Top private school offers bursaries to parents earning £120,000 as fees soar
A LEADING private school is offering bursaries and scholarships for children of middle-class families, even if parents earn £120,000 a year.
St Paul’s, London, which charges £7,827 a term, is offering discounts to families on a combined salary of £120,000, after high master Prof Mark Bailey admitted the school had become “unaffordable”.
This comes amid concerns that private school fees – which have risen by 550 per cent in the past 25 years and now cost up to £30,000 annually per child – are affordable only to wealthy foreigners.
Prof Bailey added that eventually, families on a combined income of £190,000 would become potential beneficiaries of bursaries.
“The part-bursaries are being offered in a far more generous way,” he said. “You will be looking eventually at [families earning] £150,000, £170,000, £190,000 potentially benefiting.”
He conceded that soaring fees at St Paul’s mean his school has become “increasingly unaffordable”. “It was our founder’s vision,” he told
The London Magazine, “[to educate]
‘I get people ringing me from South Africa and saying, “If my son gets into St Paul’s, we will move to London” ’
boys indifferently of their background and we’ve drifted away from that”.
St Paul’s School was founded by educational pioneer and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Colet, in 1509. It was meant to be “an inclusive meritocracy in which boys ‘from all nations and countries indifferently’ would be educated, without regard to means or race”.
But St Paul’s is not the only private school whose soaring fees are pushing out middle-class parents. Research shows fees are at their least affordable since the 1960s and that the children of previous generations who were able to go to private schools will no longer be able to do so.
It now costs more than £30,000 to send a child to board for a year, while the annual cost of a private day school is £15,500.
In London in particular, private school fees have risen at triple the rate of inflation over the past five years. The volume of pupils competing for places has also increased the pressure in London.
At Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2,000 pupils applied for 100 places.
Soaring demand, an influx of wealthy international parents and rising costs in paying staff and modernising facilities are often-cited reasons for the increase in fees.
Susan Hamlyn, a former teacher and director of The Good Schools Guide, said the increase in foreign families sending their children to private school was a major factor. She said: “I’ve been working at The Good Schools Guide for the past 16 years. The changes have been phenomenal, with the arrival of Russians, Chinese and people from the Middle East as well as emerging countries such as Kazakhstan.
“Now we are finding people coming from South America; we’re getting Brazilians and Argentinians and also Mexicans. I get people ringing me from South Africa and saying, ‘If my son gets into St Paul’s, we will move over to London’.”
Independent schools argue that they are trying to combat the soaring increases. Figures from the Independent Schools Council reveal that bursaries and scholarships totalled more than £850million last year, with more than £700 million coming directly from schools’ budgets.
But it is not just the parents who are suffering. Middle-class youngsters, too, are under increasing pressure to meet their parents’ expectations.
Lucy Elphinstone, head of Francis Holland School in west London, said: “The [situation] is fuelling desperation among parents, which is having a detrimental effect on children’s mental health.”