Private school staff - fee remission

[rockywilderness]

I hope I can ask a question of anyone who works in the private sector? I am considering an administrative role with the school where my children are pupils and have been told there will be a fee remission. Does this count as a 'benefit in kind' for tax purposes? I'm struggling to find anything online and want to know the full financial implications of their offer.

How do you mean for tax purposes?

My school charge staff 40% of the fees, so in theory it’s a bargain for private school. If you’re part time it’s calculated based on you hours.

I don’t think it will mean anything other than you spending less of your disposable income on school fees?

I was wondering if it’s classed as a ‘benefit in kind’ like a company car would be? In my experience you don’t tend to get any thing as a benefit without paying tax!

I’m not taxed on my fee remission, if that is what you mean.

I am just billed 50% of the school fees.

I get a large fee remission so we looked into this very carefully. The answer is no, you don't have to pay tax on the benefit. There are certain categories which are not classed as a taxable benefit. School fees are one example; I believe another is cheap flights for airline personnel. There is information on this, but you have to read quite deeply into the HMRC documentation to find it. There is some talk of a move to change the tax rules on school fee remission(there was already one change a few years ago which meant it could no longer be done as a salary sacrifice IIRC), but I haven't heard anything about it recently.

Thank you all so much - that's really helpful

Not all private schools are offering this discount. So if you are looking only for private schools that offer this fee remission check before applying or negotiate before accepting the job. Some will go as high as 50% like GDST trust but only girls schools.

No, it will vary hugely. Ours is more than 50% while others will be nothing or a tiny percentage. I'd be a bit surprised if you could negotiate it - I'd have thought that would cause some unhappiness in the staffroom if individual staff had different discounts - but maybe.

If a discount or fee remission exceeds 85% then it is seen as a taxable benefit in kind. This is because the marginal cost of providing the place in terms of cost to the school is calculated by the tax man as 15%. So schools which provide free places for staff (rare these days) will have staff who have to declare it…school will too.

Most schools only provide fee discounts to teaching staff.
Boarding schools and the extremely expensive day schools often give larger % discounts, because otherwise, even the discounted fee would be totally inaccessible to teachers.

Fee remission is usually pro-rata for part timers and given school fees tend to go up significantly more than staff salaries, fewer teachers are able to afford to send their kids, even with a discount.