It costs a real and specific amount to teach one student for one course. Most households pay a fraction of it. The gap between those two numbers is the entire point, and it is the thing this sector is strangely reluctant to say out loud.
We are recalculating what a place costs us today, properly, per student and per club, and we will publish the method alongside the number rather than the number on its own. Until then we would rather name no figure than name a stale one.
The sticker price is real
It costs money to run a cohort properly: mentors and teaching assistants who are paid, infrastructure that stays up, and someone marking work quickly enough that the feedback still matters. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and it would also make the programme fragile, because a thing that pretends to be free is usually one grant away from disappearing.
The scale is not charity
A household pays a percentage of the sticker price based on what it can afford, from ten percent to the whole thing. Families who pay closer to the top are not being over-charged. They are directly funding a place for someone who cannot pay, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up as a discount.
The reason the assistance question sits inside the ordinary application form, rather than in a separate process, is that a separate process is a filter. It asks a seventeen-year-old to identify themselves as poor in front of an institution before that institution has committed to anything. Plenty of them will not do it, and the ones who will not are frequently the ones we most want.
What this costs us
Honesty about money has a price. It means we cannot claim to be free, which is a much better headline. It means every cohort has a real financial ceiling, and when we say a cohort is full, it is full.
We think it is worth it. A student who knows what their place cost, and knows somebody else paid for part of it, understands something about obligation that no module covers.