To ask how you afford private school fees

[Elephantslovetofly]

We have a young DD, and although it's a while away yet we are thinking about school. The area we live in does not have a good local school, and we are considering an independent school for her

Disclaimer - I went to a private school and for what it's worth had a great education. I enjoyed being there and did well in exams. I believe my parents decided to send me there also because of a lack of a good local state school. I might have done fine at a state school, but will never know I guess

We are probably 45 min drive from the school I went to - further than is ideal. DH doesn't mind driving her there if we decide to send her there though (if she is fortunate enough to get a place)

The issue is whether we can afford it. The fees are about £9k per year for junior and £12k for senior. Assuming we therefore need to find £1k per month for fees

My cheeky question is this - if you have a child at private school, what does your household earn and how difficult is it to find the money each month to pay the fees? Our income is about £60k, and at the moment I don't think we can do it (along with our other current expenses). Wages might go up a bit before we would need to start paying, but if this is always going to be a pipe dream i'd rather get over it now

I know we could move closer to a good state school, but am exploring my options at this stage. Don't really want to move, as we have a good house here and are settled

Thanks for reading

BertrandRussell Fri 03-Jun-16 11:52:25

"And the massive flaw in your "oh just go and earn mega bucks" argument is that your mega bucks are riding on the backs of women on low wages. You can't have one without the other."

Aaaah!!!! I have felt a lone voice on MN for so many years trying to point out this simple fact: finally somebody who gets it!

None of the highly remunerated jobs in this country could be carried out for even a day without countless people doing badly paid work to provide the infrastructure.

It may not have to be your child who gets the shit job- but it's jolly well going to have to be somebody's child. So sneering at the people who end up in a low paying job is pretty pointless as you are always going to have to have somebody there to sneer at. Nice of course if you like sneering...

Getahaircut makes a good point. At my school kids were encouraged to do media and photography or business studies at A levels. These aren't accepted as useful to many universities. Core stem subjects are not encouraged resulting in an automatic bias.
When I see certain A levels on a CV I think what were the school and parents thinking to advise on this. I think many private and grammar schools make this clear much earlier in education. Some state schools do it too but more need to.

There was no despising.

Simply an observation that too many women take low paid work as a default. That we should see more women doing highly paid work.

This is not remotely contentious.

ChipStix - even if we dismiss those factors you mention, as your rhetoric seems to suggest you want us to [though the House of Lords seems like the odd one out in your list!], there remains the possibility that education makes a difference.

Perhaps two children start school with the same inate ability, and they work equally hard, but one of them is better educated, in a way that makes a significant, long term difference to the children's relative abilities.

Some people have as an article of faith that that can't happen. They think, or behave as though they thought, that the only thing that matters is something they think of as the child's innate, unalterable ability (sometimes labelled IQ, but that's another can of worms). The same people often, though not always, think that the distribution of people with a given level of innate ability couldn't possibly vary with anything else of interest, e.g., ability and inclination to send children to a private school, so that, they often think or behave as though they thought, it's safe to assume innate ability is equally distributed across children from the state and private sectors.

If you think both of those things, then indeed it makes sense to aim for proportionate representation of the sectors in top positions. But see - in that case you don't need to abolish private schools, because they didn't make a difference. All you have to do is to make sure that selection for top positions isn't influenced by anything other than suitability for the position. (OK, "all", ha - it's not completely trivial to do so. Still, there are techniques, like assessing performance on representative exercises without knowing candidates' educational history.) Once you've done that, you no longer need to care that some rich people are throwing away their money on private schooling that won't benefit their children in the long run.

If you do think that education can make a difference, that private schooling can (in principle) benefit children in the long run, not via networking or by giving them a nice accent but actually by changing their ability - well, in that case, you don't have any reason to aim for proportionate representation of the sectors. A properly meritocratic selection procedure will result in the people fortunate enough to get the best education being over-represented. If you want the jobs done as well as possible, it follows that you have to put up with that.

You can't have it both ways. Education matters, in which case we'll see the differences throughout society and there's no justification for attacking other people's choices, or it doesn't, in which case there's no need to attack other people's choices.

I think education matters a lot. That shows up two ways: it shows in the choices I make for my own family, and it shows up in how I vote (so less of the "Tories" please!)

BertrandRussell Fri 03-Jun-16 12:40:48

"I do not have a problem with people having domestic help.

I do have a problem with people of either gender openly despising the people who provide their domestic help and refusing to acknowledge that they are only in a position to make the choices they do because of those people."

Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes!!! Ditto because of the people who keep your streets clean, and transport your food, and sell your food, and empty your bins, and do the paperwork in the office, and service your computer...

Or, indeed, nurse us when we are ill or care for us in old age. Nurses and care home workers were specifically sneered at.

Encouraging women away from industries where they traditionally work ( and treated and paid like shit) is not sneering.

Are you actively encouraging your DD to work in a care home? I bet you're not.

i don't think it's about the quality of education provided at private schools. State school educate children who make it to university get higher degree classifications than their private peers.

It's about the other things - nice accent, manners, easy conversations about the school you went to: 'do you know so and so, she was there...' Etc

It's about the contacts made and aspirations seeming possible- you move in those circles, being a lawyer doesn't seem so out of this world.

these private school bubbles merge into a general soapy lather of privilege and entitlement.

It forms the establishment and acts as gatekeeper to power influence and sadly to the creative industries which rest on patronage and nepotism - and our culture is diminished as a result.

"Encouraging women away from industries where they traditionally work ( and treated and paid like shit) is not sneering"
No it isn't. It's an excellent thing.

What the poster concerned does, however, is not that.

I've re-read what was said and can see no sneering.

Fair enough.

It may not have to be your child who gets the shit job- but it's jolly well going to have to be somebody's child. Yes, exactly cory. The lowest paid, so charmingly described upthread as society's 'net takers'.

Actually you need to earn a surprising amount and pay a substantial amount if tax to move from net taker to net contributor.

It's not just the low paid.

If you do think that education can make a difference, that private schooling can (in principle) benefit children in the long run, not via networking or by giving them a nice accent but actually by changing their ability - well, in that case, you don't have any reason to aim for proportionate representation of the sectors. A properly meritocratic selection procedure will result in the people fortunate enough to get the best education being over-represented. If you want the jobs done as well as possible, it follows that you have to put up with that.

I agree ecres.

I simply disagree with you Chipstix. You seem to have an old fashioned view of the world that cannot be supported when the facts are analysed. What's worse, taking this view means that there is no reason to improve state schools.

FancyShew I agree that we need all jobs in society, and I don't sneer at people doing those jobs. However, in order to have an objective conversation about taxes and how things work, there has to be some way to express the break point in income between those being subsidised and those doing the subsidising. Those are just objective facts. Are you claiming that we shouldn't admit to objective reality because it's embarrassing?

Yes, I know Carl. Thanks anyway.

Family of four with two teenagers: Baseline domestic expenses including insurance, cars, maintenance, cleaning, food, sports subs (and I'm sure I have forgotten bills) circa £3500 - no mortgage. School fees were and additional £3,300. Not an excessive middle class lifestyle. Does that out it in perspective?

ChipStix State school educate children who make it to university get higher degree classifications than their private peers.

No, they don't. You're probably alluding to the publication by HEFCE with the embarrassing typo (see here for example).

Some research finds that if you compare state and independent school pupils with the same A level grades, the state pupils do better at university. The difference is larger at low grades (below the levels achieved by most independent school pupils) and becomes tiny to non-existent, depending which study you read, at grades BBB and above. Cambridge's own investigation found no such effect in its admitted students, almost all of whom have AAA or better, for example. There's reason to believe that, if anything, today's contextual offers over-compensate, on average, though they're a very blunt instrument.

Suppose for a moment, though, that this effect did exist even at the top end. It's still not what you want to know, if you want to compare the education offered by schools (for example, if as a parent who has the choice, you want to choose a school for your child). What you want to know is what degree results would have been obtained by the same pupil if they'd gone to each school, or realistically, by groups of pupils who were comparable when they entered the respective schools. Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose we have matched groups of pupils about to enter state school A and independent school B: pupil a1 is comparable in every way we can think of to b1, etc. but a1 will go to A and b1 to B. Let's order them roughly by ability and parental support and whatever else you think matters for degree success apart from school - let's say we expect a1 to do better than a2 who does better than ... down to a50, and similarly for the bs.

So, let our students go through their school careers at schools A and B respectively, and pause when they've got their A level results. How did they do? Well, if school A is offering a worse education than school B, we expect the as to do a bit worse than the bs. We still don't expect them all to do the same; in the thought experiment, we expect the as to be roughly in the order we had them in before, and similarly the bs, but e.g. maybe a17 might get ABB while b17 gets AAB, who knows. Probably a1 and b1 both get AAAA though (oh, add some stars); there's a ceiling effect, anyway - among the best students, even if their education in school B has been better than in school A, we don't expect that to show up in A level results because there's nowhere to go. ("Clever children will do well anywhere" dontchaknow.)

Now pick some set of grades, let's say BBB, and pick out all the state school pupils and all the independent school pupils in your originally comparable groups who got BBB. Because the independent school group did better overall, these students will be higher up the list of as than up the list of bs. Maybe the ones who got BBB and went to school A are a30...a40, while the ones who got BBB and went to school B are b38...b48.

Now they all go off to university. (Just to avoid making this too complicated, they all went to the same university to read the same subject :-) Pause when they graduate. Look at our BBB students. Look, the ones from state school have done better than the ones from independent school! Seven of the students from the a30...a40 group got 2is or above, while only six of the students from the b38...b48 group did. State education is better!

Ah. But what happened to b30...b37? That's right, they got better A level results than BBB and a higher proportion got 2is or above. Meanwhile a41...a48 got worse A level results than BBB and a lower proportion got 2is and above.

So now which school did better? If you compare the students who came out with the same A level grades, school A did, but if you compare the students who were comparable when they went in, school B did. As a parent choosing a school for your child, the latter is what you care about, because you give birth to a child, not a set of A level results.

You will see this "state students with the same A level grades do better than independent students with those grades" effect if anything less than 100% of the advantage that independent schools confer on A level grades is maintained through to degree results. It's not that interesting to anyone except university admissions officers (and they know all about it, believe me).

Exres. Great post.

Careful ecres I've made that point many times on MN (though much less eloquently) and been called everything from a liar to an idiot.

Ice also made the point that imagine it were true. Imagine that state schools somehow prepared students for university success better than private schools.

And yet those from the worse schools still outperformed the latter in the work place. Well that would be long term advantage for which you'd sell your kidney right?

GinandJag, yes I know this thread is not about me, as I am not the OP, just like it's not about the other 40 pages worth of posters on here.

I've totally lost track with this thread as I haven't had chance to read it since my comment the other day, which was merely in response to the post saying those of us with children at state schools have the spare cash for new cars and holidays because we're not skrimping to pay private fees, apparently. Wild assumption and wrong in most cases.

I've been at both private and state schools and there are so many variables involved in what is the "right" or "best" thing to do for your daughter OP, but only you will really know what is right for your family. There will always be a debate on this subject and arguments for and against both state and private education, I think it's often based on our own experiences and some people are just biased and blinkered, I'm referring to people in my own life when I say that not about any posts on this thread by the way. Having experienced both types of school I have my own history to look back on to influence my reasons for and against each option. When it comes to your original question of how people afford to pay private school fees, this is my own experience: my sister is married to my v well off bil who can afford private London fees for their 2 children without having to make any cut backs, they have a very disposable income even after fees are paid for their house, cars, holidays, lifestyle etc. My parents paid for my sisters school fees along with mine for the number of years I was at a private school by combining cutbacks, borrowing money from my grandparents, and 1 sibling getting a scholarship. My father, grandfather and great grandfather had all been to the same private school and I was the first on that side of the family to break the tradition and leave a private school to go to a state secondary school, I believe my grandad and great grandad both earned enough to pay for 5 lots of private school fees between them over the years because they simply earned enough and cut backs didn't need to be made. I have friends and other family members who pay private fees and some have borrowed money, used an inheritance or made cutbacks, while others can simply afford it without any of those, it's a mixed bag really.

That's an interesting analysis and I take your point.

But surely you recognise that the private school system - the privilege - contributes to stifled opportunity for children in Lower socio- economic groups.

ChipStix That's an interesting analysis and I take your point. Thank you.

But surely you recognise that the private school system - the privilege - contributes to stifled opportunity for children in Lower socio- economic groups. That's, at this stage, a discussion for another thread! In very brief, I think there's a better argument that the extreme and growing inequality contributes both to the success of private schools and to the difficulties experienced by those not born privileged. I think good education is ultimately in everyone's interests. I think we must lessen educational inequality by improving the worst education, and that there's nothing to be gained by worsening the best education.

However, if I write another long screed explaining that at more length, someone else will make post 1000 while I type :-)

can't resist getting post 1000 for the first time ever ;-)

I better have the 1001st post then