Private and Independent Schools Editing and Proofreading Services

An independent school's relationship with its parents is contractual, and it is the only part of the relationship nobody wants to think about. Parents are buying an education for a specific child over more than a decade, at a cost that will rise every year by an amount the contract permits the school to set. When something goes wrong — a fee increase they cannot absorb, a child asked to leave, a bursary reassessed, a term's notice they did not know they owed — the school and the family discover what they actually agreed to, usually in the worst possible circumstances.

We edit what independent and private schools produce — parent contracts and terms and conditions, fee schedules and increase provisions, bursary and scholarship terms and reassessment processes, admissions and offer documentation, notice, withdrawal and refund provisions, behaviour and discipline policies including exclusion, complaints procedures for parents, safeguarding policies and their parent-facing versions, prospectus and marketing material, examination result and destination reporting, trip, activity and additional charge information, boarding handbooks and residential documentation, staff handbooks and policies, and inspection and regulatory documentation. Our editors check that the contract says what the school actually does.

The parent contract is the document to get right, and schools habitually leave it as inherited legal text nobody has read against current practice. The provisions that matter are the ones families meet under stress: the notice period and exactly when it must be given, expressed as a date rather than as a term, because families miscount and the resulting term's fees ruin the relationship; how fees may be increased, with the actual mechanism rather than a reservation of discretion; what additional charges exist and roughly what they came to last year, since the advertised fee is not the cost of attending; the circumstances in which the school may require a child to leave and the process before that point; and how a bursary is reviewed, which is the provision families understand least and fear most. We write these so each is stated plainly, and we make sure the prospectus does not promise what the contract disclaims — the gap between the two being where most disputes originate.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including contracts, bursary information and records about identifiable families. We are editors rather than lawyers, and we offer no view on contract terms, consumer law, charitable status or any regulatory requirement — a parent contract should be reviewed by your own legal advisers. What we can do is make the terms clear and consistent with what the school does.