Independent admissions wondering why they need my place of work

[wolfywoo]

Me and dh have been asked to provide our job titles, places of work and addresses for the place of work.
Is this normal or only to judge if we are suitably middle class 😂can't see why they'd need the address of my workplace.

I assume they want to see if you can afford the fees and are in stable employment.

Probably for statistical purposes? EG targeting advertising?

They want to know if you're good for the fees

Thanks. Do they just reject you if your jobs aren't what they'd expect to pay the fees.
Do they contact your place of work to check wages?!

Most of our fees will come from a savings pot we've deliberated saved and included rate rises for so wondering if we'll be rejected for our jobs.

It won't be for this. It will be for money laundering/source of funds due diligence, to check you're not sanctioned Russians or similar. (It's probably pretty obvious you're not, but they'll have to ask everyone for the same information.)

Marketing.

They can see what kind of professions are choosing their school, and can target advertising etc

No.

Loads of kids have GPs pay etc.

They're not about to start ringing work places for proof of employment and salary....

And besides you could be a supermarket worker and still be able to afford to send your kids to independent school for reasons other than your current work.

They also like to know whether you will be useful for talks/careers/donations etc

This.

We have been asked for some schools but not all. They have never contacted our workplaces.

I don't like these questions as can only think that they will be using the answers to make assumptions about DH & I and our lifestyle. It also has no impact on whether my DC are suitable for their school, I just tend to ignore them. No one has ever followed up on it

@SummerInSun did you give all the schools requesting the info the information. My biggest concern is I'll pay the registration fee yet automatically get rejected anyway.

Which is quite sad as it is a school my dc absolutely loved the look of. And we can afford it. But not according to our jobs. So does anyone know if it won't be a problem if we leave the jobs off? I don't mind putting them down as long as it's not used against the application.

I work in admissions in the sector. It absolutely won't be used against you if your jobs don't look high-net-worth. In fact, schools actively want a bit of diversity in their intake and are very happy to have applications from 'normal' families not just the super-wealthy. If you were applying to us, we wouldn't pay the slightest bit of attention to your jobs (we're much too busy to interrogate everyone's jobs!). If we did happen to notice, we'd just assume that you had other ways to pay the fees (investments, rich GPs, an earlier high-paying career). It honestly, truly wouldn't make the slightest difference to how we viewed your application. We often turn down vastly wealthy families and offer places to perfectly normal families, and we just assume that everyone can pay the fees. There's not a chance we'd turn down an applicant we otherwise wanted on the basis of their parents' job.

I would be inclined to ask why they want this information.

It's optional.
Just another way to contact you if needed.

And it's actually just for profiling/marketing etc
It's isn't deciding if you're worthy enough or anything. Like I said you could be a CEO or a road sweeper... Doesn't tell the school where the fees are coming from. They don't really care of it's you, your parents, a trust fund, loans, local authority funding, etc long as the fees are paid !

All of the above plus general nosiness I reckon. The headteacher of one school viewed DH's LinkedIn profile the day after we put DS's application in. Possibly mine too, although I don't have premium so couldn't tell.

They won't reject your child based on your job.

They'll reject you for things like;

• academic ability
• attitude of child and parents
• references from feeder school
• poor interview/think they won't be a good fit
• heavily tutored (some schools don't want tutored kids and can tell them a mile off)