Level of family income required for private school fees?

[TheABC]

Had an interesting discussion with DH over tea tonight, after reading in the independent supplement that the average cost of fees per term for a day boarder is 4k. We are approaching that in nursery fees for DS and it's a struggle. I can't imagine trying to juggle that sort of cost for two children over 7 or more years. However, clearly a lot of people are, as 6% of all UK pupils are privately educated and I doubt we have that many millionaires.

DH thinks the income ceiling is around the 80k mark, I think it could easily be lower, depending on family circumstances (e.g mortgage commitments). Who is right?

We remortgaged our 3-bed semi to send DS private, then invested the proceeds. This gives us a fund for fees for senior/uni that's currently growing at about the right rate, but meanwhile we are paying the remortgage plus prep fees out of income. Household and fee budget is £3.2k pcm. Food and travel on top of that so probably about £3.5K pcm between us.

We try and keep food costs as low as we can, have mobile contracts which are a fiver a month and though we have 2 cars or we can't get to work, one is well over a decade old and a bit decrepit. Never been on holiday overseas, do a week in a cottage out of peak season ie when the private schools are out but states are still in. Holiday clubs paid for via childcare vouchers so get tax benefits there.

Sometimes I'd love to have a house like some of the other parents or win the lottery, but we don't and there's no point in wishing. Our view is you can't take away a good education and in the world that's coming, that may be crucial, so we do what we need to.

So I went to the DoE KS5 data set for 2014 and did some analysis, along with fact checking all this Oxbridge talk.

Debates are always better with facts.

Oxford 57.4% from state schools
Cambridge 63% from state schools
Russell Group 75% from state schools

Given that you need pretty good A level results to get into these places, the DoE's records on students that achieve AAB or better is a useful guide to how things are going. I attach my full number crunch as an image but pull out a couple of interesting points below:

About 70% of all AAB+ students come from state schools (30% from private schools)

So yes Oxford needs to increase it's state school intake by 20% to be representative. Cambridge is 10% away from representative. The Russell Group as a whole is doing just fine. All these figures have improved hugely over the last decade and will continue to do so over the next 10 years until statistical "parity".

Hopefully that puts it into perspective. All this talk of 7% of privately educated kids getting 50% of place is utter statistical ignorance. Read the data and temper your views (or let the cognitive dissonance kick in and rant).

As an aside, what's also interesting (for many other threads on here) is the data supports what many know but don't like to hear.

• Mixed schools do worse than single sex (13% AAB vs 29% for girls, 38% for boys with AAB), that includes all state schools (not just the indies)

I also think you are projecting an earlier Boomer career and financial path onto younger generations. I'm in exactly that late-30s professional dual-income bracket, and the majority of my peers have only been able to buy houses in the south-east in the last couple of years or not even yet! That idea that people get a degree in their twenties, marry, buy a house, have children, amass equity in their home, then pay rises mean they can move up the property ladder and afford things like private education, just doesn't work like that any more.

It now takes a long time to qualify in a "traditional" professional career - and housing and living costs are so expensive that most of the younger generations here are now well into their mid to late thirties before they can buy a house or start thinking about children. This is better in the north and areas with lower housing costs; but professional incomes are lower in those areas too or nearly nonexistent and there will be very few household incomes of 150k+!

It doesn't help anyone to deny the reality of current UK housing costs. Objective data shows that the real terms cost of housing in the UK is currently triple the postwar mean. That's why we have a financial crisis, and why the middle classes are being priced out of things they were historically able to afford.

A very few Xenias with 5 children in private schools and an island doesn't mean that everyone can still afford to pay school fees out of income.

It depends on how much savîng you have done as well. We'd decided that we could only afford private school for high school and would send DC to state school for their primary years. When DS was born we started saving like mad and after 10 years we had over half of what we would need to cover the fees and so the amount coming from current income would be manageable. We had a small mortgage of £76,000 (from memory) and have stayed in the same house which kept our outgoings fairly low though we did splurge on holidays!

I ended up with an inheritance and the school fees come out of that, but we would have been able to afford private secondary school on good, but not fantastic salaries. Quite a lot of people at DH's work do the same- annual bonus goes in the bank and goes right out again into savings for school fees.

Cauchy, a 400k mortgage is not 2k a month if you are first time buyers or don't have substantial equity anyway. You are missing the point that young professionals are typically paying much higher interest rates. You are also forgetting that if this is joint income then the income multiples lent will be far less.

I'm not missing the point or making up these figures: my own partner and I recently took out a first time buyer mortgage of 400k at 2k per month (Lloyds). This was not a low fraction mortgage. On our joint income of around 160k they would have lent us 600k+.

(We paid off the mortgage in full a few months later but the bank had no knowledge that we were planning to do so.)

I also didn't say that 150k was the average income of a professional family. I was disputing earlier claims on this threads of whether one can afford private schools on an income of 150k. The vast majority of parents at my DC's schools are in their late 30s or early 40s and do pay the fees on these kinds of incomes, some on much lower incomes.

The vast majority of parents at my DC's schools are in their late 30s or early 40s and do pay the fees on these kinds of incomes, some on much lower incomes.

The only people I know who are in this position either bought property before 2000, benefited from substantial inheritances or help from parents/grandparents, or are in high bonus/city/financial sector jobs (which are themselves not the "traditional middle class" jobs others in the thread are referring to).

The ability to pay school fees out of income is very much related to when you bought property and whether you benefited from the big rises, or whether you had substantial parental help.

Friends a couple of years older than me bought their starter (terraced, small 3-bed) first house in 1999 as a trainee lawyer and GP, with parental help, for 135k. They now earn a household income between them of 160k-ish and send two children to private school out of earned income - BUT they paid off the first mortgage with money from parents, sold the first house last year for 550k and bought another, 3-bed, house for 650k. Their mortgage is very small compared to their earnings. Whereas a dual-income couple now in similar careers who missed the property bubble boat would really struggle to afford the same starter home even with a high joint income.

MN I consider your analysis of the Oxbridge stats a wee bit simplistic.

If you look at the data, you will see that state schools are not uniformly represented at all. Too many grammar schools, not enough comps. And some LEAs woefully under represented.

It's not simply a case of saying an increase in 10% and all's well.

Also, as we all know the title RG university means very little. If we hone our search to the most selective universities, we see that private schools are over represented.

And these figures get much worse when we go to Masters level.

BTW no cognitive dissonance here. I have a foot in each camp; DC at private school, a job on the widening access scheme at Oxbridge.

It would not be surprising that very selective state and private schools who take only the very brightest 10% of the local area get more children into universities which are good ones. The interesting comparison would be say with Newcastle where I am from which has only had comps in the state sector since about 1971 and Bucks or Cheshire which both have some grammars although actually that would not help because we'd be comparing a poor area with rich ones. funny how the rich kept their grammar schools I suppose because the left got in in the 60s and 70s in poorer areas and abolished grammars. I thought the Sutton trust had found that the same percentage of children get into good universities from areas just with comps as those with grammars actually.

(Also I think at sixth form level private school numbers rise to 20%)

TWF

Of course you can drill down, but my overall summary analysis is way better than the throwaway 7% private get 50% Oxbridge line. My analysis shows that this is incorrect.

I took the trouble to do the stats to make that point. Where is the work you've done to illustrate your point? ......

For example, you say too many grammar schools. So how many are there in those state school results (as a %). Less than 20%, less than 10% or not even 5% of state school pupils are at grammars. You tell me. I'm tired of google and spreadsheets.

Our joint income is much lower than 80k and as we only have 1 dc we could afford to sent then to private school. The reason being a very low mortgage. We live up north and our house is worth about 150k. Most of our friends have remortgaged and bought huge fancy houses with huge mortgages but for us we would prefer to have the spare money to put into savings and potentially afford to send ds to private school. I do agree there is an element of priorities.

Another thought:

When New Labour dropped the assisted places scheme when they came in in 97 what effect did this have on private schools income?

It must have been worth a few £££ to the sector each year.

1 in 5 pupils in my school were on it.

MN I don't have the stats with me, but IIRC, there were almost double the number of applications from students coming from comprehensive than from grammar schools (2013 cohort).

Given how many more pupils there are at sixth form in comps, I think we still have an issue.

This isn't just Oxbridge BTW, the figures are similar (sometimes a bit worse) for other highly selective universities; LSE, UCL, Imperial, Durham etc etc And other universities identify a similar trend on their most sought after courses.

I visit a hell of a lot of schools and my observations are that too many comprehensives don't give their pupils the right advice in the right time frame so that they're in a position to apply to these universities.

That's an extremely useful table, MN 164.

I mentioned your SPGS stats to TWF up thread, making the point that private schools make their own choices about where they will incur costs, what their fees will be, and who they are looking to pay them.

These schools don't operate in some kind of super rich fog from which they can protest about the inevitability of inequality, which is blinding them to their purpose and duties. They are capable of looking at the numbers themselves and making different decisions. Or at least they should be.

The ability to pay school fees out of income is very much related to when you bought property and whether you benefited from the big rises, or whether you had substantial parental help.

This is my last post on this and then I will just leave this. But if you have a family income of 150k, 8k per month net, and you live in a house costing 430k with a 400k mortgage costing 2k per month, you still have 6k per month left over to live on and pay school fees. This is nothing to do with having parental help or having a lot of equity in a property. (I know because I have done it.) It is about choosing a relatively modest home and lifestyle to accommodate the fees. It can also be about making the choice to live outside London, where life is much cheaper. (Where I live a GP and a lawyer could easily find a nice 4 bedroom house for 400k and have lots of money left over for fees if they wanted.)

And yes of course lots of families don't earn 150k, lots of parents in their early 40s do have relatively small mortgages because of buying 10-15 years ago etc etc. But in the schools my DC have attended many parents have clearly chosen modest lifestyles to fund the fees. Meanwhile there are kids living near me walking from their million pound houses with Porsches on the driveways to a secondary school which is in special measures, but which their families are presumably happy with.

BTW even 20 years ago most academics couldn't afford to send their children to private schools. If anything I would say the situation has slightly improved for academics since under the Labour government professors' salaries went up, and nowadays people don't stay as lecturers but move up to professorships from their late 30s onwards.

TWF

That's a good point. If a school doesn't support and direct the student well enough and in advance of their results the student may miss opportunities. That sounds like something that can be built into the "process"?

I still don't understand your grammar vs comp point.

Is it that you'd expect a non selective school to produce the same academic results as a selective one? Why would you think that?

That's why I focussed on the AAB grades and how many of that cohort got to good unis.

The improvement to the process you highlight might be enough to get that cohort in the right place.

Clearly, it's worth discussing how this breaks down regionally to see what boroughs and specific schools need work.

There are lots of things that could be changed quote easily in comprehensives to augment the numbers of DC heading out to the most selective universities.

Unfortunately many schools are resistant.

They're judged after all not on how many pupils get places at the LSE but how many of the year 11 cohort get 5 GCSEs.

Some of the things that keep the later statistic propped up, undermine other pupils chances of getting what they need to have a chance at the former.

That's a very sad state of affairs.

If anything I would say the situation has slightly improved for academics since under the Labour government professors' salaries went up, and nowadays people don't stay as lecturers but move up to professorships from their late 30s onwards.

Cauchy, this is completely wrong. Salaries in academia have dropped significantly, there is a huge bottleneck of very good people competing for a small number of jobs, and it is now routine for people to be in their late 30s before even getting their first permanent (entry-level) lectureship (this is, if anything, even worse in the sciences where having serial fixed-term soft-money-funded postdoctoral positions is the norm). Most people in academia are certainly not professors by their late 30s!

I know we've moved on from it but I think it's very naive to talk about sacrifices. We could afford it if we made sacrifices but they aren't ones I'm willing to make. I went to a private school and even back then was surrounded by very very rich people which proved a fairly toxic environment for some. I had a friend on a bursary and she still now is affected, completely obsessed by money and status, desperate to be on the scene, marry well etc end has even said she must have been born in to the wrong family.

It's incredibly difficult for a young person to be surrounded by people with quite so much and not be able to keep up. A lesson they have to learn maybe and not necessarily a reason to eschew private but still something to think about.

Cauchy do you mean clinical academics? Their salaries doubled under Blair, while the rest of us saw no such increases.

Most academics are not profs in their 30s! Only 14% of first time post docs are still in academia 10 years later, it's so tough now.

I went to private school with two academic parents. There is no way we could pay for our two alone (academics also) but we are benefitting from the final salary pension and my parents have offered to help out with secondary. But on a combined salary of 80k there's no way we could afford it tour selves.

We had one dd in private school for secondary education only. Fees were circa £10K per year. Our household income is around £44 per year. we had a bursary of 50% for the first 2 years and then it reduced to 20% as our income increased. We had some limited help from gps who funded 3 overseas language trips and dd's aunt/godmother helped out with uniform. We still had holidays, paid a mortgage, paid for music lessons etc.

I looked up how much the local private school costs. It's about the same as a mortgage on a modest 3 bed semi in a half decent area.

So basically it's like paying 2 mortgages.

If you have 2 people on £40k that is £5k PCM take home pay. (According to 'listen to taxman' website)

If a mortgage + fees = £2k PCM then that is enough to live on comfortably.

I suppose the issue is that most people have 2 DCs or at least 2 DCs who will be secondary age at the same time. 2 x fees would leave £1.5k PCM to live on. That is doable and still more than an awful lot of people have to spare but it won't facilitate fancy cars or holidays etc.