How are you affording it - private school.

[DonkeyKon]

Fee paying (but relatively cheap) london prep school and then step up to Latymer Upper for one an (we hope) second child in the future.

we have a good income between the two of us but by god the fees are eye watering.

outside of those in banking / faang, how do you go about affording 2 x £35K/year post tax?

Mainly by using state primary and only having one child! (sorry, I realise that isn't terribly helpful to your situation).

I afford half a considerably smaller amount as one child and divorced so split fees with her father

Saved a good proportion whilst they were in primary, to go to fee paying for secondary.

I'm in FAANG my dh earns not dissimilar we could afford it but honestly dont want to.
we live fairly simply beyond the mortgage.

finding 100k gross PA excess income is too much pressure and it means we need to keep earning ££££ well into iur 50s which we arent sure is realistic. Hello RIFs....

Our friends who have done private... while they have nice / okay jobs its their parents who are paying either directly themselves or via trust funds. I know this factually not speculating because they have told us.

We MAY do private secondary but its really not my first choice unless the kids get into somewhere razzle dazzle.
We feel out money is better spent compounding and giving them a flat or starter home or equity to start a business

We are single income family and pay for only child from salary (mid Secondary) - it’s very tight now with VAT. We have a small house as a compromise and live fairly simply - mortgage not paid off and we hope to overpay on that once school(and uni??) finished. Will be working a full on job far longer than I feel I am able for …. But my child is thriving and having wonderful opportunities that enhance their life,and our, lives so we feel it’s worth, it… just.

I have two in private since reception. Single parent in finance earning just under 100K and i pay it all. No expensive holidays, no car, home owned outright. Like pp, its been worth it for mine because of the smaller classes so i somehow do it. I do envy 2 parent families though with higher incomes as must be a breeze!

We are two higher earners and only manage it because we have one child. I don’t think we could for two. Fees are eye-watering now - yearly increases plus VAT have really pushed them up since we started paying in reception (now Y7). When we went down the private route it seemed very manageable but since then the mortgage, energy, food and just about everything else has increased significantly.

Sticking to state for primary and will try to save for secondary fees. I’m used to paying nursery fees so we can just keeping chucking that into investments.

But… I don’t know if we will choose the private route when we get there. The cost is increasingly just insane, and there are so many other ways you could spend that money to their benefit (a flat, extracurriculars, tutoring - even us just affording a bigger house).

I know vanishingly few people using private preps. No one can justify the cost when you’re paying from earned income.

I think a lot depends as much on your outgoings as your income. Parents we know on eye-watering salaries nonetheless moan about the school fees because they are living in eye-wateringly expensive houses with eye-watering mortgages!

DD is in (private) secondary and yes there are wealthy families who barely notice the school fees (one parent once described fees to me as "loose change" 🙄) but many are simply making sacrifices elsewhere - live in less desirable parts of London so lower mortgage, cut back on holidays and discretionary spending etc.

As others have said. State for primary and only having 1 child. With fees over 30k a year now, we find it tough with only 1 child. I wouldn’t even have considered private school had I had more children.

Bursary

My friends who do it have help from their parents either help with housing so mortgage much lower or direct fee help or combo of both.

I just can’t see how most schools will be able to survive.

The fees being increasingly insane aside, all the parents of young children I know have crazy mortgages etc to contend with too.

I think a lot of people who might have previously privately educated their children will opt out. The cost doesn’t make sense already, and the fees keep going up. The middle classes generally want a quality of life beyond being able to pay private school fees.

DH is in FAANG. I don't work as I have accumulated a tidy sum in investments. Two DDs in a London prep and planning to send both private for secondary. Other prep families we know are in law, banking, tech, media, entertainment, some have family money but not all (we don't). Most of them aren't living in less desirable parts of London or cutting back, we feel rather frugal compared to them! Most families have 1-3 dcs but it seems that those with one child just opted for one for the simpler lifestyle than for financial reasons.

This state primary. Scholarship and bursary

@MidnightPatrol On one hand I agree but I also think plenty of families have the money. There seems to be more private school threads this year vs previously & not so many state recommendation threads despite so many threads about VAT making PS unaffordable.

It's starting to overwhelmingly be people working in finance. Smaller numbers in big tech/law, business, medicine/dentistry, etc .

There are about 600k kids at private school in the UK, the vast majority of these being kids with UK based parents.

Very roughly 250k households, maybe, earn at least £250k p.a., a decent proxy for the level at which private school is comfortably affordable. Some of these households, of course, will have no kids, some 1, some multiple.

So you can sort of see where 600k pupils might come from... these are completely made up figures of course but it might be split something like:

(a) 300k with parents who can afford it by virtue of working in finance;
(b) 100k with parents who are similarly high earning in other industries;
(c) 100k who are scraping by/who are close the borderline of really being able to afford it; and
(d) 100k who are doing it with family money or something else.

I always point out on these threads that when DS started aged 8 in 2004, the fees were a shade under £8k. When left aged 18, they were a shade under £20k. Add 15% to 20% for extras: uniform, lunches, bus, trips. At peak fee time with a 3.5 year gap, we were paying £35k from net income but that was only for 3/4 years. Then uni of course.

We afforded it because I owned my house when we got married, my father died in 2001, and aside from that, when we made the decision, we could pay for four years, DH was close to silk, I had gone back to work (small time) and if the shit had hit the fan, we could have sold the house and moved five miles out for the same space and half the equity.

Even then we were middling income wise and I'm not persuaded the fees would have been worth it except for a top of tables London Independent.

I don't understand why private school is souch more expensive than it was 20 years ago. Fees have gone up waaaay in excess of inflation every year for years now.

I assume they're just charging whatever the market will bear. In which case we may see some contraction as birth rates drop.

I think @puffyisgood has it…lots of very high earners, plus high to middle high earners with family support. And lots who don’t bother with private prep and save for private secondary instead.

We currently send 2 DC to private secondary, they all did state primary. DH is in a senior finance role, it’s fairly easily affordable as he can save up any bonus or share option payments that form part of his remuneration package and cover the fees from there, typically aiming to have a year’s worth of fees salted away in advance. This is obviously not an option for anyone who doesn’t have this kind of role or remuneration package! FWIW I do also work but I earn a fraction of what DH does and don’t contribute to school fees.

Thinking about it, virtually everyone we know who has DC in private school has either at least one parent in a very high earning role (ie finance, banking, law etc) OR is in a reasonably earning senior professional role with significant financial support from grandparents- in many cases grandparents covering nearly all or all of the fees. I do know of one or two who have truly scrimped and saved to send one child private-but this was in pre VAT days and they openly admit they could not afford it now.

It’s not just having the money though - it’s rationalising the spend too.

I think preps are going to suffer the most, just anecdotally I know so few choosing this route, now the fees are £25k+ from reception.

I live in a place where you’re looking at £2-4m for a house, and still 98% of parents I know are not doing the private prep route. It surprised me too - but it’s partly about having the money, but also value for money! Particularly given the state primaries are often very good.

@puffyisgood I have heard the same re nearly all parents working in finance. I have also heard however that a problem for the schools is keeping their results good enough to attract parents - as yes they have entry criteria and exams, but increasingly they are having to take pupils because they’re able to afford it, rather than academic excellence.

I agree that it’s a question of value. Having said that I grew up in an area that now has similar housing costs and no one in that bracket is using state secondary. Preps will defo fill the hit though.

I think you make a good point about there being a lot of people who can nearly or barely afford it but who get partial support from grandparents, that's a category excluded from my guesstimates.

Because really my categories (a) and (b) are too high, with only c250k households earning £250k+ gross, and some of those households sending their kids to state, many of them not having school age kids (private school age lasting for max 15 years per kid, and for many it's half that), etc etc, i don't think it likely that there can be as many as 400k kids at private school whose parents can comfortanly afford it through earnings.

My category (b) might include a decent number of households that made a lot of money in the 00s and 2010s property/ buy to let boom, but many of those households will by now have aged out of having school age kids. Maybe grandkids.

as yes they have entry criteria and exams, but increasingly they are having to take pupils because they’re able to afford it, rather than academic excellence

Has this not been the case for some time? Every year I’ve known dc get private places but not a grammar place. One advantage of some preps is auto entry into senior school.

I send one child private, paid for from my income. It's a strain, mainly because I no longer want to do my job (I want to retrain into teaching actually), but am trapped here until our outgoings can decrease.

Second child needs state for various reasons in any case, but I think trying to do two at private would finish me off.

(Job: senior level in law)