School fees ?

[nickname7890]

Anyone have 3 kids at private school?! How
Much do you need to earn these days??

@Checkingout811, Kenilworth in the West Midlands. Private Roman Catholic primary and it's a lovely school. £3800 ish a term. I pay monthly on the school fee plan. We did get a slight reduction due to covid so it will go back up to +/- £970/month.
Obviously music lessons etc are on top.

If you are in a position to be considering private education you are also in a position to have the choice to move into a better catchment, surely?

I don’t understand the logic in asking about salary levels. Families in London probably have a mortgage x3 of some other areas to get a 4 bed house. Some have expensive season tickets, hobbies, see expensive holidays as essential.

The only thing that informs whether you can afford it is the cost of fees against your income and your other household / life costs.

The average salary in the UK is something like £32k, so theoretically if a family maintained an ordinary average lifestyle they could do it on a salary of £32k plus the cost of fees and extras.

Whether that would be sensible is another matter.

@1000glitterydicks that’s fantastic! My DD is in a state Catholic primary. We’re considering private for secondary as there’s only 1 Catholic high school and its progress 8 and recent GCSE results weren’t fantastic.

We have two at private secondary, and we put £3.5k per month into an account to cover their fees plus any billed extras and music lessons, and this covers it. On that basis, I'd say for 3 children you'd need to look at approx £5.2k p month as a starting position for private secondary. You'll need to increase that by approx 5% each year. That equivalent to a gross income of approx £100k pa.

DH works at an indie school. Fees are £11k day attendance and £14k per term boarding. This does not include any extras. So uniform, meals, holidays etc are all on top. We are in the Home Counties...assume London and the SE is probably more expensive?

Where I live the nearest private school fees start at £5400 per term and go up to £8400 for sixth form. There is a more expensive ones a few miles away. My DC went to local state school and we we moved to the catchment areas just before they started school. My SIL spent over a third of a million on fees for her 2 DC and my DC ended up with similar/a tiny bit higher A level grades. I know it’s not all about the results but 300k is a lot of money.

We have a deliberate age gap of 10 years between our two in order to provide a private education.

Fees are currently £4K per term which is manageable but I do dread the yearly increase !

Our secondary schools are dreadful so private is the only option unless you go to church

I think it does really depend where you are. London definitely dearer, some schools much more so. Thankfully we are no longer paying fees as dc have left school, but when we were I needed to budget £2.5 k per month per child for London day school fees and extras. Some schools (e.g. GDST) are cheaper than this - say £5-6k per term.

It's so dependent on area - it's less than £4000 a year around here - the only way to know if to ask or find on websites - they'll be happy to tell you - they'd lose business otherwise!