Private school fee increases

[stripedpenguin]

My DH and I are trying to do the sums to see if we can afford private education for our DC. Last year's fees in a couple of North London schools seemed to increase by 6%. If you have DC at private school, what have been the average percentage increases over the years?

I've seen the recent thread on a similar topic but didn't get a sense of what the average annual raises have been (I confess I skimmed it a bit!)

Thank you in advance

Good advice, moonbells, but inapplicable if OP is looking at some of the big name London schools because the financial choices they have been making in the last 10 years or so are completely insane.

My advice is to scrutinise the schools' accounts on the Charity Commission's website. There you can see what direction a school is going in and what its priorities really are. Keep away from schools which are increasing the staff to pupil ratio, spending on new buildings, paying the glamorous head double the going rate etc: those ones don't think twice about inflation busting fee rises. They are just not interested in parents who are careful with their money any more.

Too true!

We just got our fee letter, so my 2015-16 is up 4.5% which I can therefore breathe a sigh of relief over as it's again less than my magical budgeted 6%. Still b. annoying though. My pay has been frozen for 5y now!

Ooooh, I might go and look at that commission website. Will be interesting

It was wise of you to budget for an annual 6% increase, moonbells, but coming in a month when inflation has actually dipped below zero, 4.5% is still pretty crazy.

We get told it's teachers' salaries and benefits that have gone up but teachers in independent schools have not seen these increases in their pay packets. Indeed, they resent being blamed for their heads' pandering to the demands of the super rich with modish facilities and lifestyle services and their growing discontent is leading some of the most talented to move into the state sector for straightforward social and moral reasons.

No, it's boosting staff numbers (turning classes into tiny de luxe seminar groups) and hugely overpaying the head (reaching 10 times a teacher's salary in the most lunatic schools) that make for these ridiculous and ultimately destructive increases.

One of the major factors is who the governors are. If they are largely bankers and landowners (and amazingly that is still often the case), they are unlikely to have any proper understanding of, or sympathy with, the financial realities facing parents on salaries. Their own investments keep going northwards, so why not fees as well?

granola the head's salary is an interesting point, I suppose it would have to be adjusted for the amount of work ie size of school, boarding vs non boarding hours, other ventures, even gross turnover -although that could be argued to relate to overspending.

Some state school heads are also reported in the press to be paid very large salaries.

Don't forget that whilst fees are rising, both salaries and any savings should be rising too to offset it a little. Clearly fees are rising faster but if salaries/savings can even half the "net inflation" then the compounding effect is lessened.

Still not great, but not quite as bleak as assuming no salary increases ever and no savings interest rates at all ....

Fair point, MN 164, but unfortunately the way the numbers have worked out these last 10 years or so, many London parents feel quite acutely that schools have let them down because their net incomes just haven't actually risen at anything approaching the rates required to keep up with the bonkers fee rises and their savings have already been exhausted in vain attempts to meet the shortfall.

You're right, summerends, some heads are being paid silly salaries, and even bonuses, by academy chains and LAs too. Sometimes there are start ups and risks which might deserve extra compensation, I guess.

The governors of schools which have been around for 100 years or longer, and remain at the top of the league tables, ought to be able to understand that their heads don't need to be paid anything like the eye watering sums which have become fashionable in the last few years.

It's just one example of spectacularly bad financial management at establishments where costs control appears to be an alien concept and whose reputations, frustratingly,do not depend on such management but instead on exam results (which were already excellent before so many parents got quite unnecessarily priced out) and on impressing researchers from Tatler and the Good Schools Guide (which previous heads rightly ignored). Lids can be lifted, though.

I'm curious granola as to what is the "eye watering" sum heads are being paid?

We were just under 5% this year

happygardening, here is a link to a survey of heads' pay published by the Daily Telegraph in 2011: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8768937/Private-school-heads-pay-doubles-as-parents-spend-more-on-fees.html

The survey found that the highest paid private school head in the UK was Bernice McCabe of North London Collegiate School, whose total pay package in the 2009/10 school year was found to be c£250k, very nearly double what she had received just 3 years earlier.

I have had a look at NLCS's accounts on the Charity Commission's website. The latest are for the financial year ended 31 July 2013 and they show that there was one employee (i.e. the head) whose total remuneration was between £300k and £309,999 "(including provision of £76k for accommodation and related services costs and fees of £24k for franchising duties)".

So that's a 20% rise in the 3 years 2010 to 2013, a period when most professionals, including teachers, saw absolutely tiny rises in their salaries.

£300k pa is around ten times the ordinary salary of a teacher in London.

Such lavish pay packages and generous rises are quite unnecessary in the independent sector. Plenty of excellent schools eschew them, as the Telegraph's survey also demonstrated. They are a disgrace and they will only damage the sector's reputation if they continue to grow at this lunatic pace.

Umm you do realise that some State school heads are earning £150k +?

Our school has just announced a rise of 3% in fees for Sept. The parents are not happy.

But it looks like they have it good!

Yes, thanks, mummytime, noted upthread.

£150k is one half of what the head of NLCS is paid. NLCS is not exactly a "challenging" school and hasn't required any "turning round".

It's completely ridiculous that any headteacher should be paid £300k pa, let alone one whose school sits comfortably at the top of the league tables.

This escalation in heads' pay is a new phenomenon. There has been no proper discussion anywhere of how it can be justified. These are charitable foundations and they are also communities which used to teach "fair play". Perhaps they should adopt "Greed is good" as their motto now. That's certainly the credo of the parents who come on here and explain that the market can bear it and if fees are too high for the "nouveau poor", they should leave London or "work harder".

The other factor that has driven an increase in fees is the massive building projects schools seem to have embarked on. Suddenly they all need new state of the art theatres, new sports halls and amazing 6th form centres with Internet cafes. There seems to be a competitive element to it. So current pupils are paying for all this while having constant disruption from building work.

If current pupils are paying for current works, the school is not well managed financially. Buildings maintenance and replacement/acquisition should be a permanent feature, amortised over a number of years.

It can look like permanent redevelopment, but it usually a 7 or more year cycle.

Saying 'everyone will be priced out' has been almost a mantra since the NI increases of the early 00s which led to pretty much unprecedented big hikes in schools fees. And London schools, even allowing for a fallow patch for some in the post-crash years, now cost more per term than they did per year then.

These schools are full. There are parents who cannot afford them, who wish they could. Unless numbers are rocky, there will be little change in price from the schools who deliver what parents perceive as value for money. There is no sign of such rockiness.

Another you point is indeed very valid schools are charging more but it appears from comments on here that London day schools (which I know little about) and very top boarding schools (which I do know quite a bit about) are not struggling to full their vacancies despite increasing their fees. Obviously the latter would be outside of the reach of the vast majority even if they didn't increase their fees for a few years, but ultimately school must take the view that if you can fill you vacancies that's all that matters.
granola I'm not surprised that many heads are earning well in excess of 180k in fact I would be surprised if they were not, they are being rewarded like chief executives because I suspect most would argue that that's they are educations equivalent. As the article says most are expected to increase the number of pupils and improve exam results, and let's not forget maintain the all singing all dancing ethos. Some as you said only have maintain exam results and pupil numbers but I suspect this might not be as easy to do as many think. There are plenty of less well known less academically prestigious and cheaper schools out there looking for bright able pupils, parents are notoriously fickle and there's always a lot of Chinese whispers at schools, many of the well know big names who weren't 10 years ago considered to be very academic are now working hard to improve their exam results and universities destinations, exam structure is changing and about to undergo a massive change, many top schools are finding it harder to get their pupils into top universities, so now the heads at top schools cant afford to sit with their feet physically or metaphorically on their desks, admiring the view from their French windows.

The heads who took their schools to the top did not sit with their feet up, happygardening. Nor did they get paid ten times a teacher's salary. Just 20 or so years ago any top head would have been horrified by such a notion.

As I mentioned on another thread, Dean Colet, founder of St Paul's School delivered a powerful sermon on the subject of covetousness, which he called a "pestilence".

There are other ways of looking at this. Most schools viewed as on the top of their game are increasingly under pressure to be "need-blind". This is more likely to work by charging what the market will bear.

Frankly the market nearer the exams end of school will bear probably 2-3 times current fees. Places are limited, and of course you may choose to get there gradually, say over a ten year period, of 15-20% annual rises. A school that is up to the job will have no trouble charging £20k a term day fees and £30k a term boarding. Parents will no longer worry over affordability, merely entry.

maryso full boarding fees are already quite a bit above £30, 000 so for all but those schools with large endowments the fees would have to be much much higher to fund needs-blind education.

Governors don't have to stop increasing fees if they have sufficient paying parents. However there is no reason why they should n't be more transparent about the reasons for high fee increases, perhaps by a breakdown of how the extra fees would be spent such as:
to cover increasing costs of maintaining status quo (staff and buildings)
for upgrading and expansion,
for extra staff

for bursaries

At least then prospective parents would be in a position to better judge the general plans of a school and whether they should expect to be paying increasingly more than average for those plans.

Exactly, summerends, transparency is the name of the game.

And, yes, the "needs blind" Ponzi scheme idea is a non-starter. Apart from anything else, it would be completely skewed in favour of the old rich boys' schools with all their property and endowments. Girls' schools couldn't build up sufficient funds, so would forever be poorer cousins.

No, what is needed is a straightforward reality check. The old principles of moderation, fairness, and making do, on which so many of these fine and brilliant schools were built, don't have to be abandoned all of a sudden in the name of the "market".

The children that are filling the places of the super-expensive schools, are the super-wealthy from abroad.

If you look at the ratios of overseas to British, it is usually high, and often that figure is a bit 'manipulated' as some students will have dual nationality (eg. Hong Kong Chinese Students) and they won't 'count' in the census.

More and more Russian children are filing spaces, as well as the super wealthy from the far East, Arab States and Africa. Where a British Education is traditionally coveted/ aspired to. And there is some 'mystique' about British boarding schools.

You'll notice, that (generally) English schools are not filled with European Mainland or North American children.

The dangers of filling a school with overseas students is two fold:
The British families see it as a school 'over run' with 'foreign' students
The overseas families will see that it isn't a 'british' school.

The result will be pulling out of both sides and drop in numbers.

*europe/america - there are super wealthy there, but they do not send their children to British Schools. Why not?

America has its own set of top private schools so have the choice at home. Europeans have the language barrier to overcome, but more importantly most european nations do not have the vast disparity of wealth to generate either a sufficient market of families able to afford fees, or an expectation that the educational difference has enough of an effect to matter (because it doesn't in their own countries).

Whereever there is huge disparity of wealth (historicaly Hong Kong, Middle East, royal families across Europe, nowadays China, Russia), so those wealthy have sent their kids to Eton et al.