Schools with fees £35k pa are they worth it?!

[tartanlines]

That's it really, are they really worth that?! My dc wants to go to one sigh...

I would agree with omidaze 100%.

We found prep school was lovely and peppered with nice to haves but the quality of maths and English teachers was iffy and there was no desire to push the smarter kids. As my dad said it was a holiday camp. Now it's £26k incl vat i don't think it's value for money.

We are paying £20k for day secondary school and I question the value of that. The teachers and teaching is 80% excellent but academic organisation of the school is inept and disappointing to say the least.

If we were paying over £50k a year I would be like a cat on a hot tin roof and constantly stressed about what they were learning and whether there was too much time on sports and not enough actual education going on. Our local public school is very nice to look at but intake is very bums on seats...

Also echoing @OMiDaze and @sheep73. We have had children in both private and state and found private to basically be all smoke and mirrors with no accountability and very quick to close ranks and protect themselves than help our child when problems arose. The educational offering was also poor - which was confirmed by tutor reports. Interestingly our state school educated child (still primary) has had a handful of children move to their school from a pretty prestigious prep. Apparently they all have very patchy learning and are struggling to catch up. The school is having to give them extra help....

Eching stuck1001 one of our kids passed the 11+ and has moved from prep to grammar. Educationally it's a massive step up. There's stuff his class didn't do in maths in year 6 (too busy practicing for the school play.. I kid you not). And his English grammar is not great either.
At the prep he was top of the class.. he gets more homework than his year 10 sibling at a private school..

*echoing!

I think our DSs' prep was worth the fees, albeit they were pretty high. I don't really recognise pp descriptions above. There was lots of sport and extracurricular fun, but also long days and Saturday classes so I don't think the fun was at the expense of the academics. I guess the chief determining factor is the senior schools aimed for. I do think all-through schools or established feeder preps can be complacent, but where their reputation depends on getting pupils into highly selective senior schools the PE-cum-Physics teacher approach isn't going to cut the mustard.

Thank you everyone, this is all hugely helpful. The prep we’re looking at sends most of its boys to the well known big name selective public schools, so I’d be hopeful(?!) of rigorous academic standards, but I’m doubting everything now…

Given the reforms to the national curriculum I can well believe that academics are more rigorous in the state sector, at least in the 3 R’s, but my concern is over whether my DS wouldn’t fare better in smaller class sizes, and whether he’d benefit from everything a good prep offers that a state school sadly just can’t. I’d welcome any further insight, plus feel free to DM me with names of preps/seniors you’d avoid, if you’re willing to do so. I’m very grateful.

I think it depends massively on which schools you are looking at. If the prep is a London day school / feeder for Winchester that's one thing but if it's a 'nuturing' country prep it's a totally different approach. We are well outside the M25 and it seems other than the top schools e.g. Winchester, CLC etc most schools are not hugely academically selective and if your child is say top quartile you can get in anywhere. The main criteria now is paying the fees..

certainly it's personal. my son in law was so traumatized by state secondary that he vowed to never send his children to one.
has it been worth it? the eldest certainly has had a lovely k-6 experience very good grades and heading to another secondary that will hopefully be equally kind.
as a grandparent what we want is a well developed love of learning and a healthy balance, i have zero doubt that the kids will have access to a solid variety of universities if that's what they want, we have several engineering tech's and red seal apprentices in the family that earn very well again what you want is a healthy attitude to the future.

@MyLeftFoot1792 One thing to be mindful of with preps is that it can be a bit difficult to get out of the system for senior school. It's fine in areas where the preps also feed grammar schools, but where we are it's independent or (good!) comps, but the preps push you to the senior schools and the comps look so lacking in comparison to what kids and parents are used to.

Agree London preps for the starred selective secondaries are different given demand for those secondaies outweighs supply and even the top ranked secondaries have now to compete with the improving academies/maths schools etc. so the preps have to ramp it up in the last few years. That said, the London preps also lean on parental top-ups/tutoring fairly liberally because many kids learn better with individualised teaching. A small few don’t need it as much which is why even the complacent teaching in non-London schools can enjoy a veneer of exam success. At least those parents appear to get what they pay for, It’s the kids that underperform their actual potential because the school is too disorganised or too big to know the individual - where its really not worth the money. Of course kids may also underperform their potential at a state school but at least there is a lot of money left over for tutoring in that case. Clearly VAT has disrupted private schools, but by succumbing to the frothy temptations of real estate empires over maths grades - the private sector schools have walked right into it…on the bright side the ones that go bust can become academies …

Depends on the alternatives I suppose.
DS's school costs 1/3 of that and I can't fault it.

I've skimmed through the posts here so forgive me if I have overlooked something. No one so far has mentioned the networking opportunities that these schools bring as the children enter adulthood. This, to me, is the biggest advantage of these schools (unfair advantage IMO). That, and the self confidence/oracy that the pupils gain although that is possibly true of less prestigious private schools too.

My own children went to a good state school, got very good grades and went on to top universities. However, they do not have the network to get them the best interships or open doors for post-graduate employment. They enter the world of work the hard way: lots of applications, selling themselves hard, gruelling interviews. Whilst DD's ex had a full round of internships organised through friends' dads and dad's friends, with a job at Lloyds Insurance when he graduates if he wants it. Your £35k pa is buying your child an easy life.

@HostaFireandIce precisely. The comps near us are the best in the county and one is top 50 in the country, but I expect still a big change after a gentle prep. Plus Lord knows how they’ll be performing after another decade of underfunding. Nearest grammars are the best part of an hour away.

I’m currently minded to see how DS is faring (with a new primary teacher) by June. I’ll visit the pre prep and prep again in the meantime with DH and chat to the Head of DS’s primary about how she sees “silly” summer born boys generally turn out. If he’s still struggling or the current school isn’t looking better by summer we may look to move to prep. I’d want to give it a meaningful try for 4-5 years for the benefit of small classes, extra curricular, music and all that sport, but with a fully open mind about returning to comp or even moving for a grammar.

Unless he’s going to Eton I’m really not convinced the big boarding seniors are worth it anymore, and increasingly it counts against them for university admission and graduate job applications to have gone to them. Fine if you’re the child of a multimillionaire and it doesn’t matter, less fine if you’re the DC of middle class parents who just want their child to do well.

No they can't because no new academies are being created and Labour want to move them back under LA control. You think LAs can afford the upkeep of indy schools?

@mugglewump again the networking may be true of Eton but I’m not sure it’s so true elsewhere anymore. DH and I work in banking and the law- giving your mates DC internships is hugely frowned upon now and generally far less done. At the big banks for work experience you must apply to a scheme and many chambers make you apply for mini pupillage or give work experience to disadvantaged kids from deprived areas.

I’m sure it’s still truer for newer industries such as tech (ironically) and in old money circles like wealth management or journalism on some of the “posh” magazines, but it’s not like the 1930s when John Betjeman was given a job on a paper by a family friend without an interview. That’s generally the preserve of a few millionaires children today.

I wish that were the case - would make the £££ on fees a no brainer! Where children benefit from enhanced networking (less common in many industries though) it is down to the parents and their network rather than schools - you cannot buy your way into those networks where they still exist.

There is advantage gained in some of the softer skills, which you describe as self confidence and oracy.

@twistyizzy im not sure what you can do with an abandoned school site - so they either get sold off as hotels/care homes or reconverted into a different type of school / college (and yes of course minus the golf course and the pottery barn) but all the families that won’t pay for private any longer have to go somewhere - so eventually the government of the day will have to put in more state places of some description …

from my experience it’s about finding the right school for the child; if you’ve found that then its value is immeasurable, but whether that’s state, less expensive independent or one of the big name schools with fees to
match depends on where you live or could move to.

We did a big name boarding school for our DC. We are almost finished. Fees now £60k pa and def not value for money - but haven't been for a while. We have done a lot of tutoring and it is a) expensive and b) difficult to organise. There have been other compromises too as we live rurally and our DC don't have local friends. I wish we had moved to towns with good independent day schools that suited our varying DC.

I think the value for money feeling / argument, will be the biggest issue for many of these expensive schools. We are v fortunate and thanks to our careers, can comfortably afford the fees, but I now know it wasn't money well spent. From an educational perspective + family quality of life.

Interesting thread, it's got me thinking.

Thank you @GrumpyMuleFan we definitely couldn’t afford £60k per annum fees (honestly these sums are now astronomical) and I’d really begrudge it to be honest.

Our issue is we live an hour from grammar schools and our local comps are very good, so it gets to a point of “is it worth it?” very quickly. I’m keen on prep as it’s a feeder, so I assume fairly decent, and good at music which I think DS would benefit from, but it’s what we’d do at 13 that I’m struggling with. I’d like to give DS 4-5 years at prep to see how he fares, see whether he embraces the latin, sports, music, coding etc and if that puts him in a strong position for returning to state for 13+. Realistically private from year 2- year 13 is probably out of reach anyway, and our nearest indy day schools are in the next city, and I’m not sure work out as better results-wise than our comps.

If it looked like he could get a major scholarship/bursary to a top public school it might be different. I think our only option is to see how the land lies in June and accept that if we live him it may be full in the knowledge that he returns to state at 11 or 13. Which of course brings its own challenges…

*move him

If you can afford it, then yes definitely.