Eton, Winchester etc. planning for the future

[WelshParent]

Dear All,

I am new to MN and this is my first post. So please be gentle with me if I do something wrong. I don't have one specific question but a bunch of related questions which I hope I can get some answers to.

OK, so we live in South Wales and DS is in yr3 at the moment at a local indie in Cardiff. It is a very good school but it is a full 3-18 type and produces very good A level results. DS is a bright kid and does lots of extra curricular activities including piano, tennis, swimming and ofcourse football. Teacher thinks that he is very good and is working at a level higher than expected.

Like many other parents we aspire for DS to be able to move to somewhere really good like Eton or Winchester. I have spent months and months reading about the admission procedures of each of those schools and some others like Harrow, Radley, Abingdon etc.

My first question is that if DS takes the pretest at Eton or Harrow and is offered a conditional place when time comes, I imagine they will want him to take CE. Now being in a 3-18 school he will not have been expressly prepared for CE. We do not have any good Prep school in S Wales, so that is not an option for us. Where would that leave us? Both of us spend a lot of time to guide him with his academics and would not have a problem preparing him for CE purely from a syllabus perspective but we do not have CE preparation experience. Would some private tutoring be enough over the normal school work (which is at quite a good level). What about subjects like Latin which may not be part of DS's school curriculum. Is dreaming of KS or Election a dream without being in a very good prep?

Secondly we are managing to afford school fees + other activities + uniform + childcare etc. of about 12k per annum as of now. We might be able to afford another 4-5k by really pushing ourselves. Now our total yearly take home is about 52k (gross of 79k) both working f/t. We do have some other commitments like financially supporting DH's mother, who lives abroad. So even though the 52k looks alright. We don't live too luxuriously at all, we do have a biggish house and pay a mortgage of about 1200. We don't have a huge lot of equity in it though. I know it is a speculative question but based on this are we likely to get a bursary if DS gets an offer or will our income work against us.

I will be ever so grateful for any replies.

Op, will pm you.

Ancient - it wasn't Hanford was it? If so, I never slept properly the whole time I was there as I was so frightened of the ghosts. I did not enjoy my time there.
The smell of the junior common room is branded indelibly on my memory. My dear mother wrote in saying I didn't have to drink that third of a pint of milk which we had at break (was that a law across the land?). In hot weather it was warm and slightly on the turn.

My DH is fanatical about keeping milk chilled because of his prep school experience (also in Dorset!).

Funny how deep an impression school food can make on us. When I left the dump I went to after Hanford I swore if I did nothing else I would learn to cook well and always offer good food.
I still shudder when I think of the hospital food. Then the surgeon got cross with me because I couldn't eat it, and put a tube up my nose and down my throat into my stomach. That was another unforgettably vile experience.

DH got into big trouble and was summoned to see the headmaster when he complained about the milk being off. When the head upended the bottle (to pour it out in order to demonstrate its alrightness) it wouldn't come out of the bottle as it had curdled so much it was completely solid.

Ancient - is the anthology really called Set the Echoes Voting? I've googled it but nothing has come up.

OP - in answer to your last question - no, you don't have to accept a place and pay a deposit until a bursary has been formally offered in writing. What I meant in my previous post is that you could get an idea of the probable bursary from Wincoll years in advance of your DS needing it.

Dapple, Yes! Was it the pig farm or the interior smell that gave it away? Sorry about the ghosts. They never bothered me.

Set the echoes flying! Bleep auto correct.

I loved it, though rarely have I been so cold in bed, and I couldn't climb the cedar tree. I also never understood why they put the milk next to the radiators. I loathed it too and still dislike milk unless chilled. I was there aeons ago.

My DH can remember playing tennis against Hanford and watching a performance of The Admirable Crichton at Newton Manor (Swanage) in the late 60's. I had rather assumed that boys' and girls' prep schools never met back then.

Sad that in those days Purbeck had 5 prep schools (4 for boys, 1 for girls). Now there are none.

BadgerB, CoolCocktail, IndridCold, ancientbuchanan and ZeroFunDame

Thank you very much for your inputs on the workings of the bursaries. The rest of the banter is very interesting too .

Loving the warm milk reminiscences.. Sadly, I can confirm that a Catholic state primary in West Scotland in the 1980s can confer the same trauma. I can still remember the horror of being forced to drink warm milk slightly on the turn from bizarre pyramid shaped tetrapak containers. How I longed for the old style glass bottles. I didn't drink milk again until my early 30s.

Welsh just dug out some old papers, and apparently no school can ask for any money before the January of the year before you start. So, for entry in Sept 2018 you wouldn't have to pay anything until Jan 2017.

For Eton the assessments for 2018 would have taken place in Nov 2015 and June 2016, so if you were offered a place that would give you at least 6 months to sort out the bursary before the first deposit became due.

Re yesterday's q2 OP - it's not my understanding that you request a certain amount. (In fact I've never seen that happen in any school.) Far as I know you fill out the application forms (full details of income, assets, outgoings ...) and wait for them to tell you what they're prepared to offer.

(Not impossible that I'm wrong but it would be different to anything I've seen.)

Thank you very much for that information IndridCold - very kind of you to take so much trouble.

ZeroFunDame, Winchester's form doesn't request it - so you are right there.
I was just reading through Eton's application form and they ask how much the parents think they can realistically put up towards the boy's fees. I imagine that sort of implicitly tells them how much the parents are asking as a bursary.

Yes ... You're right. (That is different to what I've seen.)

I'm still worrying about the automatic withdrawl of conditional offers if the bursary request is refused. My brain must be working particularly slowly right now - it seems such a guillotine.

If they really do run it that way, it would be a travesty because Eton's website says that they are only able to offer a bursary to one of three applicants. That would mean that the remaining two thirds automatically lose their places and that many boys move up from the waiting list. Thinking about it again, it really sounds bizzare!

The only vaguely logical explanation is that Eton want parents really to explore all financial options before applying for a bursary. It might be galling to them if a boy gets a conditional place, doesn't get a bursary and then magically finds the fees from GPs, re-mortgaging, offshore accounts or whatever. If they had offered a bursary they would have been giving fee remission to a family who apparently did not actually need it.

grovel, That does make sense generally.

The problem arises because both E and W ask to apply for bursaries as soon as conditional offers are given out (W infact seems to enquire and get a feel even before registration). So how can parents make the decision say to say remortgage their house even before their son has an offer. I know it is a bit academic but it can put parents in precarious positions.

It's awkward all round, I agree.
Eton know that they have loads of parents who cannot afford the fees out of income and do not apply for bursaries because they can do the things I mentioned above . They need to be confident, I suppose, that families applying for bursaries are prepared to make the same "sacrifices" as many other parents. Ergo, if a family don't get a bursary they can't (by definition) afford Eton and therefore there's no point keeping a B List family on tenterhooks.
I'm surmising, not commenting on the rights and wrongs.

That's very reasonable - I suppose they have some kind of complex weighting method of the various parameters that are used for the evaluation.

Off topic but very amused by the predictive text that made Other Men's Flowers a poetry authority. It is many things- but not that!

Questioning Lord Wavell's authority, Hak? How very dare you!

Hakluyt - why do you find it amusing that Other Men's Flowers should be mistakenly referred to as an 'authority'?

Ancient - both the pig farm and the smell inside gave it away for me. Apparently Peggy only retired quite recently - she seemed ancient when I was there, and I'm now ancient.