In-fee-lation?

Written by Hayley Dunlop

We discovered last month that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has risen to 3.3% - the highest it has been since records began more than 11 years ago. Using this as a guideline, it would be easy to presume that average fees at ISC schools are, indeed, ‘inflation busting’, having risen 6.2% since 2007. However, looking more closely at the various factors that contribute to CPI presents an altogether different picture.

Education is just one of the categories that contributes to the CPI ‘basket’ of goods and services, which is supposed to reflect the ways households spend their money. Other categories in this basket include food, drink, household bills and transport. Yet these categories do not have equal ‘weighting’ when it comes to measuring overall CPI. In fact, education expenditure (which includes independent school fees, evening classes, international student fees and UK university tuition fees) is given a weight of only 1.9% of total spending in the CPI basket of goods and services. As a result, movements in the education category will have little impact on overall CPI changes and, to get a true picture of how much fees are rising, education inflation needs to be examined separately.

Analysis of education inflation by the ISC research team reveals that it increased by 13.7% in 2007. This clearly shows that, in the context of education, fee increases at ISC schools are less than half the rate of overall education inflation. More detailed analysis also reveals that, since ISC school fees account for less than a third of overall private education expenditure, all other private school costs are therefore rising faster than those in ISC schools. Therefore, for parents who are choosing independent schools for their children, ISC schools – even before fee assistance, scholarships and bursaries are taken into consideration - are delivering the best value for money in an increasingly tough economic environment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:45 am by Hayley Dunlop and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.