Private school fees: How to get your kids into public school

Want to send your children to private school, but assume you can't afford it? It's a reasonable assumption. Look at the advertised private school fees and you will see that a reasonable day school costs close to £10,000 per child. Go boarding and it'll be £30,000. Before extras. After tax.

The result? Last week, Andrew Halls, head of Kings College School in Wimbledon (annual fees: £20,000), laid it out: "somewhere along the line, first the nurses stopped sending children to us; then the policemen, then the armed force, then even the local accountants and lawyers".

He might be overegging the pudding here the armed forces still benefit from amazingly good public subsidies when they send their children to boarding school; a good London lawyer shouldn't have that much trouble coming up with £20,000 a year for five years; and I'm not convinced that nursing salaries were ever the core of private school revenues. But he still makes a useful point: schools have put their fees up at going on triple the rate of inflation for the last few decades and they now "charge too much".

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Still, you might well be wrong in thinking you can't afford private school: in fact, the poorer you are, the better your chances. That's because today's private schools need a rising number of applications from parents who can't afford to pay for their services: giving out bursaries is a key part of the deal that allows them to keep their charitable status.

The Sunday Times offers a few examples: about 20% of the girls at schools run by the Girls' Day School Trust (gdst.net) have bursaries; the City of London School for Girls also offers around 20% of students bursaries; and at Christ's Hospital School in West Sussex, just 16% pay the full boarding fees the rest get some kind of means-tested help. In all, more than 25% of private school children get help and of those, says the Independent Schools Council, 40% get half their fees paid.

Want your child to be one? You can go to the Good Schools Guide Advice Serviceand find out which schools to approach (for a fee of about £120). But why not just call the school you like and ask? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Otherwise, look to charitable organisations, says Charlotte Beugge in the The Sunday Times. The Ogden Trust offers 50% off fees for sixth-form students doing physics A-level and planning to do it at university too, while the Fashion and Textile Children's Trust subsidises children whose parents work in fashion or textiles. Other possibilities are at www.fismagazine.co.uk/fundraising/grants/ and on scholarships and bursaries, see www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk.