St Paul's Girls' School spgs

[Oceanicflight815]

I'm getting really tired of reading the negative comments about SPGS on here. I have a dd there and we think the school is fantastic. When we were faced with making choices after the 11+, I was so worried about all the hearsay that I seriously considered not accepting the offer. How was my normal, sporty dd going to cope with robotic, hot-housed, ultra-competitive, over-tutored, super-indulged, bitchy girls who wear obscenely short shorts? I'm so happy now that we gave it a chance.

"Well I never wanted my dd to go there", is a comment that offer holders will hear many times from people whose dd has missed the cut, even though you know that prior to the 11+, they would have sold their soul for a place. Naive people like me eventually work out that the negative comments are just the bitter taste of sour grapes.

My dd went to a school that prepared the children for the 11+ but there was no tutoring except for some who were struggling. As a poster has recently written, the school watches your child from the first day they walk in the door. They have test scores stretching for years. They know exactly what is going on and there is no way the Head will jeapordise their relationship with any of the secondary schools by recommending a child they feel is not right for that school. If it helps you to believe that my child spent all her young years being tutored, fine, but you are wrong with her and also for the huge majority of SPGS girls. They are genuinely clever girls. I understand the need to tutor if you are not coming from a private school. However, if you are at a prep school and are tutoring in the hope getting a place, you are making a serious mistake. Your dd will be happier at a different school. There are girls who make it through thanks to a tutor and they do struggle. Equally, you can dismiss the idea that prep schools over prepare the kids. If that was the case, they'd all be at spgs but they are not.

We live in West London and so we know classmates and friends' children at virtually every school here. There is absolutely no difference in the amount of homework my dd brings home compared to any of them. Content yes, amount no. Hot-housing clearly not. You need to let go of that myth too. There is plenty of time for clubs, after school activities, meeting friends, or just lying around watching television.

I find it insulting that my lovely dd is branded as robotic. She is a wonderful girl and I can't see anything in her personality that you would describe as robotic. I know all the girls in her tutor group and they are all really lovely girls that you be very proud to call your own. There was a bitchy super competive girl at her prep and that girl was not offered a place at spgs even though academically she would have been fine. I suspect that these sort of girls are being weeded out at interview. The girls at spgs seem to be confident in their own abilities. They are content within themselves. They know that they all got into the school for a reason and there is no need to prove their superiority to anyone. They are just friends.

Pushy parents, sure. No doubt I'm one. Unfortunately, you have to be in a West London. I do want what is best for my children. I want them to reach their potential. And I know the parents at my prep were the same as me and their children went to a whole range of schools so you've got the same parents at every school.

As for short shorts, that's just an additional ridiculous argument against the school. yes, there are a few. I see the girls are nearby schools rolling their skirts up. They are all teenagers. A poster suggested you stand outside the school gates and see the skimpy outfits worn by spgs girl. instead, you will see jeans, hoodies, and leggings. Half of them are in their sports kit. And they do have a really nice (but expensive) sports kit.

Yes of course there will be issues but they are the same issues as all schools around here face. If you are stressed and over anxious, it would not have mattered if you went to spgs, g&l, Lu, leh, fh, nh, clsh, nlc etc. All these schools and many more are great schools who are aiming at good results. Sex, drugs, fingers crossed yet to go there, but any story told to you third hand about spgs will apply to any school. I've got a ds elsewhere and all I can say about pastoral care is that it is far superior at spgs, as is their communication with parents and opportunities for parental involvement.

So good luck to you with your upcoming offers. Accept spgs if you feel it is right for your dd. Accept leh if that is, especially if you live near it. Keep the commute in mind, it is really important. They are all great schools around here. Ignore all the sour grapes, not just about spgs but about whichever school you choose. And if you were desperate for an offer from school but miss out, be happy for those that got in. It's ok to be disappointed. Feel sad and then make the best of what is offered. Congratulate your child, they did a great job in a very tough and stressful situation. I wish them nothing but the very best.

Even more difficult to justify in excess of £30k in the 7th year after SPGS's amazing inflation busting fee rises year after year. The GDST schools (as well as JAGS, CLSG and some others) know their parents' constraints and are keen to keep fee rises low as well as offering bursaries, thereby maintaining a healthy social mix.

SPGS has squeezed the middle out and it's waving goodbye now. It's a real shame.

Bias - the better results at SPGS are a direct reflection of the intake - the GDST schools will have a slightly broader ability range hence the more variable results

But I should imagine that your dd will be capable of getting a string of A*s (or whatever the equivalent is by the time she takes them) wherever she goes so you then have to decide if the extra several thousand pounds a year is worth it. Will the rest of her school experience be so much better at SPGS that it would justify the difference?

My daughter attended Putney High rather than SPGS for that exact reason. The GDST schools offer far better value for money. She got all A*s, and most of her friends also got strings of them. She was also very happy there, played sport, went on trips, made good friends, so I am very happy with the decision we made.

The West London private schools are all lovely, I think mothers of only girls forget how lucky we/they are to have such a large number of fantastic schools. Being close to the school probably makes more difference than anything as then the pupil can take part in all they have to offer and won't have an energy sapping commute. With dd2 she didn't even sit schools which weren't a very easy journey.

Those are exactly our thoughts. We are comparatively well off but not super rich and can't happily sign off that much money potentially rising at a rate of 40%. It doesn't align with my financial principles. Just to be clear I'm not criticising the school or any families who go there, I'm sure it's an amazing school! DD is pleased to be offered a place but not bothered by it. We are also waiting to hear from Tiffin.

We are in a completely different city (Paris) but I just wanted to reiterate that a school's overall stellar exam grades doesn't mean that your own DC won't do as well or better in a school with a more mixed intake. My DSSs' school does a brilliant job of taking every DC to its full potential. It selects on personal qualities as much as on academic attainment which means there is a good supportive environment, good behaviour and no drugs/alcohol/eating disorders/ridiculous consumer competition.

For what its worth you can get the schools accounts on the Charities Commission website and see the finances over the last 4 years.

SPGS page

Comparisons between year to Aug 2010 and Aug 2013 (i.e. latest 4 years available):

Income
£16.3m vs £13.0m (up 25%)

Costs
£14.8m vs £11.7m (up 26%)

Staff costs (included in above)
£8.8m vs £7.4m (up 19%)

Staff numbers
163 vs 153 (of which increase 11 where teaching staff)

Average staff cost (salary, benefits, pension etc)
£52k vs £48k (up 8%)

Cash
£11m vs £7m (up 57%)

Means test bursaries on the roll
72 girls vs 58 girls (up 24%)

Total school roll
741 vs 720

There are lots of ways of looking at this but what is clear is they've invested in more staff (11 more teaching staff) and modestly increased their bursaries.

However, they have also increased the number of students a little and the fees a lot leaving them with about £1m more cash in the bank per year (£4m over 4 years).

I suspect the talk of capital investment is overblown as the Mercers would step up to that (as they have for the Boys school). I do spy a bit of a battle with a deficit in the defined benefit pension scheme (gold dust if you have one) but that isn't that big a deal.

The argument that higher fees will pay for more bursaries to reach 20% on bursaries doesn't seem to have materialised despite the flush coffers.

Let's see what the 2014 accounts will show ...... another bumper rise is income, flat costs, cash pile growing? Or will they start giving out those bursaries to make up for the alienation of many parents/girls that can't afford them any more?

I love numbers and facts .... sorry.

MN164,

So, the staff numbers went up from 153 to 163 (up 6.5%), total school roll went up from 720 to 741 (up 3%), while the number of bursaries went up from 58 to 72 (up 24%). That does sound like number of bursaries went up faster than either staff or total school roll.

Assuming, in the absence of information, that the number of bursaries were equally distributed ( I agree there is a potential fallacy there), average number of bursaries per year in the year to Aug 2010 was 8.285 (58/7 year groups), while the average number of bursaries in the year to Aug 2013 was 10.285 (72 / 7 year groups). This can potentially imply that the average number of bursaries for the three years from Aug 2010 to Aug 2013 was 12.93 ( (710.285-48.285)/3) which indicates an increase of 56% (12.93/8.285) in the number of bursaries per year.

Agree 12.93 per year (12%) is still far from stated(??) target of 20%.

Thanks for these numbers, MN164, and for your analysis.

It's clear that SPGS's fee hikes, which are rapidly excluding the salaried middle class (if not those with bonuses, share options, "little inheritances" and other such exotica spoken of on other current threads), are being spent on making the school ever more luxurious for the sliver of the super rich who haven't yet been priced out. You can see that in the teacher/pupil ratio: 11 more teachers/21 more pupils.

72 on bursaries out of 741 on the roll. That's fewer than 10%. A long way to go. Meanwhile bursary pupils will find there will be on average just two of them in any class of 20 (if class sizes even get that big) with everybody else being super rich. A strange polarised community is being built there and in similarly exclusive schools in London. It's a shame.

Here's the 2014 numbers update (vs 2010, five years). They added another £3m to cash in the last year whilst debts remained stable and low. The bursary fund continues to grow but the amount spent and numbers of bursaries given does not ..... :

Income
£17.5m vs £13.0m

Costs
£15.5m vs £11.7m

Staff costs (included in above)
£9.5m vs £7.4m

Staff numbers
174 vs 153

Average staff cost (salary, benefits, pension etc)
£55k vs £48k

Cash
£14m vs £7m

Means test bursaries on the roll
72 girls vs 58 girls (up 24%)

Total school roll
747 vs 720

Genuine question. How do they count discounts to children of staff members? If I were starting again, I would consider retraining as a teacher after DC were born and then apply for every job going at Alleyns or Latymer U. Staff discount for both DC from prep all the way through. Life would have been a lot easier.

When DD was going through 11+ one wise mother (two older DC then one much younger) put it well. Putney (and other GDST) are cheaper by the equivalent of a family holiday. Are other schools so much better that it is worth giving this up.

So what do you think they are stock piling the cash for MN164?

For a charity there are different kinds of cash. Some might be restricted for certain purposes (bursaries or other commitments), perhaps set at the time of donation by the donor.

They will have a policy of having a certain number of months costs at hand. Their biggest overhead is salary. So long as they can pay next month's salaries, rates and utilities they're in pretty good shape, especially as their income is rock solid (paid in advance, termly, on direct debit, very wealthy customers so credit risk is low). At the risk of being non-prudent (?) they might need to hold £1m in cash for that. Frankly, they could easily have a bank facility to cover this and not hold a cash pile at all for such outflows.

In that context, even is there is a good chunk of "restricted use" cash, £14m is one hell of a gold chest.

All this said, it's up to the trustees to decide what to "charge" parents and what to spend money on, so long as it's in keeping their "charitable objectives". There isn't anything to "regulate" them or to counter-act the inflation busting fee rises and bursting coffers. It's a private school and Ofsted and the DoE can't really touch them without a major policy change.

Springisontheway- huge building project lasting a couple of years starts in Sept to redevelop and expand the school facilities- imagine that is coming from the pot.

The Worshipful Company of Mercers funded the £75m+ building works at the boys school. Wouldn't they do the same for the girls school?

I know nothing of the SW London schools and reputations but have to say your post is fantastic. People should read it and apply it to whatever school they are down treading.

And as for Eton. Whe I was was younger I worked for a company that took children for residential. High proportion were london Indi pupils - many Eton boys. They were the politest teenage boys I've ever met in my life. I was there to supervise and look after them - except (old fashioned as it may be!) they were very protective of me and held doors, offered to get me coffee at breakfast etc. I expect many of them are wonderful fathers and husbands now

It happens everywhere though. I get it with my DS who has SN, comments about doing level 6 maths is no major deal when they find out he is doing it. However level 6 is a massive deal when their dcs are doing it in literacy - of course because my DS is way behind in that!

Thanks for the updated numbers, MN164. These confirm quite starkly that SPGS is offering an increasingly luxurious education, which will soon be affordable only by a super rich elite and by a smattering of families privileged to receive bursaries.

Average staff costs have increased by 15% in 5 years while the fees have gone up by 37%. Teachers are being priced out of sending their own DC to these elite schools. I don't know what the staff discounts are at SPGS, Needmoresleep, but I believe they are generally around one third of full fees in London schools. If you were a teacher at SPGS, that would mean the fees you would pay, after the discount, would be about the same amount as you would pay at GDST and some other London girls' schools without any such discount. The difference is closer to two family holidays than one.

The stats show that no additional bursaries were awarded in 2014. There have only been 14 additional bursaries in the last 5 years, that's 2.8 pa. At that rate, it will take 28 years to reach 20% of the school roll. The numbers speak for themselves: the school does not walk its talk on diversity and inclusiveness.

You can see the school's building plans on its website: the home page takes you to them. It's called "Project Ambition" and it explains that the most important reason for the new buildings is to address "stress and anxiety", which "was [sic] highlighted as a key issue" in a recent survey of staff, parents and pupils. What of parents' stress and anxiety in coping with astronomical annual fee hikes?

OP was right to accentuate the positive about SPGS and to counter some myths about it. However, the school's accounts show where it is heading now and it's a million miles away from the world of salaried middle class professionals. It must be a planet where, if other threads are to believed, people with "trust funds", "share options" and "financial advisers" play snowplough dodgems. The Charity Commission won't like it.

I'm very impressed by your number crunching MN164. Dying to know how those numbers compare to the similar local schools - is there an easy way to find this information??

Click on the link I posted and use the search to find the schools and their accounts. It should all be there, assuming the schools are charities. If they are state schools or in private "for profit" ownership you need to look elsewhere.

Thanks.

I assume staff discounts are not considered "bursaries". If they were they could go a long way to explaining Latymer Upper's rapid increase in bursary numbers, and give slightly diofferent meaning to the numbers above. Presumably not such an issue with SPGS are first you need a girl and then the girl needs to get through a very selective 11+. Staff discounts should be a good thing as they help attract and retain staff. It would be pretty galling to work at SPGS (or elsewhere) and see colleagues enjoy a discount, but either have boys or a girl who was not clever enough.

FWIW I think staff discounts within the Alleyns Foundation are higher, as much as 80%. No idea about West London schools though they too will face the general London problem of attracting staff. I have spotted from staff ads that both Westminster and Latymer Upper can offer staff accommodaton. Not sure if this is true of the Mercer Company schools.

I also think that pricing out the affluent middle classes, and given Putney is a very good school and cheaper by the price of a family holiday they must be losing some, will change the character of the school. Or rather within the diversity they have at the moment, change the balance in favour of the more affluent non-dom financial sector types. Whether this is a problem may depend on where you start from.

A positive is that pupil aspirations will be high, and parents will work hard to support those aspirations, thus improving SPGS' international standing. A negative perhaps is that there are some good things about British middle class values which may be one reason why our education has such an international appeal. I wonder if the school might lose something it perhaps does not realise is valuable.

Your points are well made, Needmoresleep.

My only quibble is in relation to what you say about pupil aspirations. The impression I have, and which is confirmed by recent posts on other threads about how to pay school fees, is that the small class of parents who can now afford to pay the eye watering fees at the likes of SPGS don't generally pay these from income derived from their own hard work. Instead, they rely on trust funds, personal and family wealth, profit shares, bonuses and suchlike.

A hard working university professor, for example, could no longer afford to send her DD to SPGS, certainly not if she had to pay the fees from her university salary and from ordinary savings accumulated during an academic career. Ten years ago an SPGS education was within a university professor's grasp; not now.

I would hope that Paulinas would still aspire to academia, and other salaried professions, but they are unlikely to find many examples amongst the parent body.

Of course, they might look up to their teachers but, as you rightly point out, those teachers will themselves be finding it increasingly difficult to send their own DDs to the school, which is another recent change whose repercussions will be felt in the coming years.

For those of us who support independent schools, and who used to admire the likes of SPGS before they headed for the luxury market, this is a sorry state of affairs to witness. It's really a disgrace.

I do fear the Charity Commission will take note at some point and that other more prudent and socially aware schools (like JAGS, CLSG, the GDST schools) could end up suffering by association.

SPGS girls have always tended to be a bit wealthier than those at other London day schools with a higher percentage coming from the private sector (20-25% from Bute House alone). Indeed DD at SPGS/DS at Eton used to be a common combination before entry to both became more competitive. I therefore wouldn't be surprised if SPGS fees have always been a bit higher than other girls day schools although given that (unlike the others) they include lunch SPGS fees are in fact currently not much more than local rivals like Godolphin or Latymer Upper in the lower school and no more than 10% more in the sixth form. I very much doubt many prospective SPGS parents will be put off by an extra £2000 a year in fees in the sixth form (other leading Oxbridge schools also tend to charge a premium -see e.g. Westminster at over £25K per annum for sixth form day pupils).Paulinas have always been posh!

Granola

How would you measure socially aware to compare these schools?

The number of bursaries awarded and the total value per annum?

Lynharvey Yes, no doubt SPGS fees have always been a "bit" higher but the gap with CLSG, NLCS, JAGS and others has considerably widened in the last few years. The fees now stand at around 20 to 40% higher, i.e. between £3k and £6k more pa.

Indeed, as the Sunday Times found, SPGS's fees rose at the highest rate (37%) of all schools in the UK between 2010 and 2014, a period when salaries were stagnating.

That's a choice the leadership of this school made, which others did not make. It's a choice which disappoints those of us who had previously admired the school for what we had understood to be its academic priorities. The current leadership appears to be more interested in providing a de luxe service to the super rich (and to a tiny smattering of the poor). No doubt the super rich have always been there but the way the school is now catering to them, and exclusivey to them, is certainly new.

Prospective parents ought to include those for whom an extra £2k pa is a lot of money to find. If there are no such prospective parents, then Paulinas must indeed be rich. Would OP and other parents on here agree with you on that?

MN164 As my posts above and on other threads (eg re KCS Wimbledon) indicate, what bothers me is the squeezing out of the middle. Bursaries are not necessarily a good indication of a school's social awareness and diversity. They can be used a bit like social housing in new developments (with their "poor doors"): they don't necessarily prove that the leadership of the school is itself committed to access and inclusiveness.

Schools like SPGS are in danger of becoming polarised between the super rich at one end of the social spectrum and those privileged to receive bursaries at the other. Those previously clinging on in the middle (and there were plenty - not all Paulinas have been posh) are now jumping off and/or heading to Putney, as confirmed in other posts above. Other schools are being more careful about holding on to their clingers-on.

Prompted by your excellent analyses of SPGS's accounts and by Mulberry10's question, I went and looked at accounts of other schools. It's not straightforward, eg GDST accounts aren't separated out neatly, nor are the Corporation of London's. JAGS is a bit confusing too because the accounts include the prep school. But there were some striking features of the JAGS accounts, which spoke of a leadership which did understand the financial pressures which have hit most of us in these last few years.

For example, JAGS' 2010 report noted that the economic situation was such that the governors had decided to keep the fees rise to just 2%. Between 2010 and 2013, only one additional teacher was recruited while the school roll rose from 775 to 802. The number on bursaries increased to 123, representing 15% of Senior School fees (£1.7m). So, the school has deliberately kept costs down, increasing income with more pupils and widening access. The comparison with SPGS's numbers above is a stark one.

Granola

That's a good contrasting example (JAGS vs SPGS).

I agree with you wholeheartedly that the fee rise will push away a number of wealthy middle class professionals and polarise the school.

However, I am less passionate about the outcome at SPGS as:

1. there are plenty of good schools to choose from in London, especially in West London - private, faith, grammar, state;

2. if I defend selective schools (which I do) then I would be deeply hypocritical to complain that a school is selecting us "out", which it probably is either academically or economically;

3. private schools are charities and, I believe, their objective will be tested on their ability to help the disadvantaged and their integration with the community and state sector. The CC will look carefully at the bursaries and not the middle class squeeze. The school will make a case that that higher fees will subsidise greater bursaries. How hard the CC dig into analysis is not something I can guess.