove. Seeing that felt so jarring and awful: all these children, friendship groups, relationships between staff and pupils, all scattered to the winds. The Save St Lawrence College Campaign Group that I’m part of have been working on proposals to buy the school ourselves because we believe there are options and connections that were not leveraged before the school went into administration.

The school has no money right now, though. The staff weren’t even paid by the school for their last month of work – they were paid by the government redundancy programme.

The introduction of VAT on fees could be part of why this happened. I know there are parents who withdrew their children and cited that as a reason, particularly people with multiple children in the school.

When the closure was announced, our councillor [Polly Williams] was on the news saying that it’s so sad that this school has closed, but that there are state options locally the parents should look at. That’s one way to look at it, but also there were hundreds of students in Thanet that were not a drain on the local assets. Fee-paying schools mean more money in the system – now there are 500 extra children being put into the state school system.

Our son is now enjoying his new school, thankfully. From what we’ve heard from his teachers, he seems to be settling in with no problems. But every couple of days he’ll say to us: “I miss my old school, I miss my old friends. Why did my school close?”

It’s not easy to give a good answer to a three-year-old child, but we’re also almost lucky he’d only had a year there and didn’t feel more embedded. But he absolutely loved the school and still misses it.