One way or another, a good education costs money. It's best to recognise this hard fact early as it makes all subsequent decisions about where to school your children much easier.
Whether through astronomical school fees in the private sector or the high house prices in the catchment areas of the best schools the state can offer, someone is going to make money out of your desire to give your children the best possible start in life.
The exact price of a private education varies from school to school and region to region.
A recent report from the Halifax bank claimed that if you are about to embark on paying for a private education now for your child from the age of three to 18, then you can expect to fork out £326,000, assuming fees continue to rise at about 6% a year and including extras such as uniform and books.
And that is not for anything too fancy. The figures are based on attendance at an average priced pre-prep school, followed by a prep school and finally boarding in a senior school.
You can cut the cost a little by confining private education to between the ages of 11 and 18 and using a state primary school. Then the price drops to a mere £211,000.
These are average fees for a single child. At the top end of the scale the cost is much higher.
The average private day school currently charges £10,368 a year (£8,122 in the cheaper north of England and £8,205 in Scotland), according to Sam Freedman of the Independent Schools Council (ISC). This encompasses schools at the less expensive end of the range, such as the single-sex schools run by the Girls' Day School Trust. Manchester High, a GDST school, for instance, charges £7,728 a year for a senior place.
But at the expensive end, in boarding schools with an international reputation such as Millfield, Winchester and Eton, fees are approaching £25,000 a year, more than a new teacher's starting salary.
At prep school level, says the ISC, fees range from £4,000 to £9,500 a year.
Martin Ellis, the Halifax's chief economist, says: "The average worker in a number of occupations, including pharmacists, engineers and journalists, can no longer afford private education for their offspring."
However, fighting the barrage of doom-laden headlines about the costs of going private was the timely announcement by Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's School in London - our highest-ranked boys' independent school - of plans for more bursaries for children from less well-off backgrounds.
Stephen announced in October that governors at St Paul's had backed a radical move towards "needs-blind" admissions - selecting the school's 850 pupils on academic merit and charging only according to their families' income.
It is an expensive proposal for a school where annual fees are £15,000.
Stephen acknowledges it is a vision that will take 25 years to realise being dependent on the school raising an endowment of £250m from alumni and benefactors to cover the loss in fee income from parents.
In the meantime, the school is boosting the number of bursaries it offers. Stephen says: "Bright children are being neglected in our education system. Our first step is to increase our number of bursaries. At present, we have 60 (each one covering up to 80% of the fees). We want to move to 153."
In an effort to retain its charitable status, Eton College is also launching a multi-million-pound appeal to raise enough money to permit one in three of its places to be supported by bursaries. And at Dulwich College in London, the master, Graham Able, believes that all places will be "needs-blind" inside 15 years.
So before writing off independent education as too expensive, check out the availability of bursaries at potential schools. This Parent Power CD-Rom gives details of bursary awards (usually means-tested) and scholarships (usually academically driven) for all the leading independent schools. Scholarships can cover musical, sporting, artistic and academic excellence. Those schools where more than 10% of admissions benefit are flagged up by a special icon on their summary page.
If your son or daughter is clever enough, another option is to try for a grammar school place in the state sector. First, you will need to move to an area where grammar schools have survived alongside their comprehensive counterparts - Essex, Kent and Trafford spring to mind.
Essex, for instance, boasts some of the highest-performing state secondary schools in the country, with four schools in two towns (King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys and Chelmsford County High School for Girls, in Chelmsford, and Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls) among the top 20 performers nationally. Three of them have been Sunday Times School of the Year in the past decade. Southend and Westcliff contain another four schools that consistently rank in the top 100 state schools. Freedman, of the ISC, however, believes that the competition to pass grammar school entrance exams - which he describes as "surrogate independent schools that happen to be free" - can be tougher than selection for private schools.
At The Henrietta Barnett School, in Barnet, north London, (ranked seventh in our state secondary table this year) there are 10 applications for every place on offer, despite the not inconsiderable deterrent of a two-stage entrance test.
Because of the long odds against success, many parents who enter their daughters hedge their bets by also entering them for the admission tests of a range of private schools in the capital such as North London Collegiate and City of London School for Girls. Don't think, however, that if you opt your children out of academic competition for places at either independent schools or state grammar schools that the race for a place becomes any less strenuous. Far from it.
For places at the leading comprehensive schools, there is competition of a different sort. And while it involves bricks and mortar rather than brains and motivation, it can prove costly just the same.
To get into the catchment area for one of the top-performing comprehensives in England you can expect to pay a house price premium of tens of thousands of pounds.
Even though several of the most academically successful comprehensives retain an element of selection (selecting for instance, up to 10% of children on aptitude for a particular subject or on musical ability), many still allocate places according to their catchment areas and how far a family lives from the school.
A good example is Watford Grammar School for Girls, one of the most successful comprehensives in the exam league tables, and ranked 45th this year. All its recruits come from a postcode-defined catchment area with 55% of admissions designated as "community places". The remaining 45% of admissions are "specialist places", split between those with an aptitude for music (10%) and those selected by academic ability (35%) "as measured by the school's assessment procedures".
Mark Taylor, sales manager for estate agents Watford Estates, says that houses within the catchment area in west Watford are on average 10% higher than those outside, an extra £20,000 to £25,000 on the price of a three-bedroom terraced house. It is a price many are willing to pay.
