Nobody sets out to run a school where a third of the students pay something other than the list price. It arrives one reasonable exception at a time.
How it happens
A family with three children asks for something. You say yes, because three children is real money and they are lovely.
A parent who has been with you five years mentions that things are tight. You hold their price.
A teacher's nephew joins. Obviously he does not pay full.
A family threatens to leave over a price rise. You exempt them from it.
Every one of those decisions was defensible on the day. The problem is that none of them has an end date, and none of them is written anywhere that gets reviewed.
Add it up once
Export what every active student is actually billed, next to your list price. Sort by the gap.
Two things usually turn up, and both are uncomfortable:
The total is larger than you expected. In a school of 200, a scattering of exceptions routinely adds up to more than the entire marketing budget.
The distribution is not what you would choose. The biggest discounts frequently sit with families who have been around longest rather than with families who most need them, because longevity produces more opportunities to ask.
That second one is the real finding. If you were handing out that money deliberately, you would not hand it out that way.
Structure beats judgement
Two or three named discounts, with written rules, applied identically:
- Sibling: a fixed percentage off the second and subsequent child.
- Pay in advance: a fixed percentage for a term or year up front.
- Hardship: a real one, with a review date and a named approver.
Everything else goes through an approval, gets recorded against the student, and carries an expiry.
A discount without an end date is a price change you did not intend to make.
The hardship one deserves saying out loud
Schools that have a proper hardship discount give away less money, not more. When there is a defined route for the family genuinely struggling, the ad-hoc reductions for families who simply asked well stop being the mechanism — and it is the second group that costs you most.
Then review it every year
Put a date in the calendar. Look at every non-standard price, confirm it still reflects something true, and close the ones that do not. Most families will not notice; the ones who do will get a conversation, which is what should have happened originally.
Approvals with a written trail — who granted what, and why — are covered in the approvals guide.