Private school isn’t worth it

In the end, it was the sports kit that persuaded us to pull the plug: two technical training tops at a cost of £90. A directive had come down from the senior school that all pupils must be in new gear from Kukri (official supplier to county cricket clubs and Commonwealth Games England) by the start of the Michaelmas term. I replaced what our sons had outgrown in the school’s uniform shop (five items: £200), but baulked at spending another £100 when their old training tops still fitted.

Our sons had been in prep school since we bolted from London after the lockdowns to a part of the country we barely knew. The prep school was an attempt to assuage our anxiety about what they’d missed during home-schooling in a household with a new baby sister and parents who worked throughout.

But then the school put the fees up twice – citing concessions made during Covid – and our mortgage rose by £500 a month. The headteacher was aware of this: there was a queue of parents each term trooping in to see her about the cost of living. The likely general election loomed ahead of us, and Labour’s pledge to put VAT on private school fees.

We had other concerns. Saturday school was optional (involving ‘academic enrichment’ but nothing from the curriculum), but we had to pay an extra £4,000 a year for it. The boys were only there 60 per cent of the time. And having thought we’d parked our concerns about their education, I realised during the nine weeks of their summer holiday that my eight-year-old couldn’t tell the time and both he and his nine-year-old brother used capital letters randomly. These were things I’d tried to fix during lockdown.