Where millionaire Rishi Sunak went to high school and the large full price

Millionaire Rishi Sunak is one of the richest men to have ever held the office of Prime Minister – and certainly had plenty of money spent on him while he was growing up.

Born in Southampton in 1980, he was entirely privately educated throughout his youth, and attended Oakmount Preparatory School until it closed in 1989. He then went on to study at Stroud School, King Edward VI Preparatory.

The fees at Stroud School currently start at £4,060 for nursery students and increase the older the child gets. Today, a family sending their child to the school from Reception to Year 6 would spend a colossal £34,907.

After leaving Stroud School in 1992, Mr Sunak went on to study at one of the UK’s most expensive schools – Winchester College. Winchester College is a public school in Hampshire that educates around 700 boys from the ages of 13 to 18. It has recently begun allowing girls into the sixth form for the first time. The current fees to study at Winchester are £45,936 each year for boarders, and £33,990 for day pupils.

Rishi Sunak left the school in 1998, and fees were lower at this time. But, around the turn of the millennium, families were already paying just under £20,000 per year for boarding.

During his initial failed Tory leadership bid in 2022, some of his supporters claimed he attended the elite school on a scholarship. But Rishi Sunak confirmed to Channel 4 that he did not receive a scholarship and that his parents paid the fees. Speaking about his time at Winchester in a documentary for the BBC in 2001, a young Rishi said: “At Winchester I was one of very few Asians, I mean the first generation into that level of society. It does put me in an elite of achievement definitely in society, but I’ll always consider myself sort of, you know, professional middle class.”

In one now-infamous clip, Sunak was also shown talking about how he had no working class friends. He said: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class.” His dad smirked on screen, and Sunak went on to correct himself, saying: “Well not working class, but I mix and match.”

In the same documentary, Sunak’s parents claimed that paying Rishi’s Winchester fees was “quite a large financial commitment” because they were double the fees of his school in Southampton. Rishi Sunak was made head boy in his final year at Winchester and went on to study at Lincoln College, Oxford.

After graduating from Oxford in 2001 he got a scholarship to do an MBA at Stanford University, and moved to Santa Monica with his new wife, billionaire Infosys heiress Akshata Murthy. The couple lived in a beachfront apartment which they rented for $20,000 a month, around £13,000 at the time. Today they are estimated to have a combined personal fortune of £651m, and have donated over £100,000 to Winchester College over the years.

Earlier this month, one of his old teachers at the school revealed to the Mirror that he would not be backing his former pupil at the ballot box. Nick MacKinnon is instead backing Keir Starmer’s party at the election to punish the PM for supporting Brexit. He regarded Sunak as “a good boy” when he taught him maths in the 1990s, but the ex-Winchester teacher now says of the 44-year-old PM: “I don’t know how he sleeps at night after knowingly putting a slow puncture in UK PLC.” The prize-winning poet also blasted Mr Sunak’s National Service policy as an “opportunistic punt” to garner support among pensioners.

Mr MacKinnon worked at the 642-year-old Hampshire boarding school from 1986 until 2020. He continues to tutor maths, English and Medieval history and has taken a keen interest in Sunak’s political career. Mr MacKinnon told the Mirror : “I remember him only as a boy at the back of class, I recall little about him as a pupil but his achievements at Winchester are not in dispute. He was a good boy, he was head of school and the first non white head of school in 600 years at that. He was a very good boy and I am sorry for the way he has turned out, which was to become wildly opportunistic.”