by adamdsouza » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:53 am
I’m a teacher at an independent school and I’ve also been involved in the management of a schools group, so I hope I can give you some clarity. The TL;DR answer is: it depends.
Many London day schools, especially the smaller, less academically selective ones, are owned and operated by for-profit companies, e.g. Minerva Education, Bellevue Education, GEMS. The margins on running a private school are pretty tight, and it’s only going to get tighter with rising compliance costs and a huge increase in contributions to the teachers’ pension scheme. (Teachers at the very august St Edward’s in Oxford went on strike over this recently.) These schools are unlikely to offer hardship funds, although a few may have nominal income-assessed bursaries; this is not going to be much more than a token fee relief.
However, many of the larger schools in our area are operated by charities. Many of the girls’ schools are run by the GDST, a Victorian charity, and several schools in Croydon by the Whitgift Foundation, which is a medieval trust supported by huge land/property holdings. These schools are much more likely to be generous in giving bursary support. To justify their position as charities in a hardening political climate (as mentioned by other people in the thread) these schools are having to bend over backwards to "demonstrate public benefit”. What this means in practice is that scholarships (merit-based) and bursaries (financial need-based) have been de-coupled, but your children will need to score very highly on entrance tests to make the case of how they will “gain” from the school’s charitable purposes (read: get top exam results which make the school look good).
I’m a teacher at an independent school and I’ve also been involved in the management of a schools group, so I hope I can give you some clarity. The TL;DR answer is: it depends.
Many London day schools, especially the smaller, less academically selective ones, are owned and operated by for-profit companies, e.g. Minerva Education, Bellevue Education, GEMS. The margins on running a private school are pretty tight, and it’s only going to get tighter with rising compliance costs and a huge increase in contributions to the teachers’ pension scheme. (Teachers at the very august St Edward’s in Oxford went on strike over this recently.) These schools are [u]unlikely[/u] to offer hardship funds, although a few may have nominal income-assessed bursaries; this is not going to be much more than a token fee relief.
However, many of the larger schools in our area are operated by charities. Many of the girls’ schools are run by the GDST, a Victorian charity, and several schools in Croydon by the Whitgift Foundation, which is a medieval trust supported by huge land/property holdings. These schools are much more likely to be generous in giving bursary support. To justify their position as charities in a hardening political climate (as mentioned by other people in the thread) these schools are having to bend over backwards to "demonstrate public benefit”. What this means in practice is that scholarships (merit-based) and bursaries (financial need-based) have been de-coupled, but your children will need to score very highly on entrance tests to make the case of how they will “gain” from the school’s charitable purposes (read: [i]get top exam results which make the school look good[/i]).