Private School Operating and Financial Model

Enrolment is the master driver. Each year opens with the prior closing balance, adds new intake, subtracts graduates and attrition, and caps the result at maximum campus capacity of 1,200 students.

• Default assumptions start at 800 students with 180 annual intake growing at 2% per year, 8% graduation and 3% attrition, both calculated on opening enrolment. Closing enrolment feeds three revenue streams: gross tuition at the base fee escalated annually, net tuition after a scholarship rate of 5%, one-off enrolment fees on each new student, and ancillary revenue per student.
• This structure makes revenue sensitive to retention and intake assumptions rather than to price alone.

Teaching staff is the largest cost and is driven by a student-teacher ratio of 12, with required teachers rounded up to whole positions. That rounding creates step-function cost increases at enrolment thresholds, so margin can compress when a new teacher is triggered.

• Each teacher carries a fully loaded cost inflated at 3.5% annually. Admin, facilities, marketing and IT costs are set as percentages of revenue, which lets fixed-cost leverage improve margins as the school scales.
• Maintenance capex is also a percentage of revenue, with no growth capex because the base case remains below capacity. The model's margin profile targets typical mature-campus ranges, though actual results depend entirely on the assumptions entered.

The school is modelled as a going concern at acquisition, with pre-existing campus assets, a term loan and share capital. No new debt or equity is raised during the five-year projection.

• Debt amortises straight-line, interest is calculated on the opening balance to avoid circularity, and a DSCR covenant of at least 1.25 times is tested each year. Cash flow combines net income, depreciation and working capital movements, less maintenance capex, debt repayment and dividends paid at a 50% payout of positive net income.
• The returns section builds an equity IRR from the initial outflow, annual dividends and Year 5 exit proceeds, giving a leveraged return on the acquisition.

The model is designed to answer a specific acquisition question: whether buying a premium private K-12 school produces an acceptable equity return over a five-year hold.

• It includes per-student KPIs, an exit multiple assumption and a validation checks sheet covering balance sheet balance, cash never turning negative, enrolment within capacity, DSCR compliance, staff cost ratio and IRR numeric checks.
• A compact operating dashboard summarises enrolment, revenue per student and EBITDA per student for quick review.
• The public download here is a values-only preview, so users can inspect the structure and logic, while the underlying template supports editing inputs and viewing calculated outputs in Excel.