To ask Dh’s boss to fund private school for our Dd school

9500 whether £ or € is quite an uplift. As PP mentioned, there may be some negative tax implications too. I would chicken out of asking but if you’re desperate and determined, go for it. If your DD is only 7 are you thinking of staying there 10 years? That’s a big commitment for the business to be paying for school and your DH would be expecting some regular year on year pay rises too (if these still happen nowadays).

@Zezet I believe there is a fair amount of drama and complicated lives in any school!
@TheSquareMile how could they afford boarding in UK if they can’t afford the local 10K fees.

Dh is an essential member of the team and they really need him as can’t find workers of his level in the area, they’ve told him this and are keen to keep him.

It's always nice when employers tell their employees this but please don't overestimate it.

There are plenty of 'indispensable' staff in the dole queues.

It should be asked and done under the scope of wages increase. Otherwise, it would set a precedent the company might not want.
Is it France or Italy? Countries with a high work load? The argument for private schools would be harder to present compared to China or India.

We had it in our relocation package but this was from the first posting we had decades ago and it just rolled country after country. New staff has far less generous packages, school fees are strictly linked to countries. For those coming now to Australia, it has been removed.

Why don’t you just ask for a raise in salary, to cover school fees?

I don’t understand why all this guessing and conjecture and backstory. It’ll be a yes or no answer and mumsnet can’t tell you either way!

We are an academic who's done a fair amount of international teaching + a foreign office civil servant, so all our colleagues and many of our close friends have a lot of experience with this, mostly in Africa, Asia, Middle East (though somehow not Dubai! but Dubai is considered weird even by expat standards).

You'll be very disappointed that right now we are back in Western Europe for a few months ;-).

And yes, some of the teachers are fucked up. Much more so, I think, then at the local secondary school where my mum has worked all her life. In no particular order:

• The teacher who had a massive drinking problem, showed everyone dick picks of another teacher, and on one drunken sobbing occasion just suddenly bit someone. She was a foreign service child herself and had grown up with a fair bit of trauma (bombings etc). Ended up in the international lifestyle for the same reason - that was just her life.
• The student who was evacuated from Pakistan and then later was evacuated from a next posting in central Africa and sent away from her single mum (who stayed on post as the civil war raged, to do her job), to her grandmother. She later found her grandmother after a stroke. Later went back on post.
• The wife met her husband when he was a diplomat in her home country. She loved the lifestyle and the glitter and mostly him. Got married, pregnant, followed him to a next posting. Eight years later two kids, she lives far away from family, and the weather is snow not the hot climate she is from. She is miserable. The kids feel it. There is no grandparents or village close by to keep an eye out. These are your classmates now.
• The local kid that can pay the fees because their father is in local politics. Local politics are... complicated.
• The mum died of corona. Her husband and toddler daughter's visas were tied to her job. Not much later, that child was gone from the school.

It's often just hard, and the schools bring a lot of that together.

They can also be the most wonderful schools, of course.

Yes, and it's a lot of pressure on DH to continue at that particular place of employment, even if he becomes unhappy there in the future and wants to leave to work elsewhere.

Are you in Spain OP?

I know you seem determined not to name the country for some reason but there are options that fall between private and state. I was wondering if these could be an option to you?

Have you seen "Happy Velley"? 😬

@Justallabitblahreally

I was wondering whether boarding in the UK was an option you could follow up.

Does she need specialised medical care?

I guess again it comes down to personal experience of international private schools. I've worked in some excellent ones and have worked in / had friends who worked in some truly awful ones which were run either just to make money or as a hobby.

The impression I got from two people I know who worked there was that they were able to make much more money there at that stage of their careers than they would have done in the UK.

One of them was female and in cosmetics marketing, the other was male and in engineering/construction.

My understanding from what they said was that they did really well even though they had no grasp of Arabic, English being widely spoken.

They both enjoyed the lifestyles they had there as young professional expats in Dubai, they are both very gregarious and enjoyed the social side.

So your husband was hired on local terms. Renegotiating his contract will be difficult. Easier to ask for a pay rise and explain your looking at sending your daughter to a fee paying school.

Higher salaries and attractive taxation.

Tax free, good compensation - if you have a good career you get paid better than London rates and get to keep most of your money. It is also low crime, you live in gorgeous gated communities with pools and only interact with brits or people who can speak English. Dubai has been literally bee hand made to attract certain talents - it’s a curated city.

its not for me, I have visited my family but I could never call it home - it’s like a new build estate on many many steroids lol

A private school is a private enterprise, a business, I would expect a good school to be well run financially. A school has employees, facilities, bills to pay and clients. If it’s well run, it could make a profit. Why is that a problem?

Not sure how that is different from an “educational establishment”