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British boarding school admissions for international families
Britain's best schools select in Year 6, years before a child ever arrives. Most families applying from overseas find that out a year too late. Sixty minutes with an adviser gets you the real timetable, a banded shortlist, and a straight answer on your child's chances.
£450 on booking. It comes off either package in full if you carry on. No obligation. The written plan's yours whatever you decide.
Watch this before you shortlist a single school
Video slot reserved
3 minutes.
Working with us
What we cover on the Pathway Decision Call
One decision, made properly, inside a week.
We run the whole application with you. Start to offer.
From this decision to the university offer. However many years that takes.
Paid in full. Your £450 comes off either package if you continue. We don't do refunds and we don't need to. You keep the plan either way.
What the brochures leave out
None of this is secret. Every one of these sits on a school's own admissions page. It just isn't what an open day tells you, and it's much harder to pick up from another country. Most families work it out too late. Two of the four have usually gone.
Several leading schools shut registration before a child finishes Year 5. Three years before entry. One moved its deadline from June to August and flags the change itself; another closes on 30 June.
Published school admissions pages, 2026
Most of the rest close on 30 September or 1 October of Year 6. The ISEB Common Pre-Test follows in October or November. A child sits it once. There's no retake.
School admissions pages, iseb.co.uk
You declare bursary intent when you register, not later. At one leading school the deadline for families needing serious assistance falls in January of Year 6, before a single offer goes out.
Published school bursary pages, 2026
One year at the top end of British boarding in 2026/27, including the 20% VAT that's applied to school fees since January 2025. Five years of that is over £328,000, before any fee rises.
School fee schedules, 2026/27
British boarding averages around £54,000 a year with VAT. At the schools most families here ask about, it's closer to £65,000. That's the size of the decision.
Why the school decides the university
This is the part families miss. The university decision looks like it lands at seventeen. Most of it is already settled by then, because the school decides what your child can even study.
A school that doesn't run Further Mathematics, or runs it only if enough pupils sign up, quietly weakens every future application to Engineering, Economics and the mathematical sciences. Cambridge tells Engineering applicants to take Further Maths if their school offers it. If it doesn't, that sentence is doing a lot of work.
undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk, Engineering
Plenty of schools teach one or the other. Pick the school and you've often picked the curriculum. That matters more than it sounds: an IB student gets three Higher Level slots, and Cambridge says plainly that Higher Level meets its A level subject requirements while Standard Level only meets AS.
undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk, accepted qualifications
Chemistry is compulsory for Medicine at Oxford. Cambridge wants Maths for Natural Sciences even with three sciences behind it. LSE wants an A* or a 7 in Maths specifically, for Economics. Drop the wrong subject at sixteen and those courses close. Nobody tells the family at the time.
Oxford, Cambridge and LSE published entry requirements
So you choose a school backwards. From the degree your child might plausibly want, not forwards from a league table. That's what the call is for.
Two minutes to tell us about your child. We read every one ourselves, and we only take on families we can genuinely help.
60 minutes on video, at a time that works in your timezone. We go through your child, the schools on your mind and the ones that should be properly. Both parents welcome. Bring your child too if they want to be there.
Five working days. In writing, with every date on it. Then a second call once you've read it and talked it over at home.
Credentials
Our team has placed over 200 students at top institutions. We built UK Education Guide and sold it, and we've placed students at Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and across a broad range of British independent schools. The portal behind this page compares 82 boarding schools and 30 universities on real fees, qualifications and entry data.
We're independent. Everything you tell us stays between us, and nothing goes to a school unless you ask us to send it.
Before you ask
Possibly, for some of them. We'll say so on the call rather than let you spend a year working it out. Late entry routes are published and real, and several leading schools run a late applicant round with its own dates. The point is to know which doors are still open before you spend anything else.
Because a free call is a sales call. Ours is the advice. Charging for it means we can tell you a school is wrong for your child, or that you've left it too late, without worrying about what that costs us. It also means we take fewer families and prepare properly for each one.
No. Be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Schools decide places on pre-test, assessment and interview. What we do is make sure your child is registered at the right schools, at the right time, ready for the right assessments, with a list that has real fallbacks on it.
Yes. Plenty of families turn up certain they want boarding and leave having realised a strong day school suits their child better. Sometimes it goes the other way. You don't need that settled before we speak; it's part of what we work through.
Most of the families we advise are outside Britain. The call runs on video at a time that suits your timezone, and the plan lands in your inbox afterwards. Applying from abroad is the normal case here, not the exception. The timing questions matter more for you, because you can't drop into an open day on a Tuesday.
We'll have read your application first. The first half is us asking about your child, what's worked and what hasn't. The second half is the recommendation, live, with you pushing back on it. The written version follows within five working days.
Tell us about your child. We read every one and reply inside a working day with times, or with an honest note if we're not the right people to help.
Or send us the details below and we'll come back to you.
Every figure on this page is published by the institution named
Fees, deadlines and admissions statistics are those published for the current cycle at the time of writing and change each year. We confirm every date against the institution before you act on it.