What is the TRUE cost of private school?

[ElenyaTuesday]

I hope someone can help me here. We have decided to look at private senior schools for ds1 for next year. The fees are around £11,000pa which is just about manageable. My main worry is the cost of everything else - what else would we have to budget for? I know that music tuition and exam fees aren't included but are there other common costs at private school that we need to consider?
Thanks.

Shoppingbags, very few dyslexic children round here get any decent support in state schools. I know this as a parent and as a specialist dyslexia teacher. Ds is now Y5 and I really can't think of a local state secondary school that will work for him in our 11 plus area, but I will resent paying 12k a year for him to get a decent education.

£27k is not for the tiny percentage of people who can get AAA in A levels and read medicine at one of the better universities. Most people are not in that league which is why they become teachers and nurses etc It's perfectly right doctors are paid more because their skills and abilities are rarer. It's just market forces. But if you mess around with their pensions or spoil the deal they have then when they're choosing future careers fewer will want to go into medicine when they see what their Cambridge contemporaries are earning as partners in big 5 accountancy etc firms are earning in their 40s compared to them.

I know. The average wage is £20k but most of the brightest expect to earn more and want to as it can make aspects of life easier (like affording school fees for 5 children ! never mind buying their shoes).

I know many very bright graduates who, quite a few years after graduating, are not on much more than 27K, and some on less. They're all Oxford graduates and mostly have further degrees too but they're not very money-minded - they're academics, museum workers, voluntary workers (i.e. with aid organisations), publishers, and (yes, even very bright graduates) teachers. The medics I know tend to be earning far more than the other graduates with similar levels of starting qualifications.

My daughters qualification salary will be over £50k but she wants to be able to keep a horse, buy a flat etc as well as have interseting work. Her friend who graduated last year (and is brilliant) started on £60k at a bank as a banker but she has a friend working at an auction house doing what she loves on very very little. As long as people know what careers earn and the long term implications over their next 40 year life that's fine. It's when they don't realise as students the consequences of those decisions there's a problem and obviously most people aren't in a position anyway to get the very well paid jobs. Most of teh doctors we know like my brother's colleagues bemoan the fact they didn't go into the City or aren't lawyers drawing over £500k a year actually.

so what is her job?

Xenia - I think you do live in a very different world to most people. The starting salaries you describe are way in excess of any I have ever come across - and from very highly qualified people. And the salaries you quote for other professions are also equally as unusual. It is a very small percentage of the population, most located in very specific firms in London, that actually earn anything like those figures. But you talk about them as if they are quite normal. To most people they are completely unimaginable!

Hula

I think maybe Xenia is being boastful and probably exagerating the truth rather.

Her whole life seems to revolve around money money money

Sad imho

Hulababy - I agree re salaries. I know that these salaries are available in the City for a small number of people, but judging from my DH's peers at his Oxford college, many Oxbridge graduates are not even earning £50k after years of work despite educational and professional qualifications and years of professional experience. Perhaps they were stupid to go into areas of work such as science, engineering, teaching etc etc?

Ah but isn't that the key to it - that these things are possible, to telling your children that if they get those A levels, go to those schools, develop those hobbies and contacts, follow that course and pick those careers that is one choice? I don't want to say where exactly she will work when she finished but it's certainly in London and it is a relief she has found a job but it was not my idea, choice or pressure in any way. I've 2 more at university and if one wants to become a priest or another work for Amnesty or whatever I have no problems with that either. I just want them to have choices and good opportunities. The hardest tyhing for them at this age is actually deciding what they might want to do. It's so hard to know even what jobs exist beyond the standard limited range everyone knows of. My main advice was my father's to us - to choose something you'll enjoy doing for 40 years.

Not boastful, just showing what possibilities there are and she hasn't passed her exams yet so she might not survive to that point. I am certainly not changing figures and the boy on £60k is brilliant in every way and has worked at that bank every holiday for 3 years and deserves everything he has got. He knows it's a pact with the devil in a sense - already he was working solid weekends recently ro 6am and back in the office on Sunday morning at 7.30am although that might have been my daughter's exagerration to me.

RTKM, no idea what Xenia's daughter is doing but £50k+ is a feasible salary at qualification for a Magic Circle lawyer in London (eg see here ). Salary at qualification though isn't usually the same as a graduate entry salary - for many of the professions you have to do additional qualifications in your first few years of work.

I think it is that her whole point of reference is money

It is her total devotion to ££££££££££

that is

rather than happiness and life

I know lots of boys from DH school get huge wages etc but why is there a need for her to boast so much?

Ah but why not have both? It's not a choice - poverty or happiness. Plenty of people in interesting jobs have balanced happy lives and loving families.

..meant poverty and happiness or riches and unhappiness obviously and yes that hint of the job was not far off the mark.

It's not easy for students to decide what to do actually but if they've had a good education they get more choices, that's all I was saying. Ideas for what the other 2 should do on a postcard gratefully received.

You haven't produced some sort of clone have you my dear . Sorry was picking it as a "random" example.

Why do you feel the need to keep talking about £££££££££££££ though?

I'd be worried about the type of work life balance a person would have if they had toprove their worth for such high salaries. Have heard horror stories through DH's contacts.

We have what I would describe as bext of both sides. DH has a fab job he loves and is very well paid for it, esp considering age and location. Is to be promoted further next year meaning a huge change is income for us. Ye, despite that he is still home at 6:30pm every night and gets to take DD to school each day as well, and doesn't have loads of work to do in the evening.

Think there is a huge thing to be said for the work life balance personally.

How strange. You get to those jobs because you have huge worth. You have skills as a graduate employers are fighting to get because you're the best of your generation. You don't go for those jobs unless you are up to that challenge and it's huge fun. If you don't find it so you don't apply. If you can't stand the heat you get out of the kitchen just as if you can't take being shouted at by a head chef you don't go in for those jobs or if you can't stand blood you don't become a doctor.

Surely it's better to be in an interesting intellectual satisfying career that pays well than one that doesn't but I certainly have not set plan that the children have to do XYZ and I'm sure they'll choose a mix of different careers. She is the eldest so I suppose those are often most ambitious. Also she works terribly hard and is very good so she's deserved what she's achieved... and we're counting our chickens here anyway because she might not pass her exams. Her friend when I sat next to him at her 21st has a plan to make the money by 30 and then do other things but when you're 21/22 you just don't really know how you're going to be throughout life so you make what seem wise choices and if it doesn't work out you do something else.

Teachers have a big impact as do big business charitable donors who earn a lot and then endow charities. They all give back although obviously some teachers are hopeless and damage children and some bankers never give a penny away.

If this thread is about what we can do for our children to give them the chances to earn these kinds of sums if they choose rather than packing them off to the nearest comp where the average GCSEs are very low then most parents would choose to give their children the better chances.

I do know some people in the City who came by unusual routes or with poor grades from very poor homes but it is hugely harder for them. Not impossible but harder. Often they are misinformed by schools too about what matters and where to apply to university as well.

But just be aware our children can have these chances and don't tel them they're byond them or not for people like us or whatever. They should know that with hard work, desire, brains and lots of luck the world's their oyster.