To think only the super rich will be able to afford private schools?

[donniedarko89]

I live in a fairly affluent area, full of private schools. We are comfortable, not wealthy, and considered private for secondary eventually (and who knows, with the cost of living crisis), while enriching the state primary's offer with lots of extra clubs and activities. Noticing that more and more families are doing the same, even high-earners who would in the past have gone private by default. Are private schools going to become only for the ultra rich, especially if the fees spike up with a Labour government?

Only an idiot would move their DC to a school to get the 'advantage' of a contextual offer.

Contextual offers are generally only a grade or two lower than the normal offer which hardly compensates for lack of across-the-board high quality A level teaching and university application support which is my experience of a struggling state school.

I suspect that claims of 'gaming the system' are made by parents who have had to take their DC out of private school for other reasons: can't afford the fees or DC didn't make the grade to get into private 6th form.

Not as overrepresented as people think; while at GCSE only 7% of DC are privately educated, at A Levels it's 18%.

The difference is that state school DC are more likely to go and do other things like apprenticeships which tend not to take them in a university bound direction, and BTECs which are less widely accepted than A Levels.

Nationally only 9.8% of university entrants are privately educated. This does vary significantly between institutions - but even at Cambridge it's only 27.5% privately educated. It's disproportionate, but not vastly disproportionate compared to the demographics of those taking A Levels, and certainly lower than many assume.

'Only an idiot would move their DC to a school to get the 'advantage' of a contextual offer.'

Absolutely - they're far from guaranteed

@Poopoolittlekitten not guaranteed and also unlikely to be that much of a difference compared to normal offers

Typically two grades lower (e.g. AAA becomes ABB) but it requires multiple indicators of disadvantage with eligibility varying from uni to uni. In many cases the widening participation programmes require quite a bit of legwork on the part of the student - anything from essays to a residential.

Tabitha who switched to a state sixth form, parents have degrees, no FSM history and a leafy postcode isn't going to get a contextual offer. Her parents are fooling themselves if they think they're gaming the system.

Danny who switched to a state sixth form, but whose parents were making big sacrifices to send him to a private school for GCSEs, first in his family to into higher education, lives in a postcode with low rates of progression to higher education and whose education was disrupted by health issues - he will be eligible for some (but not all) contextual offers.

Haven’t some (?) one, Uni, Edinburgh, (?) given contextual offers to all from state schools?

More and more 'good' unis are rejecting private school candidates in favour of state schools ones- having too high a private % is going to start affecting funding and they can't afford that.