How do parents afford private school

[Tonnnnnn]

Around here private school fees for secondary school are around £30k per year.

What sort of salary is required to fund two kids at private school? I am assuming both parents need to earn around £100k mark or one parent needs to earn £250k.

Even then, mortgage, holidays etc.

Aside from a few high paying industries ( banking, law) most places would t pay this much unless you were senior, and there are thousands of private school places around London.

Wonder if people are using their salaries or if it’s family
money paying for the fees

But commercially successful if people pay it.

Grandparents are interesting.

how many grandchildren do they pay for? If you have two kids and each has two children, how the fuck so they afford four (or more) sets of fees? How do they plan for it?

I know one couple paid for their eldest child’s children, but when the younger one had children they couldn’t afford it. It was a massive family secret for years and there was a lot of gaslighting. Funnily enough the younger child no longer speaks to their sibling or their family.

another friend has a fair bit of money and could afford it. Their child actually asked them to pay for private school, but they said no because they had other children and if any more gdc came along they couldn’t pay for all.

We looked and it would be paid by salarys for us, which we could just about afford for two DCs. But we were concerned if doing that then if we lost jobs or had to take lower incomes or had health issues then we would not be able to pay. So we decided to move closer to better schools.

Our fees were/are £15k per year and we only had 1 year of overlap for 2 DC.
I had been a SAHP so I went back to work and earned more than enough to cover the fees .
We have a very small mortgage and don't lead a flash lifestyle

By working really hard.

Some pay from very high salaries.

Some have good salaries but have cheap housing - due to getting on the ladder before things went crazy.

Some have family in pay

Even if you have high salaries now it's very hard with the cost of housing to fund it.

@Tonnnnnn it really depends on personal circumstances. I have a friend where the grandparents are paying for private school for example. There are also scholarships in the school my kids go to. We have 3 kids in private school that we pay for.

The ones I know are all inheritance. I do feel a little sad I can't offer my kids the same opportunities my sibling can offer their kids based on inheritance from their partners side, but I guess that's life.

I think the news they are going has hit at a time where we're struggling to keep our DC's at the good state school near us

Private isn't always that expensive outside the SE - we're paying £18k per year next year per child (including the 20% VAT increase). We afford it by living in a smaller house than we could probably afford, having cheaper cars than we could probably afford, only doing private for secondary/sixth form and having planned ahead financially. As soon as ours finished nursery we put the money we used to spend on that into a savings account - this gave us enough of a pot to cover the years where we'd have both kids in private. It also fed into our decision to not have a third child (not the only reason, but one of them). No outside help from family & paid entirely from salaries/savings. Demographic of kids at our school is mainly parents in professional roles - medics, engineers, lawyers, accountants, academics and a few self-employed/business owners. Very few uber rich - just quite typical professional families.

We have 2 dc and pay that for each child. It’s from salary. And almost every child in my dc classes are not from this country and all working parents. So no generational wealth here.
I find it very laughable when people assume it’s always family money and can’t entertain the idea that it could be from hard work.

I think there’s probably very different answers for London and elsewhere, as the cost of both the schools and affording housing are so much higher there.

My neighbour’s daughter is at one of the well known London day schools, and she says there is an extremely disproportionate number of only children.

I can see that paying fees for one could be manageable on a high but not spectacular income. Funding 2 or 3 however….!

I am a single parent with one child who is in year 9. When she started in yr 7 fees were just over £10k per year, which was affordable on my salary, with a frugal lifestyle. After 3 years of fee increases and VAT, fees are now over £18K a year, which is 50% of my take home income. We will manage for the remaining 4 years, taking money out of savings, but I wouldn't have signed up at this cost.

Thinking of the people I know from childhood, the privately educated once’s haven’t done any better than the state educated ones tbh.

I think expectations and parental involvement probably play the biggest role in outcomes.

Guess we're lucky only paying 2 k per year for secondary private. The classes are big though (30 students) but since only bright well behaved children are admitted it's still better than state. And you don't get only the wealthy children which is good.

It's no mystery OP, some people earn a lot of money, some people don't. Some people have inheritance/family money etc
This is how some people, including us, afford private education.

Alternatively some people have multiple jobs and never go on holiday so they can afford it.

Also some children are awarded scholarships so that helps too.

We pay through our salary we only have one in private though, the others are fine in state. Earn £200k (gross) between us.

Neither of us have parents who could pay and I wouldn't want them too anyway.

I don’t think any schools are run on a commercial profit motive basis. 95% of private schools in Scotland are run by charitable trusts, ie not allowed to make a profit.

We're in London and send our one DC to private primary. It's £6,500 per term (with VAT), but you also have to factor in lunches, clubs, holiday clubs, etc.

As far as I can tell, the parents in our year (for the most part) fund via salaries and there's a lot of high earners (e.g., investment bankers, private equity, etc.) and two-income households. We pay fees from our salaries and are relatively high earners (£250k me and £185k DH).

Also important to think about the fact that fees are paid with post-tax cash. Living in London with high cost of housing, etc., I think it would be a bit of a squeeze to pay fees even if both parents on £100k; especially so if more than one child.

We definitely felt the impact of the interest rate spike as our mortgage went from £2k to £3k per month. We felt very fortunate to be able to absorb that extra cost as I'm sure there are a lot of families where that sort of spike could drastically impact lifestyle, etc.

For us, when we come back to the U.K. it will be because of an extremely generous education allowance provided via DH’s job.
If we didn’t get that, we’d never in a million years be able to afford private for 3 DC’s.

I think you don't understand just how wealthy some people are...

just have to see a recent thread on here where a poster was complaining that an income of £180,000 wasn't enough ....

Depends on the family.

• high salaries
• have saved for years, whilst kids were young
• family help or trusts (very common in some schools)
• bursaries
• 2 parents working all hours (including shift work).
• Re-mortgage their house
• sacrifice other things (holidays/cars/eating out)
• decide to only have 1 child

DT’s have left now but current fees start at £17 979pa and go up to £23,258pa

We earn around... 100-120k? per year, without any deductions.

We plan to send our kid to private secondary school. At primary school as long as it's a decent one, I do feel that if it's a supportive environment then if parents at home are invested in education, development and activities, private primary school is a bit unecessary.

Whereas secondary school is where it really counts. So we do plan to send our child to private school. Having looked into it, it's around £1000-1500 per month I think. Which is a month of nursery fees!

We've chosen one child so that we can ensure we can provide everything our child needs. With two, I don't think private school would ever be an option for us.

I think you don't understand just how wealthy some people are...

For every mc law partner earning 2-3m a year millions are earning a fraction of that. We don't have particularly high salaries here hence why earning 80k puts you in the 5% of earnings.