If you want your child to get a quality education, but don’t want to go bankrupt in the process, you should check our 10 affordable boarding schools in England list. Everybody has heard about Eton and Harrow. Also, everybody knows that these schools charge an arm and a leg for tuition. To be more precise, one school year in, for example, Eton will cost you ₤34,434. That’s $53,974 and there are registration and acceptance fees that amount to few thousands on top of that. In comparison, Columbia University, one of the most expensive colleges in the United States, charges $63,440 per school year. There is irony in the fact the Eton was founded by King Henry VI to provide free education to boys from impoverished families.
Fortunately, there are alternatives for people who haven’t been born with a silver spoon in their mouths. These are state boarding schools and they don’t charge tuition, just boarding fees. On average, this will cost you between ₤10,000 and 12,000 (about $16,000 to 19,000). The tuition fees are covered by Her Majesty’s government and you can take advantage of this offer if you are EU citizen or have resident status in the UK. If not, you can check out our list of the 6 cheapest boarding schools in Europe.
While state boarding schools may not compete with private ones in terms of accommodations, it is still on a high level. As for academic results, they are in the same league. This makes them viable and affordable alternative to expensive private schools.
Unlike their private counterparts, these schools aren’t independent. They have to adhere to the UK government’s Department for Education rules and guidelines concerning the curriculum and children with special education needs. However, they are still considered prestigious and most of them offer better conditions, like small class size and plenty of extracurricular activities, and consequently better education than majority of regular schools, which is witnessed on state exams, where children from boarding schools often outperform those from day schools. Teachers have more time to interact with children on a daily basis simply because of the fact that children spend their entire time on school grounds. This offers lots of opportunities regular schools do not have.
Among other criteria, all 10 schools on our list of affordable schools in England have been rated “Outstanding” by Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, a UK government’s agency). This is the highest mark possible and any school that gets it guaranteed top-notch institution. All these schools have academic status under the UK law, meaning that they are subjected directly to the Department of Education and not local school authorities.
