To ask your household income with 3-4 DC in private school?

[Lemoning]

And are you comfortably living, affording savings and holidays and not worrying about money? Pre tax income, and obviously including the school fees in your outgoings, ie: they're not paid by GP or similar.

I sometimes wonder if we're going to regret starting down the private school road because of money worries later on. Our income pre tax is about £200k.

The one thing I would say about independent schools is that they lure you in when the kids are tots with low fees ('Look dear, it's piles cheaper than the nursery/nanny! We're saving money!') and then the costs just rack up as they get older.

Early secondary stage is a pain. You still have to find holiday cover, the fees have bumped up to £15k or so, the requests for a week in France come in (£1k) or ski-ing trips in Austria (£2k) ... The fees in sixth form are daunting and then there is still University to come ... Not to mention flipping law college. It all costs a fortune.

I think SlipshodSybil is being sensible. I hate to say this but if your DH is 40+ and in law he is probably at the peak of his earnings at present. If he was a magic circle partner, I think he'd be on twice what you have quoted and if he's not a partner in that sort of firm at 40 he's probably not likely to be.

Hope it all works out for you OP.

Agree with the consensus about being unlikely to make partner after 40. Vanishingly rare. And partners in magic circle firms do not earn £150k. Partners in top twenty firms do not earn £150k, They earn significantly more than that.

Seems kind of pointless responding to a thread where that is the question though?

I don't think I would be going down the private route with 3 dcs and £200k. That would be making life unnecessarily tight for yourselves as a family.

I have reported your posts, Bue and celestialsquirrels. No personal animosity, but there are reasons why people namechange. Of course the poster you recognise is instantly recognisable, but she has name-changed for her own reasons and it is not yours to ask why or indeed to out her on this thread.

Oh sorry wuldrick you are quite right I didn't think. I've reported my post myself too.
Sorry!

OK fair enough, I didn't think of it like that.

I have really enjoyed this thread seriously,its like walking into another world. 200k is a huge amount of money. Enjoy it ,depends what you want. I am an oxbridge graduate,make approx 30k a year. I am a SEN teacher.I don't have a mortgage and have enough money. You make more than 6 times this.

feelingdizzy
They may earn 6x as much as you but they do not have 6 X as much after tax.
Then there are living costs to take into account.

I have also been fascinated.
I think if this was high priority for the OP the family could change their lifestyle to afford it.
Certainly we have felt we could consider independent school as an option for our 3 children.
I know lots of families with children in private school and from what I know of them I guess their incomes are far lower than £200k.

But we aren't looking at the £25k per year schools!

OK you do need a good above average income to consider iThe Independent sector with 2 or 3 or more but then we take into account our priorities.
As well as what we hope to get out of the private - which is another issue, I think.
My eldest is now at Grammar so I will not be moving him unless I come into some serious windfall!

Obviously schools in different areas are different
I am sorry to hear about the boy who went into state sector at 6th form and had a hard time as the posh kid.
I don't know how typical that experience is though.
I know kids who have made this move without that problem - there is a lot of movement between schools at 6th form.
Certainly in Kent there is a lot of movement between state and independent. I know many children who go from private into non-selective High Schools at year 7 after not passing the Kent Test and parents unable or unwilling to pay the higher fees required for year 7+.

To Op or anyone else set on private i would suggest:
If all those years are not affordable I would seriously consider moving your children in to private at a younger age - year 3 or 4 and letting them move into state sector at 6th form. This way I think they would get the maximum benefit for minimum investment. I would not wait until year 7 for many reasons. But you have to take into account your local schools.

We have 3 children (one with a 20% scholarship) currently in expensive London day schools. Every month I produce very detailed spreadsheets of our income and outgoings so that we know we are able to afford the school fees every month (both my husband and I have varying income every month).

In order to pay the school fees and have an ordinary life (no flashy holidays, no flashy cars, no flashy clothes) with a mortgage of about £1k a month and pension contributions of double yours we have to earn £300k a year. This level of income makes us comfortable. £200k we would struggle on.

We're currently looking at public schools and working out how to afford them. Class size has to be a priority. Just piping up to add a quick note on Wuldric's point about uni though - as fees are in the form of an interest-free loan that our children can pay back once they've started work, we'd rather use the money on their early education. It's a very individual choice though. Lemoning, I think we're leaning towards your way of doing things - we'll likely go for public school in the secondary phase but I'm not sure if we'll manage prep, even though we both went private through our own school careers. What is your DH's objection to state prep just out of interest (trying to see if I can steal some of your arguments!)

Elizabeth, I am one of those under thirty earning 50k plus a year. I went to an average comp (35% A to C GCSEs) then an FE college before Cambridge. My parents didn't send me to private school but they did teach me to read and write before 4 and spend time with me. I learnt far more at my school about the real world than I would have done anywhere else.

My children will not be going to anything other than a state school.

I couldn't disagree more Taraplumbing. IME, ansd I was Kent born and bred, it is very difficult to move from private to state. I did that at 11 40+ years ago. I moved back to indy at 16 In my experience it is much easier for a child to move state to indy than in reverse. I think you are also missing the point about the cost of living in London. We could literally buy a row of prime seafront houses for the value of our London terrace. .

Have you thought about hiring a nanny/ governess? A governess will be trained in teaching at various levels and can personalise to your children.

If you had a governess every afternoon you would eat childcare covered for a few hours and they can help teach and with homework/ studying etc. 3-7pm mon- fri for a good governess is say £400-500 a week. Far cheaper over a year than private school fees for 4. Plus you would have no after school childcare fees on top if needed

Just going to make one point in all this, which is about Oxbridge, and the fact that a very high proportion of students there are privately educated, whereas only 7% of the population is privately educated.

The very simple point is this: correlation does not prove causation. I'm not saying you don't get a better education in private school, but private schools select in two ways: they select those who can afford to pay for it, and many of them also select academically. If you look at the average comprehensive, and look at only the children from the wealthiest families - those who could afford private school if they wanted it - they are doing very well indeed.

One reason that a smaller proportion of comprehensive students goes to Oxbridge is that they take children from all backgrounds, including backgrounds that are immensely deprived, where many of the children are already at a massive disadvantage by the time they start secondary school.

Also , to many oxbridge is a status thing.

Private school often is too.

Personally I don't get the idea (obsession) that these are the only universities worthy of consideration.

I am astounded by how many people would even consider private education in this economic climate. As others have pointed out, no job is safe. My dh and i earn good money, but I would NOT consider private.
I am fortunate enough to be fairly well educated and I can therefore coach my dc in the core maths and English skills. They are all doing extremely well. I do not intend to risk my mental health to put my dc in a private school when i can teach them myself .

The point about independent schools is not just the teaching in core maths and english skills. I could, if my DC would listen to me (which they won't) teach them Maths and English. It's having first class teaching across a range of subjects, it's about having really good sports, a massive range of musical stuff - where everyone plays at least one instrument - a whole host of extra-curricular stuff (archery, bridge, chess, sailing, canoeing you name it) and good wrap around care. It's not just about good academics.

OP

How old are your children?

Your husband's attitude seems a bit knee-jerk - not based on experience of actual schools

Lacking in terms of sports on offer, things like languages from reception year.

Sport can be fitted in in spare time, as can languages. Musical instruments too.

My DC go to state school, I am a student nurse and DP works in a facctory, so no choice really, but my children don't do so badly.

I will be a trained nurse by the time my DC hit secondary age and am thinking, mainly because of the crack pot head mistress, of sending them elswhere. I would like DS to go to a boys school a few miles away that is a boarding school. It is a state school that offers lots of sports etc and is fabulous, you only pay for the board, not the schooling, so it is cheaper. Not sure about options for DD though.

I think you've hit it actually areyoubeingserviced.

There is a massive difference between being well qualified and well educated. My dd is probably top 25% rather than top 5% (remember we are in the London microcosm). The comps would have got her to a certain qualified state with probably 8 or 9 B+ GCSE. Unfortunately she wouldn't have come out of it particularly well educated. She probably wouldn't be able to construct a grammatically correct sentence (and I appreciate I have opened myself up for mass criticism here) and she probably wouldn't be able to convert a fraction to a decimal with ease. At the end of the day, she can do those things without being an A* student.

My DH has the brain the size of a planet and went to the local comp; he felt for years and years that he had to compensate because somehow, in spite of having a mother who had been a primary deputy head, he had to work twice as hard to make sure the absolute basics were right.

I work in HE and never fail to be shocked at the poor standards of basic skills many of our students and employees appear to have absorbed. And some of those employees are post doctorate. Those problems don't seem to be present in those who have received an independent education and I think that is a dreadful indictment of the status of state education in the UK at the present time.

I have one academically gifted child and one child who is probably top average. We have paid and the benefit, I believe, is that my children will come out of the other end well educated as well as well qualified. It is very difficult to quantify but I really do believe the benefits will be reaped as they get bigger.

I am old and wasn't regarded as university material even at grammar school but I truly and honestly believe that I was successful because I was well educated and was able to write relatively well and deal with numbers relatively well. My DH has the brain the size of a planet and is exceptionally successful but at 29 (many years ago) needed his confidence bolstered, his grammar corrected and me to teach him some of the basics like shaking hands and making small talk. He went to Oxford from his comp btw and took a first. He has been passionate about the fact that he didn't want his children to feel slightly inadequate when they got there. One is going; one will not but the one who will not is nevertheless very well educated. That is what I think we have paid for and I think it is unspeakably sad that a good all round education doesn't seem to be available to all anymore, regardless of ability. Although that is, of course, a much wider debate than required by this thread.

Reading this thread has opened a different world to me. Wow. Our household income per year pre tax is around £27k. We seem to be doing Ok raising our kids & having a life. Oh & before any benefits bashers come in we live somewhere that is not mainland UK & you get no benefits.

My advice to the OP is to save as much as you possibly can & only take major financial decisions based on what the highest earning parent can afford. That way, if something awful you don't expect happens you can still pay the mortgage & the school fees & cause minimum disruption.

6k a month into pensions.... you are incredibly sensible. If there was any way I could pay anything at all into a pension at the end of the month I would do.