The Game Changer

Finding private school fees can be a stretch, but the good news is that schools are digging deep to create sizeable bursary funds to offer full school places to more children, says Gillian Upton.

Social mobility and social cohesion are the buzzwords in private schools these days as they strive to ensure their cohort emanates from a wide range of backgrounds, and for that to materialise they need to grow a sizeable bursary fund.

Schools are cognisant that finding £18,000 a year for private school fees is a challenge for most parents and if you have two or three children, even more so. Grandparents may be persuaded to contribute, savings plans can begin early, and schools often help with flexible payment plans. Outside that, scholarships can no longer be relied upon as they have shrunk to negligible levels.

Removing the financial barrier is key and many private schools have switched funds away from non means-tested scholarships in order to offer more and larger bursaries. They want the bursary to cover not just the cost of a private education, but to be all-encompassing, covering the cost of uniforms, school trips, meals and transport too.

The drive for a bigger bursary pot is integral to the school ethos, usually anchored in maintaining a local school, embedded in the local community. Schools want to foster a cohort which includes local residents and not just fee-paying parents.

“Employers are also conscious of finding employees from a wider variety of backgrounds – the biggest benefit of that variety is for our whole school ethos,” says Alasdair Kennedy, Head of Trinity. “Part of Trinity’s DNA is that it’s also a school for local families.”

On the flip side, schools have little influence in curtailing fixed overheads, the largest being staff costs, but are nonetheless conscious of keeping annual fees to a minimum in order to maintain social breadth. “Independent schools have become quite an elite preserve,” says Andrew Halls, Head of King’s College School (KCS) in Wimbledon. KCS fees rose by 3.2 per cent this year and the school has consciously pitched KCS termly fees at just over £1,000 less than those of St Paul’s, with whom they compete. That’s quite an achievement in the same year KCS has had to shoulder an increased bill of £680,000 for teacher pension contributions.

Conscious of moving away from its elitist position, the school dropped its demand for upfront fees in favour of per term and is also looking to introduce more flexible payment terms for parents.

It’s abundantly clear that private schools are feeling the pinch just as much as parents. Schools are also busy ‘sweating the asset’ to create incremental income, by hiring out halls and sports grounds for example, and some also rake in funds from their overseas schools. Alumni and even PTAs often add to the bursary pot.

KCS wants to change lives and is aiming to give seven 100 per cent bursaries to 11-year-olds in Year 7, so 49 across the whole school, plus five in sixth form. They are advertising the bursaries on sides of buses, as much o let local parents know that they take in children aged 11, something the school introduced four years ago. “It’s a very big project for us,” says Halls. Some £1.8m stands in the bursary pot currently and the plan is to double the 3-4 per cent of the KCS school community currently on bursaries.

Bursary children must still pass the 11+ exam so schools retain their academic selectivity and the bursary child arrives on merit alone, just like the rest of their classmates. “Fundamentally, we are looking for potential, regardless of the ability to pay,” says Suzie Longstaff, Head of Putney High, a GDST school. Bursaries at Putney range from 30 per cent to 100 per cent.

For parents though, it is a rigorous process of measuring need, based on threefold criteria: joint income; savings; and property value. It will very often include a home visit too.

Income thresholds vary from school to school. For Trinity, for example, joint income has to be under £80,000pa. Most higher-value bursaries at GDST senior schools are awarded to pupils from families with a total income of less than £36,000pa, or £41,000 for London schools, who have no capital asset other than their income.

“It’s a rigorous assessment,” says Zac Barratt, Chair of the bursary fund at Newton Prep. “Our head is checking that the child will flourish here, that they are bright enough and that they will not disrupt the cohort.” And he adds: “We rarely turn them down.”

Dulwich College has a big bursary push this year because it is celebrating the school’s 400th anniversary, which was founded on helping “poor scholars”. It is a project close to the heart of Deputy Master External, Dr Cameron Pyke as he explains: “I was on an assisted place at my school and it was a gateway to life.”

The Dulwich bursary pot stands at £13.2m and 33 per cent of pupils are benefitting from a bursary this year, with the average bursary discount at 83.7 per cent. “The direction of travel is for deeper bursaries,” says Dr Pyke.

Alleyn’s is on a similar journey. Over the last decade the school has doubled the number of children in receipt of a bursary and this year that means that 100 children are bursary funded, a figure that head Dr Gary Savage wants to double “as soon as I can”. To this end the school is launching an endowment fund this year to generate an annual income sufficient to offer 100 per cent bursaries. Already the average bursary at Alleyn’s is 90 per cent. “We’re one of the largest [bursary providers] in the land,” says Dr Savage. “It’s unusual and we’re proud of it. We’ve concentrated on transformational bursaries.”

Trinity School has created a six-strong team to work towards its bursary fund, with the aim of engaging alumni in the school. “We’re being cautious to start with, aiming to raise an additional £350,000 a year, and that will support 20 full bursary places or 40 half bursaries,” says Head Alasdair Kennedy.

Unsurprisingly, exam results of bursary pupils and non-bursary pupils are identical. Bursary pupils are not singled out and share all the same opportunities as their peers. Newton Prep highlights bursary pupils reading modern languages at Oxford after leaving the school for KCS, and another training to be a solicitor after studying at Bristol. “We did an informal tracking process two years ago and it was pretty impressive,” says Barratt. Dr Gary Savage adds that bursary pupils are “some of our best performing children”, totally involved in all co-curricular activities and indistinguishable from other children.

Adding more resource to the bursary pot is good news for any cash-strapped parent hoping for a private education for their child.