Sedbergh School

Situated between the Lake District National Park and the Yorkshire Dales, Sedbergh School is a co-educational boarding school. Established in 1525, it is one of the few remaining full boarding schools in the UK with 97% of pupils boarding seven days a week.

The school approached MTM Consulting to assist the Senior Leadership Team in planning and understanding how they would be able to mitigate against the impact of VAT being added to school fees should it come into effect with a change of government.

We proposed using our unique Fee Elasticity Demand research tool to understand the implications of fee changes on the school’s enrolment.

This analysis included the socio-economic profiles of current families and potential families living within a realistic catchment area, allowing the school to visualise the size of its addressable market across all key entry points and providing a detailed analysis of how fee increases could affect market size, parental roll and ideas of how fees could be increased at different levels across different entry points.

Using the markets of over 1,000 schools in the UK, we implemented a non-random coefficients logit estimation of the fee elasticity of demand. This allowed us to predict the best-case and worst-case scenarios of differing fee increases, in terms of pupil contractions.

This provided the school with a complete demand and supply analysis, and full visibility over the markets to which it caters.

Our investigation successfully provided the leadership team at Sedbergh School comprehensive insight into the ramifications of fee adjustments across the year groups.

Much like our experiences with numerous other schools, we identified variations among distinct entry points. This nuanced understanding enabled the school to adopt a more strategic approach to fee increases, opting for a tailored adjustment strategy rather than a uniform rise across all entry points.