Independent school fees and Coronavirus

[Creamegg11]

Our prep school closed on Tuesday due to the Coronavirus situation and the school has given the children some work and also some online learning via an App to do at home.

A parent on WhatsApp mentioned whether parents will get some refund on school fees especially as we don’t know when the children will return. I suppose no one predicted this was going to happen and it’s not the school’s fault but it had me thinking.

Mum, that excludes years 11 and 13 for a start, and I don’t think it’s fair that schools shove a load of online resources up for them suddenly to justify a whole term’s fees.
We had a letter from the CEO of our school group, which basically suggested that year 11 fees were justified now because teachers are having to collect the necessary data to give those students final grades!

We had an email from the school yesterday to say next terms boarding fees are due in full - all about the contractual terms force majeure etc etc. Felt a bit grubby of them TBH....

I teach in an independent school and my OH in a different one. As people have rightly said the bulk of the fee income goes on teacher salaries. Most independents function on a fairly small margin. Our school is liaising with parents who may struggle but ultimately unless you are going to be removing your child you need to pay. I will be planning, marking and setting work as normal remotely and in many ways it’s going to be far trickier. OHs school has a lot of international boarders and there’s a real chance it may not survive. There’s no way schools have the capacity to refund.

However, since hearing the Chancellors statement about salaries for employed staff (upto 80% of a salary, capped at a £2500 threshold) will be paid, I do feel full of hope that we will not be billed for next term as the school will be able to defray its biggest expense salary wise.

They would only be able to claim this if the teachers are not expected to do any work over the period - so no setting online work/assessing/planning/answering parent's queries etc.

@Jagz87 - your figures are way out. I reckon the average salary at my school is around £40 grand. Only a very small handful schools have foundations that give them extra reserves.

@verlioca Our school is open for children of key workers (we have lots, as the school is located nearby a major teaching hospital) for the next five weeks, in the first instance (the last two weeks of term and three weeks Easter holiday). They're opening proper extended hours too, which is reassuring those that will need to use the offer.

@Musmerian Jagz' figures were per term salary/income.

@Jagz87

Your figures miss a huge number of costs - including the fact that wages are not the only cost incurred by a business towards it's staff.

I am well acquainted with 3 private schools. In fact I worked at a very "highly regarded" independent school for a while - interestingly the wages they paid were about 20% below going rate for a teacher of my experience and whilst I was there we were all required to take another 10% pay cut. Teachers in the year previously had gone unpaid for 2 months. So yes- - many independent schools are flying very close to the wind anyway.

I suspect the same might not be true of schools that are members of "groups". My children went to a private school run by the Cognita group, and it always seemed to have sufficient resources. That said - they divested themselves of the senior school attached to the prep my children attended as they didn't consider it to be financially viable.

A lot of independent schools are charities. Try looking at the charity commission report for your school and see how much excess income they really have.

@Musmerian. I am sure everyone empathises but this just not change the fact that if fees have been paid by parents and the services are not provided as per normal then even if force majeure is written into contracts, these have to reasonably be applied; not unilaterally or arbitrarily. I keep repeating that these are private businesses, whatever their structure. Payers have to be informed of any variation and agree, not simply acquiesce to a statement from the school. What would put schools out of business is class action.

I don’t think it’s fair that schools shove a load of online resources up for them suddenly to justify a whole term’s fees.

Please don't tar all schools with the same brush. I have been delivering all of my lessons "live" - I call the kids via Microsoft Teams at the start of each lesson and then we work through the lesson as normal. I am also planning, uploading resources I've made, taking work in and marking it as normal. So if my students' parents decided that all this wasn't worth paying for, I'd be pretty fucked off actually.

I teach in the state sector. Like TheOnlyLiving I will call the students by Microsoft Teams at the start of every lesson and work through the lesson with them. Any visual teaching material is saved and can be played back later. On line tasks, assessments and feedback. All this is standard across the school. I would suggest many people on here are not getting value for money.

Our (academic) senior school was very clear that the children are expected to stick to the published timetable. The relevant teacher will be available via Teams for each lesson and will be marking work and giving feedback. We are being asked to look at this every so often and intervene if our child is doing a "10-minute job" on a 30 minute bit of work.

I await, with interest, to see how drama, art and DT will work. We have a fairly hefty games/PE department (so it would really help if the school could get help paying their salaries). Most have a form teacher role, so I imagine they will need to do a bit of pastoral work.

Those hoping to have their children in school (I imagine it will be about 100 or so) will be supervised and follow the online work (there seem to be plenty of computers around the school to cope with this).

Frankly I am relieved that DD learned to read 7 years ago - I never managed to get my head around phonics!

TheOnlyBoy, apologies - I was specifically talking about DD's school for year 11.

What you are doing sounds great @livingboy. I wish my DD's school was doing 'live' lessons. They are simply putting instructions for parents on a website with the lesson materials. I appreciate that still requires work on their part but for parents its a bit of a baptism of fire having to get our heads around all the various resources the school has been using to teach the children and then delivering the 'teaching' part ourselves. We need to print materials, then photo and upload results for teachers to give a bit of feedback. So yes they are doing that, by my DD can't read yet so I then need to relay the feedback and the associated 'teaching' and 'motivation' that goes with giving it! Having had day one of home education on Friday, I found it hard going. Earlier in the week when it had been forewarned I think the parents had anticipated video teaching and we were all waiting with curiousity to see what this would be like. Even then, I was doubtful how much could be achieved with a reception-age child. However, its proven to be worse than that as we've been told that video teaching isn't possible because of GDPR. But can't this be worked around? I really hope they are going to improve on the current situation as I can't see this being sustainable.

The working parents are taken aback with what's being expected whilst they are also trying to do their jobs at home. Even if they have a full-time nanny at home that nanny would likely only be there full time if there's a younger sibling to look after during the day or the nanny has been assigned other housekeeping duties during school hours. The support that younger children will get in their education will be quite variable and hence if children are off for a long time there are going to be some kids returning with a lot of catching up to do. And if you are one of the parents who's worked hard at being a home teacher for months on end you may then find the school just repeats it all again when they go back because so many won't have covered the syllabus. Neither of our children are getting the full education experience that we are paying for but with our youngest it feels like they are getting so little of it that I am looking very closely at the 'force majeur' clauses in the contract and very interested to find out what a lawyer thinks!

@PaulGalico [sic] I have one in independent and one in state and yes- the amount and quality of work set has been about the same from each school. There is no online video teaching for safeguarding though. Very strict instructions were issued to teach the Y13s this way (state) but since the a levels were cancelled this presumably won't happen.

What I am paying for isn't the academics per se, more the smaller class sizes, extended provision, extra-curricular offer, etc which becomes less of an issue and differs less from the state system as children get older.

Sorry- differs less in the schools I have available to our children, I should say, I appreciate other schools may still offer a significant edge over the state schools available to other families.

Our school is using MSteams and having 'live' lessons following their normal timetable (much to the disgust of my DC). The year 11 are also having the same which seems odd, but fine by me! The school is also staying open for key workers, we know there are a lot of doctors in our school. So I think it is fair to pay, will be different if my DH and I can't work though....

If anyone genuinely can't pay all/part of their fees, they should call the Bursar straightaway. There are funds in place for families whose circumstances change suddenly, but you will need to evidence this.

I think you'll find that school fees insurance covers missing school if your child is ill but not the school closing down. I need to read my policy!

I work at an independent school and just want to chip in with a few things:

70% of our costs are staff - we won’t be able to claim the 80% as teachers are all still working (our remote provision is detailed and demanding for teachers) and other staff are being used on a rota basis to allow the school to stay open for the c100 key workers’ children we need to provide childcare for.

Lunches will be refunded which will COST us money. If lunches are say £3.50 then less than £2 goes on food - the rest covers staff (still being paid) and a combination of other fixed and variable costs for which there will only be a small reduction.

We are still running buses for the very few children using them - the amount we pay for the bus is the same but the income from users will be dramatically reduced.

There are premises costs that will not be reduced - our cleaning contract requires 6 months notice, our insurance still needs paid, our other maintenance plans still need to be fulfilled as an example.

There will be minimal savings from not actually running the full school - buses go fixtures, paper use, some premises (not opening and heating quite the full building) but these will be a very small percentage of overall costs and probably outweighed by the additional costs mentioned above re lunches and buses.

Our business interruption insurance doesn’t cover us for pandemics.

Our children are still being educated as best as we can.

Force majeure in the contract covers a pandemic situation and means fees are still payable as long as we do everything reasonable to continue education. We are.

We are looking at whether there is anything we can do but we don’t fully understand the implications yet so haven’t communicated anything to parents as we need time. And we need governors meetings to discuss.

But ultimately, if we lose a term’s fees we won’t be here in September. I don’t think we are in a different position to most other independent schools.

Please give us a bit of slack!

We got a letter home saying they are waiving fees from the end of March until the foreseeable future. They have sent comprehensive plans home and I did ring them and say I was more than happy to continue to pay but they are adamant that we shouldn't.

Wow @OrlandoInTheWilderness that’s a great approach! They must have good reserves

I wonder if anyone has considered the safeguarding issue teaching children at home who may be in their bedrooms? I think this needs to be more carefully thought through and does not constitute equivalent education in my view to face to face teaching.

Wow which school is this? Excellent!

I wonder if anyone has considered the safeguarding issue teaching children at home who may be in their bedrooms?

We have been advised to use audio rather than video, and students have been told that they must be in a "public" room in their house (ie not their bedroom), and they must blur their backgrounds if the lesson has to be done via video.

Of course safeguarding is being considered. What do you think safeguarding officers in schools do? Teachers are working flat out to try to deal with an absolutely unprecedented situation. No one has had to deal with this scale of disruption in peacetime before. Fortunately most of our parents seem to be appreciative of our efforts rather than whinging about them. But for some people, we're clearly going to be damned if we don't and damned if we do try to deliver lessons live.