Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:22 pm

Many small business owners worry about the education of their children or grandchildren (the author’s parents put two grandchildren though private schooling as they thought that the local education authority schools were not suitable).

The problem with this is that the termly fees for many private schools are in the region of thousands of pounds and how many of us have the ability to pay out lump sums like this three times a year?

I was thinking about this the other day, for no reason other than I had read about the financial pressures on small businesses in the current economic climate and thought about the other expenses that many small business owners face on an annual basis such as insurance or even as a lump sum where equipment is being brought.  It was at this point that I had what I thought was a “eureka” moment.  Businesses can pay for things like insurance on a monthly basis so why couldn’t they pay school fees in the same way, after all schools have regular commitments for things like staff salaries so wouldn’t this help them with their own cash flow ?

Having had this flash of inspiration I decided to make this the subject of my next blog posting so spent a while researching the various options.  I don’t know why, as now I think about it it should have been obvious that someone will have already thought about it, but I was surprised to see that there are firms that will handle this for schools even to the extent of paying the schools their termly fees and allowing parents to pay the school fees on a monthly basis.  One such firm is Premium Credit ( www.sfpschoolfees.co.uk) who seem to offer flexible school fee payment options (which they call School Fee Plan) letting them pay fees on a regular basis while the school gets the full fee at the start of each term.

To me, this seems a nice simple way of spreading the cost for the parent (or grandparent) while letting the school work as normal and would be a boon not only to anyone that runs their own business but also people that are employed and want to put their children through private schools for what could be more than 12 or 13 years.