Biggest rise in private school fees for 5 years

PRIVATE school fees will increase by their largest amount in five years after the Treasury’s ruling on teacher pensions, the Independent School Council (ISC) has said.

Last year, fees were raised by an average of 3.7 per cent, making it the highest year-on-year rise since 2014.

Barnaby Lenon, chairman of the ISC and a former headmaster of Harrow School, said that schools were “battling” to hold their costs down but the changes to the pension scheme were “out of our control”.

“This year the biggest problem is the very significant increase in the employer’s contribution to the pension scheme,” he said, as he warned that parents should be braced for further fee increases next year as well.

The Department for Education (DFE) has announced that an employer’s contribution for teachers’ pensions will rise from 16.48 per cent of their salaries to 23.6 per cent, following a valuation of public service pension schemes by the Treasury. The change, coming in September, will cost private schools an extra £110 million from 2019-20 and nearly £200million the following year.

Private schools are now faced with either pulling out of the teachers’ pension scheme, making them less attractive to new teachers, or raising fees.

The DFE is providing £940million of funding to state schools to help them meet the extra costs for the first year of the scheme, but private schools are expected to foot the bill themselves.

Martin Stephen, the former high master of St Paul’s School in west London, which now charges £37,610-ayear for boarders, said he is “deeply concerned” about ever-rising fees.

“By higher-than-inflation fee increases, the independent schools are in danger of biting the hand that should feed them,” he said. “The fee increases have changed the market of independent schools. They have raised the barrier financially. That rules out what has been the mainstay of independent schools – the children of doctors, lawyers and GPS – who are now increasingly being squeezed out.”

The average fees for independent boarding schools is now £34,695 a year, up from £33,684 last year while day schools charge an average of £14,289, up from £13,854. Lord Ralph Lucas, of The Good Schools Guide, said that the private school sector was “misjudging the situation completely”. Analysis for the ISC has found that private schools – which support 320,000 jobs – save the taxpayer more than £20billion a year by educating pupils who would otherwise need state places and by providing employment, community facilities and tax contributions.

Children not taking up state places saved £3.5billion, according to Oxford Economics. In addition, £4.1 billion was paid in tax and the value of the work they supported across the economy was £13.7billion.