PARENTS who send their children to private schools may be landed with an increase in fees because of a need to meet government “quotas” on the number of pupils allowed in on bursaries.

The Charity Commission is expected to signal to the 2,500 independent schools in England and Wales next week that if they want to retain their charitable status and the accompanying tax benefits they must ensure that pupils from underprivileged backgrounds pay lower fees.

The result is likely to be an extra burden on parents who pay fees to educate their own children and whose taxes already support state schools.

Independent schools argue that they deserve to be treated as charities because they save the state large sums of money by educating hundreds of thousands of children who would otherwise need places at state schools.

However, the 2006 Charities Act requires the commissioners to test the “public benefit” from schools claiming charitable status.

Five schools have been chosen for pilot tests on whether they provide enough benefit to the outside community, both in numbers of means-tested bursaries and the access allowed to their playing fields and other facilities.

Independent school sources believe the Charity Commission is likely to indicate when it announces the results of the tests that it is looking for the cost of subsidised schooling to equate to about 5% of the school’s annual income from fees.

Many richer schools, including Eton, more than meet this requirement, but others, lacking endowment funds, may have to increase fees to pay for poorer pupils. It would particularly hit newer and lesser-known schools that do not have endowments.

The commissioners are believed to have taken soundings from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, which has already tested 11 of the 75 independent schools north of the border. Four schools, all of which provided less than 5.5% of their fee income in bursaries, failed the test. One school, St Leonards in St Andrews, spent only 0.5% of its income on bursaries.

A draft school trustee report that the Charity Commission published as a possible template showed a school which offered bursaries of a value greater than 5% of the school’s annual gross income from fees. The fictional school had 16% of its pupils on bursaries.

Manchester Grammar school, the only one of the five schools tested to have volunteered, is expected to pass the test because 17% of its places are supported by bursaries; it coaches state school children for the entrance interviews to Oxford and Cambridge and it invites the public to lectures, such as one given there last week by Douglas Hurd, the Tory former home secretary.

However, the head of St Anselm’s, a boarding preparatory school in Bakewell, Derbyshire, with 200 pupils, which has also been tested, said spending in excess of 5% of income on bursaries would be difficult in a recession. Simon Northcott has tried to help local schoolchildren but nobody wanted to learn Greek from his teachers and state schools turned down the use of his school’s swimming pool.

Northcott added: “We certainly did not volunteer to be tested.

“On the one hand [the charity commissioners] were saying they took every school on its individual circumstances, but on the other they declined to look round our school. They really wanted to know how many bursaries we had.”

Other independent schools in Labour-controlled areas claim they have been given the “brush-off” when they have attempted closer liaison with state schools.

David Lyscom, chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, which represents the private sector, said: “It would be alarming if the grammar school tested was held up as the template. I do hope they do not set it as high as the benchmark in Scotland because a lot of schools will not be able to achieve that. An increase in bursaries would have to come from putting up fees.”

The Charity Commission denied there would be a hard and fast rule on the percentage of fees spent on bursaries.

“There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach and no benchmark for the minimum or maximum amount for bursaries,” said a spokeswoman.

“Much will depend on the circumstances of the charity, and although fee reductions are an obvious way of making the services of a fee-charging charity more widely accessible, this is not the only means of achieving this. All the activity that meets the principles of public benefit is taken into consideration.”

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