Prestigious private school Eton College has issued a £45m bond order to help boost the number of scholarships and bursaries it issues.
The College has borrowed £45m at a fixed interest rate of 3.63 per cent for 45 years, by issuing a debt private placement to UK institutional investor Friends Life.
The College is the latest of several charities to issue bonds. In this case it will use the funding to build its endowment.
The proceeds will be used to “leverage the net investment returns of the College’s endowment portfolio, and to part fund the next phase of the school’s building programme”. The returns from the endowment are how the College’s scholarships and bursaries are funded, so the debt placement will indirectly fund more fee assistance.
When asked if this has been done to help further the College’s public benefit following debates over how private schools meet their public benefit, Janet Walker, burser at the college, told Civil Society News: “This year we paid £6.4m in fee assistance (scholarships and bursaries) and we are very pleased about that. We have 70 boys not paying any fees at all and we have just over 20 per cent getting some sort of help, with an average help of 63 per cent (including the 70 scholarships).
“But we would like to increase it because we are not quite needs blind, we can’t help all the people that need to be helped. We’d like to get to the stage where can help all the boys that need it.”
