Increase in costs are boarding schools worth it?

[25Green]

With the recent rise & continuation of fees going up, do past & present parents of boarding schools see the value in them?

If we hadn't already got a long way down the line, I'd be seriously questioning embarking on boarding at the very least.

Full boarding has advantages for families that are based overseas or in the military that a day school cannot offer.

In terms of just academics, boarding schools are not good value for money compared to a selective day school for example.

However, if parents are unable to pack in all the sports, music, drama and co-curricular due to family location or work commitments, then boarding could be worthwhile.

There will also be lots of other intangible benefits associated with boarding that get debated on here regularly.

You can't consider the value of boarding in the abstract. So much depends on the child, the family situation, the particular boarding school. Like any big life decision there are so many factors that go into it.

Fundamentally, boarding is not for everyone, but neither is a day school. The decision of whether or not it represents value for money has to be made on a case by case basis.

Agree. It depends. The school my son attended was life changing for him for a number of reasons and he benefitted from the 24/7 pastoral care and extra curricular and made the best of everything on offer. It was worth every penny and I would have happily paid increased costs to keep him there. In a different situation or if your child isn’t interested in all the extras on offer then maybe not.

My DS is currently at boarding school and the benefits we see for him are immense. The VAT hike will hurt us, undoubtably, though we are lucky that we can afford to cover it with the hit being taken by our (lack of) savings rather than depriving the family of anything in the here and now.

This question is so specific to the the circumstances of each family and each child, I suspect most people in practice will be pretty binary, in that it was either never worth it in the first place, or it will be worth it to the point that we cannot afford to pay.