Private schools are engaged in an “arms race” to build top facilities funded by rising fees while obscuring how little they spend on scholarships, researchers have claimed.
A study by accountancy and finance researchers, which examined the accounts of 142 private schools, found that the institutions appear to spend more on scholarships than they actually do, and that most are small grants to pupils with musical or sporting talents, or discounts for teachers’ children.
Private school fees have more than tripled since 1990, the researchers estimate. The rise has been helped by a race to build top facilities to attract the wealthiest pupils both at home and internationally, the researchers said.
In a paper presented at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference, researchers said that rising fees had created surpluses that schools were spending on “luxurious infrastructure projects”.
Dr Malcolm James, head of accounting and finance at Cardiff Metropolitan University, who led the research, said that there was an “arms race” as schools attempted to justify the fees.
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They include Roedean School, which, after refurbishing its boarding houses, was described in Tatler as having the “swankiest boarding facilities in the country, perhaps in the universe”.
Oundle School in Northamptonshire opened its new sports centre last September, featuring an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an eight-court indoor arena with retractable seating, a café, gyms and dance studios.
Just over half of private schools in the UK have charitable status. The High Court has previously ruled this means that they must show substantial public benefit.
The study found that out of 176,000 pupils who received bursaries of some kind, only 6,118 received full scholarships. The average scholarship amounted to only £1,000 a year, the researchers claimed.
“Given the levels of fees, the overwhelming majority of scholarship students still require very substantial family contributions,” James said. “Many scholarships may, in practice, be awarded to middle or upper-class families. Scholarships may therefore do little to make schools genuinely more socially inclusive.”
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Although the schools lost potential income by subsidising some students, those pupils did not cost much extra to house and teach because they used existing facilities, the study said.
“Schools might therefore appear more virtuous than they actually are and this might permit them to give lower levels of total fee remission than they actually could,” he said.
“Through ingenious accounting technologies, schools are able to provide remarkably little benefit to less-advantaged families. The accounting regime utilised by these schools permits a veil to be drawn over the actual cost of scholarships granted – effectively overstating it and thereby justifying a limitation on the numbers of students assisted.”
There is no suggestion of improper or irregular accounting.
Julie Robinson, chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, said that the level of means-tested fees help had increased by £175 million since 2011 and that the sector was working on a scheme to help 10,000 children from low-income families attend independent schools.
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She said: “Schools spend far more on bursaries than on scholarships. In fact, over double the amount is spent on means-tested bursaries compared to scholarships. Bursaries are specifically targeted at those whose financial circumstances merit fee assistance.
“Means-tested bursary funding is provided to both low and middle-income families and many schools are striving to do more to provide places for disadvantaged pupils, but are doing so in an environment where they also need to be mindful of holding down fee increases despite facing growing costs.”