Relentless private school fee hikes "have not put off parents"

Huge rises in the cost of private schooling in the UK in recent decades have had little impact on the number of parents choosing the sector for their children, according to a new analysis from UCL. Fees have trebled in real terms since 1980, with their cost as a proportion of household budgets rising "inexorably" over the period. This means that even a family whose income is higher than that of 95 per cent of those in England has to pay a fifth of its income to educate just one child privately. Yet fee-charging schools have not become more the preserve of the super-wealthy as a result. Instead, it seems that, while some less well-off households are deterred by higher fees, this has been off-set by the sector's attempts to broaden its social mix through, for example, the wider use of subsidised bursaries for less well-off and from transfers from savings and other family members. These are central findings of a new analysis: Who is Choosing Private Schooling in Britain and Why', published by academics at the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES) at UCL Institute of Education. The research team - Francis Green, Jake Anders, Morag Henderson and Golo Henseke - looked at fee data from the Independent Schools Council, whose schools educate 80 per cent of pupils who are in the private sector, to track the remarkable increase in fees in the past 40 years.