2025 Private School Costs (just a rant)

[sherbsy]

Just a rant ladies as I wanted to get something off my chest...

My DH and I were lucky enough to go to private schools as kids. These schools weren't exactly posh, they were just former grammar schools (i.e. academic student factories) that converted in the 70s to private schools because the Labour government at the time told them to.

I know it's a privilege to go, there's a choice involved, a compromise etc. Neither of us ever went on holiday as kids or had many luxuries and our parents endured a lot to be able to afford it. I'm grateful for all they did and I wanted to do the same for my children.

But despite having good jobs...we just can't.

My rant is just at the excessive cost of it all in 2024. We both earn well and it's still beyond our means. With VAT being added in January, I'm not even sure it's worth it anymore.

When I left in 2000, it cost our parents ~£6,500 for a year. Inflation adjusted, that's about £12,000 in today's money. By no means cheap but both the schools we went to are now charging ~£22,000 per child, per year. That's before you factor in uniform, lunches, trips, exam costs etc.

Finding £44,000+ after tax every year with today's marginal tax rates, mortgage costs, food costs, energy costs etc just isn't possible for us...and I'd surprised many people can find it.

I know it's a middle-class rant, I know there's privilege involved but can anyone else empathise with us? It just feels like the Labour government have twice pulled the ladder away from capable kids (once in the 70s and now in 2024), offering it only to the rich ones.

I do have insight on the state school question and TBH I think a lot of it is that they financially manage better because just increasing fees isn't an easy go to

That's probably true as well. Private school parents have clearly in the past proved to be quite unresponsive to price rises. So raising fees above inflation was often the easy option

State schools funding is based on head count so you want a full school. Paywards are normally funded by the gov although not always straightforward & same for pensions. Plus additional funding for fsm, pp, certain SEN.

teachers pensions contribution is now more than 28% which is huge. That’s a lot of money for private schools to find.

And don’t forget committed PTAs etc, out fairs raise thousands for a new library or whatever. One of my school mum friends just bought about £300 worth of books for the school.

The secondary my friend works out has some pretty big donations, some parents are happy to give £1000 or so because its nothing compared to private fees so then the school get a school bus etc.

There are plenty of people with money in state schools.

If state funding is just under £7,500 per pupil and private school fees are (on average) £13k, I assume that the £5.5k difference is mostly either in class sizes or facilities. That's assuming the £7.5k and £13.5k cover the same elements. Are state schools able to recover the VAT they pay on goods and services?

Are state schools able to recover the VAT they pay on goods and services?

For certain things yes.

State schools also pay business rates whereas private schools up to now have been able to claim charitable relief

A lot of state schools are however eligible for 80% relief on business rates, eg all academies which now make up the vast majority of secondary schools.

Yes this is definitely the case at ours. I recognise how lucky we are and what a huge difference demographics makes in state schools.

While still demographically quite mixed, there's an increasing intake of better off kids - mainly families who would have been able to afford private 10 or 15 years ago but have been priced out since then.

A fair few of those parents do make fairly significant ongoing donations to the school, and the PTA is also a pretty efficient fundraising and sponsorship machine.

I suspect it also drives a similar mentality to what OP describes as expecting from private schools, though hopefully not as extreme - the idea that if the school doesn't provide a good experience, both those donations and enrolments from that particular demographic are likely to decrease. The school puts a huge amount of effort in and I'm incredibly grateful for it, but I'm also aware that they are more able to do so because of the demographics of the area and the school population.

But how is making education egalitarian rather than creaming off the most able pupils and leaving the rest without ambition "removing upward social mobility"?

And in the last few decades at least, grammar schools have done very little for social mobility - rather they entrench socioeconomic privilege.

There will be outlier cases but as a system, grammars aren't enhancing social mobility.

Prep schools will need to be quite careful as lots of people who might have traditionally been expected to go private aren’t and picking state for primary. In our primary school there are lots of people who you might think are more typical of a private demographic- big 4 partners, hedge fund managers, lawyers, doctors etc. The agonising is very much about private v state at secondary- prep just isn’t featuring so the people picking that in our area must be properly wealthy.

My siblings and I were all a mix of private and state grammar. DH and his siblings were the same.

We only have the one DC and could have just about afforded private for her, but once we started looking, there were some superb state options available to us.

We got the places via music aptitude routes and DD has a long and expensive commute - but has meant we haven't had to pay for fees and haven't had to pay a premium for housing in a desirable area for schools. We would probably have been spending the money on music anyway so great that it also landed her with a choice of top secondaries, and not paying fees mean we can spend on tutors and extra curriculars instead (and handpick who teaches her rather than whoever a private school happened to have on the staff).

So, if you are prepared to be flexible and creative, and have a child with potential for one of the aptitude subjects then there is more out there than you might think.

DD's school is definitely streets ahead of my super-selective grammar in terms of subject and extra curricular offer and she's had a happier time at school than I did.

Oh and yes - private school fees are now completely ludicrous. In a way it was a relief as they're so high I don't feel at all guilty for not going down that path.

Interestingly we've had some new joiners over the summer in our prep. I wondered if it might be because our 11 plus pass rate is v high (there is no connected secondary school) and people are thinking about increasing their chances of getting into grammar?

Exactly. Labour hate that.

Yes of course. Because most of them were closed inevitable. And even more so following the latest thunderingly idiotic VAT plans. Private education only for the uber rich. Grammars will become schools only for the ‘quite’ wealthy (catchment tutors etc)

If you read the research, it looks at fully grammar areas - where the ratios of grammars to secondary moderns (let's not pretend and call them comps, I hope we've all got too much respect for our collective intelligence for that) are pretty much unchanged.

Even in fully grammar areas, and even looking at prior attainment at 7, grammars are abysmal for social mobility.

Well, there are no ‘fully grammar’ areas in England.

However that aside, he states ‘So expanding grammar schools would actually work against social mobility by perpetuating the current inequality in access, which leaves children from low and middle income families severely underrepresented’

A flimsy conclusion with little to support it in the basic Swiss cheese style research, which sounds like something from a Y9 essay.

He needs to look back on grammars from 1944 onwards, and analyse background vs outcomes in a longitudinal study. To obtain significant data.

Kent is nearly a third grammar places, , NI slightly more.

There is a consistent and ongoing evidence base on this - the HoC library has a good series of figures and I've not seen a single piece of research in the UK context that suggests grammar/secondary modern systems are better for social mobility than comprehensives, rather than significantly benefiting the better-off.

The EPI has a great review of data ont he subject that includes the 1970 British Cohort Study, among a great deal of more relevant and recent data.

Happy to see anything suggesting otherwise from any recent decade.

@JassyRadlett 🤷‍♀️ You get out what you put in. So if grammar schools encourage more intelligent children to do well, and they do well, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s called raising people up not pushing them down. We are not all equal - intelligence is a particular attribute that meets a normal distribution across the population. Brighter kids should get the opportunity to have their potential met.

Making grammars the norm would do this, as it was before. Now with only a few they’re becoming exclusive. And thanks to Labour, even more so.

Currently most state secondaries that aren’t grammars, dumb everyone down.

Really? You sound very entitled. There's people starving out there or kids with holes in their shoes wishing they had some actual shoes. Your children can just go to a regular school it's not like they're going to be uneducated. Yes private school is expensive just like Gucci handbags only a small number of people can afford it and you're not one of them (as are 93% of the population)

Unless richer children are more intelligent, and that's why they are much more likely to get into grammars than more deprived children - even when their test scores at 7 were the same - then the 'bright kids' narrative doesn't hold when you look at the socioeconomics of grammar school admissions (and even that ignores the extremely strong correlation between tutoring and admissions.)

Unless that's true, you'd expect grammar admissions to more closely reflect the demographics of the populations they serve. Sadly, they don't.

The trope of the poor but bright child being lifted up by the grammar system passed into mythology at the same time as the affordable private school for moderately earning professionals.

I'm a big fan of setting in a comprehensive environment - not least because it allows for kids with spiky profiles, kids who develop at different rates, and kids who might have had one off day when they were ten, while still providing space for lessons to be pitched appropriately to children's abilities. It also allows for much greater movement between sets. I haven't been able to find much data on the socioeconomic impacts of setting and streaming in comprehensives - that would be very interesting.

@JassyRadlett you keep talking about grammars as they are today. Not as they were originally. When my parents and my husbands parents, all from working class backgrounds, went to grammar. And did very well. That’s what they were for and that’s what they achieved. Then. Not a trope, fact. Today is different, as I’ve already said. But you ignore these things.

I feel your pain not being able to give what you had because the goalposts have move so far.

I went to private school from Y2 (equivalent) through university in the US. We live in the UK now and I'm grateful we have few quality state schools to pick from.

My Lutheran primary/middle school has since closed down (along with the Catholic one in the town) because it was no longer viable and people couldn't afford it.

My high school (4 years) was $5000-6000 a year 25 years ago and is 15k a year now. Granted that's a bargain compared to what we spent on nursery last year before the hours kicked in! £16,700!

Uni hit 20k a year while I was there 20 years ago- note it's for 4 years there not 3. And has surpassed 50k now. That's before room and board or books which we have to pay for there.

There's no way we would be able to send DS there. He starts school next year so we can stop paying nursery and regroup on finances which are rock bottom. But we would never catch up to make that possible.

We talk about him doing an IB one day to leave the door open to uni abroad but it wouldn't be the US, that's for sure. Even if he didn't take the private uni option, we couldn't afford for him to be an international student.

Yes. I was very clear from the outset that I am talking about grammars as they today exist in the society we inhabit, and the impact they have had on social mobility in the last two or three decades.

I've not said that grammars were never a vehicle for social mobility (though as the EPI says, even in the 1970 cohort studies their value in that sense was very questionable), but that the current evidence says quite the contrary, even in full grammar areas.

And yes, the modern trope of grammars that lift up thousands of poor but bright children is exactly that - a common, overused device that had its basis in truth a long time ago but has ceased to be so - as I said before. It's an historical artefact that relates to a very different socioeconomic model of education.

In Britain, today, grammars are shit for social mobility. This has been the case for some decades. That's my argument. The impact that had several generations ago is irrelevant to that argument.

Here's the full paper I referred to originally by the way - in case you want to see the full paper rather than the press release.