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Help with School Fees

SFIA offer help with school fees and advice to parents wishing to plan for the cost of their children’s private school fees. If you are intending to send your child to an independent school, it is important, from a financial point of view, to plan in advance. There are tax efficient savings accounts and plans specifically designed to cover this outlay.

Although planning early is preferred it’s certainly not essential, a significant number of parents looking for help with school fees approach us with children starting (or attending) senior school. Disrupting a child's education midway through a vital stage would be very unfortunate, so it is important to look for help with school fees and prepare for the commitment of paying fees for several years.

If you are looking for financial assistance, help with school fees is available in the form of scholarships or means-tested bursaries for which you may qualify. The Head and/or Bursar of the school will be able to provide information about bursaries and eligibility for them.

Help with school fees offered by schools include:

Scholarships

• Offered by many schools to attract bright pupils to the school by helping their parents with the fees.
• Awarded as a result of competitive examination, for academic, musical, artistic or all-round merit.
• Vary in value but rarely cover all the fees; these are sometimes ‘topped up’ by bursaries on a means-tested basis.

Bursaries

• Grant from the school to help parents pay the fees.
• It is awarded after a ‘means test’ of family income.
• Unlike a scholarship, it is not based on a competitive examination.
• Often offered to children of clergy, teachers and armed forces personnel, children of former pupils, single parent families and orphans or concessions for brothers and sisters.

Other forms of help with school fees include:

Government grants

- Service families

The Ministry of Defense (MOD) offer help with school fees to children of parents in all ranks of the armed forces in specific circumstances. Further information can be obtained from Service Education Units or from the Children's Education Advisory Service. Diplomats

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office offer help with school fees to children of diplomats and other government servants working abroad to attend boarding schools in Britain. Further information can be obtained from Diplomatic Service Families Association.

- Local authority grants

Some education authorities and social service departments offer help with school fees by giving grants to enable children who need to board to go to boarding schools. You should apply to the Director of Education for the area in which you live.

Reasons commonly accepted for boarding need include:

• parents are abroad or move home frequently because of their jobs
• home circumstances are unhelpful to the child's development
• the child is highly talented and can only be properly catered for at a boarding school
• the child suffers from a disability which makes boarding desirable
• the child lives in a remote part of the country and cannot easily travel each day to school