Private schools in the United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, private schools (also called independent schools) are schools that require fees for admission and enrollment. Some have financial endowments and most are governed by a board of directors consisting of school governors. Many are owned and operated by a mixture of corporations, trusts and individuals. They are independent of many of the regulations and conditions that apply to state-funded schools. For example, the schools do not have to follow the National Curriculum for England, although many such schools do.

Historically in the UK, the term private school referred to a school as private property, privately owned, in contrast to public property or a financial endowment, subject to a trust or of charitable status. Many of the older private schools catering for the 13–18 age range in England and Wales are known as public schools, seven of which were the subject of the Public Schools Act 1868. The term public school meant they were then open to pupils regardless of where they lived or their religion (while in most other English-speaking countries public school refers to a publicly funded state school). Preparatory schools educate younger children up to the age of 13 to prepare (prep) them for entry to the public schools and other secondary schools. In 2023, the Independent Schools Council (ISC), a lobbying group for private school industry, claimed that their members schools contributed £16.5 billion to gross value added (GVA) in Britain.

Some former grammar schools converted to a private fee-charging model following the 1965 Circular 10/65 and the subsequent cessation in 1975 of government funding support for direct grant grammar schools. There are around 2,600 independent schools in the UK, which educate around 615,000 children, approximately 7 per cent of all British school-age children. Among pupils over the age of 16, the figure is 18 per cent. In addition to charging tuition fees, they may also benefit from gifts, charitable endowments and charitable status. Some of these schools (1,300) are members of the Independent Schools Council. In 2021, the average annual cost for private schooling was £15,191 for day schools and £36,000 for boarding schools. The Independent Schools Yearbook has been published annually since 1986. This was a name change of a publication that started in 1889 as The Public Schools Yearbook.