Private schools spent years chasing foreign students. Now they’re bribing the British to come back

For three generations, the men in Tom’s* family went to the same British public school. His grandfather started there in the 1930s, his father in the late 1960s and Tom himself in the 1990s. He and his wife always assumed their own son, Hugo*, would follow in their footsteps.

But, a few weeks before Hugo was due to begin his first term, the family were invited to a garden party to welcome the newcomers. Immediately, they were alarmed to discover that their son would be one of very few British-born pupils in his house that year, with the majority of other students coming from abroad, and particularly from wealthy Asian families. After a frantic few days, they found him a place at a smaller, less prestigious independent school and informed Tom’s alma mater that they were turning down their offer of a place for Hugo.

“I was sad because it was the end of a tradition, but it just felt wrong,” says Tom. “I still see most of the friends I made in my house at school – we went to university together and are godparents to each other’s children. My son would be denied that, and I didn’t like the idea of him feeling like a minority when my experience was the opposite.”

Aside from the top 1 per cent of earners and those with reserves of family wealth, what might have been considered to be the English middle classes have been largely priced out of the schools they once considered their birthright, and the global rich have taken their place.

Since 2014, the number of international students attending UK private schools, including day and boarding, has risen by more than 75 per cent, with Asia accounting for nearly 50 per cent per cent of that intake. Almost 11,000 of the non-British pupils at independent schools are from China, according to the Independent Schools Council, while there are 26,195 foreign-born pupils whose parents live overseas. While not all of these institutions are boarding schools, “92 per cent of non-British pupils whose parents live overseas choose to board”, the ISC says.

“Fees at top boarding schools are around £65,000 a year, once extras and VAT are included,” says Will Orr-Ewing, the founder of Keystone Tutors. “Take your country solicitors or doctors – the gentry class who made up much of the boarding school intake until the 1990s. There is simply no way they can afford this, particularly if they have more than one child.”

Labour’s hike on VAT has only added to a problem that has been growing throughout this century, and has become particularly acute over the last decade of stagnant wages, sky-high mortgages and frozen tax thresholds. And while smaller independent schools have borne the brunt of the Labour-induced pupil exodus (despite Keir Starmer promising that VAT would have “a negligible impact” on private education), expensive public schools have also seen a reduction in the number of applications from British families since the introduction of VAT on school fees in January 2025.

“I’ve been in this sector for a long time, and each year the composition of these schools changes a little bit away from the English upper-middle classes, so over a generation it becomes quite significant,” says Orr-Ewing.

Unlike the state sector, private schools are under no obligation to release demographic data, so much of this remains difficult to prove. Admissions officers insist that British students still dominate (at Eton about 10 per cent of students come from overseas, while at Harrow it is closer to 28 per cent and at Roedean it climbs to 40 per cent) but one former governor says this can obscure wider cultural changes.

“What they mean is that the composition by passport hasn’t changed as much as parents think it has,” he says. “Many families based in China or Hong Kong have British passports. The schools also have data on ethnicity and whether parents were born abroad – but they are unlikely to release that.”

Similarly, schools are careful to avoid large clusters of pupils from any one country. “There is a huge difference between Malaysian, Chinese, Thai and Hong Kong pupils,” says Orr-Ewing. “But in the eyes of some British parents, it can feel as if their child’s class is made up of one singular bloc of East Asian students.”

In this respect, public schools are beginning to resemble British universities, many of which now rely on foreign students paying full fees to subsidise domestic ones. Elite boarding schools insist that international pupils allow them to fund bursaries for poorer British children, but the underlying economic model is similar.

Parents who can afford the fees, meanwhile, do not need a graph to tell them that many of their children’s peers have arrived at school via Heathrow.

Schools themselves are aware of the problem. Many elite institutions now run lucrative outposts in the Middle East and Asia – Dulwich College, for example, now has 10 schools in Asian cities like Shanghai and Singapore – while marketing the leafy original site as the authentic version of a British education. That argument starts to flounder when the UK school no longer feels particularly British.

“Children from Hong Kong are pretty much guaranteed to pay full fees and get amazing grades, so you can see why schools want them,” says one education consultant. “But they also know that a lot of Hong Kong parents will say: ‘Please take my boy, but don’t take any other boys from here – we want him to go to an English institution.’”

Locals, however, are having to make different choices. Richer British families are choosing independent day schools, while middle-earners who were themselves privately educated are turning to the state sector. “Improvement in state education has been an important accelerator,” says Orr-Ewing. “In the 1990s, journalists, for example, could afford independent school. Now they are putting all their money into moving to affluent areas with good state options.”

The old-fashioned idea of boarding school has also fallen out of favour with some British families, who are more conscious of the psychological effects of sending children away, and who are particularly shunning the prep schools that offer boarding from the age of six. International parents, by contrast, are often looking for something different.

“I have a client at the moment who just needs his child in a boarding school so he can crack on with finding a place in Monaco,” says Luke Knightly-Jones, founder of Royal Tutors. “It solves the problem of where the child is.”

But an excess of foreign pupils risks diluting the culture that made these schools so desirable in the first place. Like Wimbledon or Glyndebourne, they are globally famous not just because they are excellent, but because they represent a particular type of Britishness.

An old Harrovian with a child currently studying at the school notes that the culture has changed dramatically. “Harrow was always for all-rounders – a place where sport was prized as highly as academics and where boys took a lot of pride in who they were – but with so many international kids, the place feels different. Half the house won’t cheer on the rugby team on a Saturday morning because they’re too busy revising.”

Orr-Ewing, who went to Harrow in the 1990s, adds: “An institution has to be culturally confident. It has to say: ‘This is who we are and this is what we believe in.’ But because these schools are customer products, they also have to provide what the customer wants. As they have been forced to whack up the fees, the balance has skewed towards the latter.”

In an attempt to recapture something of what they once were, some boarding schools are giving discounts to legacy pupils. Warminster, Taunton and Ruthin all offer 10 per cent reductions for the children of former pupils. At Downside, alumni families get 20 per cent off, while Harrow recently announced a discount of 5 per cent. Beyond the publicised figures, many schools are known to quietly even offer fee remissions (separate to scholarships and bursaries) to the children of former pupils, provided they are also intelligent and a good fit.

Then there is the question of whether British children should be admitted with weaker exam results, with some education consultants and parents arguing that the days of prioritising raw academic performance should end.

“This is the bit where the schools have done it to themselves,” says one tutor. “They only look at admissions scores and select the best, which nowadays means children from cultures where they are prepared to revise for 10 hours a day, rather than equally bright children who have been at country prep schools playing cricket half the time.”

Some schools have gone further still in trying to maintain a local student base. In March, parents at Sutton Valence received a letter explaining that the school was dropping entrance exams to the senior school for pupils already in the prep school.

“The academic threshold for progression is being dismantled in favour of a guaranteed internal pipeline,” says Knightly-Jones. “This begs the question, are parents of children in schools that are taking this step really paying for ‘selective’ schooling any more?”

He predicts that such moves will worsen the problem in the long run by driving British families into the arms of grammar schools. “Unless you are considering the very top private schools, why wouldn’t you choose a grammar ahead of an independent school making concessions on entry?”

As for Tom, when he informed his alma mater that he would be turning down his son’s place, they offered to move Hugo to another less international house within the school. Tom doesn’t regret saying no. But when he visits his son’s new school, with its Victorian theatre and modern dining hall, he sometimes thinks about the soaring oak-panelled rooms and centuries-old rituals of his youth – and wonders whether his family has lost out on more than just tradition.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]