Settings that keep every number honest.
Review the assumptions and preferences that apply across the whole family plan.
How to use the forecaster
Six clear steps to a forecast you can trust, plus direct help when you need it.
▶ Watch a walkthrough
A short guided tour of the whole tool, if you'd rather watch than read.
01 · Add your children
Set each child's age and current education stage to map their journey.
Go to Children → Add a child. Enter their name and either their age or their current year group / stage: the tool fills in the other one for you, plus the calendar year they start Reception (or your curriculum's equivalent) and the year they're expected to leave school. Those two years drive every "is this child in school yet" calculation in the forecast, so a wrong age or stage will throw off the whole projection for that child.
You can add as many children as you like. Each gets their own tab in Costs and their own row everywhere in the forecast, so siblings at different stages (or different schools) are tracked separately. If two children overlap in school at the same time, the dashboard flags that as a "peak pressure" period automatically.
02 · Enter current costs
Upload a fee guide or enter tuition, transport, uniforms, care, activities and extras manually.
Costs are split into three parts for each child: Tuition (school fees, entered as a full year-by-year fee schedule or one single annual/termly estimate), Nursery (day/week-rate childcare for children not yet in formal school, kept separate because it's billed completely differently to school tuition), and Other costs (transport, uniform, activities, meals, camps, tutoring, registration).
Upload Document reads a school or nursery fee sheet (PDF, PNG, JPG or CSV) entirely on your device; nothing is sent anywhere. Tick every child the document applies to, let it read the file, then check the review table before applying: every detected value, its category and its frequency (annual/termly) are editable, and you can remove anything it got wrong. For nursery/childcare documents that price by days-per-week, it shows you the programme options so you pick the one your child is actually on.
Always glance over what was extracted before applying it: OCR and PDF parsing are good but not infallible, especially on scanned images or unusually formatted fee sheets.
03 · Set assumptions
Review fee growth and general inflation before projecting forward.
Under Subsidies & rates, each cost category has a default annual growth rate (how much fees typically rise each year). Sensible regional defaults are pre-filled, and you can reset to them at any time. You can also override the rate for a single child in a single year directly from their Costs tab (useful when a school has just announced a specific increase), without changing the general assumption for every other year.
04 · Add subsidies
Include employer support, bursaries and sibling discounts.
Subsidies reduce the forecast without touching the underlying fee data, so you can compare "what we're actually quoted" against "what we'll actually pay." Apply a subsidy to all children or specific ones, and to all cost categories or just tuition. Sibling discounts (common when 2+ children attend the same school) are configured separately and only apply in years where those children genuinely overlap in school.
Switch the Gross / Net after subsidies toggle at the top of Dashboard, Costs and Reports to see figures before or after every subsidy is applied.
05 · Review the forecast
Explore total cost, annual cost, peak years, child detail and overlap.
The Dashboard gives the headline numbers: total cost across your chosen forecast window (3/5/10 years), the single most expensive year within that window, and a per-child breakdown. Reports goes further (cost by category over time, year-by-year tables, and sibling-overlap detail), useful for spotting exactly which category (tuition vs activities vs transport) is driving a cost spike in a given year.
A yellow banner appears whenever a child is due to be in school for a year that has no fee entered yet, so you always know where the forecast is still incomplete rather than silently showing £0.
06 · Revisit each year
Update confirmed fees and use academic-year rollover.
Fee schedules are usually estimates beyond the current year. As each school year's real fees get confirmed (a new fee letter, a nursery re-registration, a subsidy renewal), come back and update just that entry rather than re-entering everything. The tool automatically rolls forward each child's stage at the start of a new academic year, so ages and year groups don't need to be corrected by hand every September.
07 · Understanding the Settings page
What each part of Settings controls, beyond How to use.
Data & preferences: name the current calculation, save up to 5 calculations so you can compare scenarios (e.g. two different schools), start a fresh "New Calculation" that can optionally copy across your existing children, costs, region and subsidies, and export or import a JSON backup of everything.
Subsidies & rates: the default annual fee-growth rate per category (with a one-click reset to the regional default), every employer/bursary/scholarship subsidy you've added, and the sibling discount setting.
Cost categories: turn categories you don't use (e.g. camps, tutoring) off so they stop cluttering the Costs tab and Reports, or add a custom category for a cost specific to your family. The twelve built-in categories are never deleted, only hidden.
School year: the academic year start date used to work out which calendar year each child's fees fall into, and when the yearly rollover (advancing every child's stage) happens.
Currency & region: the country/curriculum for the whole plan, which sets the currency symbol, the year-group names used throughout (Reception vs FS2 vs Kindergarten, etc.) and the suggested regional fee-growth rate. A plan holds one currency; if costs span two currencies (e.g. relocating schools), start a second calculation instead.
Privacy & data: everything is stored only in this browser (nothing is sent to a server). Export a JSON backup periodically so your plan can be restored if this device or browser storage is ever cleared.
📱 Add to your phone's home screen
Use the forecaster like an app, without an app-store install.
iPhone (Safari): tap the Share icon (square with an arrow) in the toolbar, scroll down and tap "Add to Home Screen," then confirm. It'll appear on your home screen with its own icon and open full-screen, no browser bar.
Android (Chrome): tap the ⋮ menu in the top-right corner, then tap "Add to Home screen" (or "Install app" if offered) and confirm.
Fee document guide
What kind of school and nursery fee documents the upload tool reads reliably, and what to expect from the rest.
Fee documents vary widely in structure across different schools and countries, which can cause inconsistent results from the upload function. The upload function is still learning, and was built to learn from a wide variety of fee documents. If it doesn't recognise yours, you can send it to info@theprojecthouse.co.uk to help train the tool on it.
Always double-check what the tool extracts against the original document, even for documents in the "works best" category below. This reads documents automatically (including OCR for scans and photos), and automatic reading can still misread a digit, drop a row, or mislabel a stage. The review screen shows a confidence mark next to every figure, but that mark reflects how the tool read it, not whether it's correct, so treat every extracted amount as a draft to confirm, not a finished answer.
✓ Works best
A genuine fee table, with amounts clearly attached to a grade, year or age.
A real table of grades/years against amounts. Rows or columns labelled things like "Year 7", "Grade 5", "Reception", "FS2", or a column literally headed "Year"/"Grade" with the numbers listed underneath it, read reliably, whether that's a school PDF, a nursery fee sheet, or a clean screenshot. A full table covering every grade the school teaches, Reception through Year 13 or Kindergarten through Grade 12, is exactly the strongest case, not something to avoid: most of the real fee sheets this tool reads well are exactly that.
One consistent price list per document. Every row quoting the same pricing period (e.g. all 2026/27 fees, not a mix of this year's and next year's rates for the same grades) and the same currency throughout, ideally with an explicit "Total" or "Annual Fee" column. Two different price lists stacked on one page, not two grades, is what actually confuses the tool.
A PDF beats a screenshot. If the school's fee schedule is available as a PDF (even a scanned one) or you can save/print the page to PDF, use that over a screenshot: PDFs are consistently read more reliably by this tool.
If you do use a screenshot, crop it to just the table, the header and rows only, without the page title, school name/logo, or any text above or below. Wider columns also read better than narrow ones: the thing that matters most is whether each row's year and its fee comfortably fit side by side on one line. A narrow mobile screenshot often can't fit both, so the page wraps the fee onto its own line underneath: visually still one row, but read as two unrelated rows by the tool, which loses the row entirely. The two examples below are cropped exactly the same way; only the column width differs.
Text-based PDFs and clean screenshots read far better than a photo of a printed page or a photo of a screen: glare, skew and low resolution are the biggest reasons OCR misreads a figure.
Nursery/daycare sheets priced by days-per-week are supported directly: upload it and you'll be shown the day-count and session options to pick the one your child is actually on.
⚠ Usually needs a manual check or entry
The tool will still try, but these shapes are where it's most likely to get something wrong or find nothing.
One flat fee for the whole school, stated only in a sentence. Some schools (often boarding schools) publish a single rate with no table at all: there's nothing for the tool to find there, so enter that figure directly on the Costs page.
Classical English year names used on their own, "Shell", "Remove", "Fifth Form", "Lower/Upper Sixth", without the school also stating the matching "Year 9/10/12/13" number anywhere. Most UK schools state both; a document using only the traditional names won't resolve automatically.
Named packages or tiers with no age or grade attached, e.g. "Explorer", "Adventurer", "Pioneer" style session bundles. These come through as separate options rather than one clean figure; check the review table and remove any that don't apply before applying.
Payment-plan tables (Pay-in-Full / Two-Semester / Ten-Month, and similar) describe how you'd pay, not what each grade costs: the tool looks for the underlying per-grade tuition, not the instalment options.
Very low-quality scans (heavily skewed, blurry, or a photo taken at an angle) can cause the tool to misread digits or miss rows. A straight-on screenshot or a text-based PDF from the school's own website is always more reliable than a phone photo.
If a screenshot doesn't extract well, don't just try the same screenshot again. A narrow column that wraps a fee onto its own line (see "Works best" above) is recovered automatically in most cases, but not every one. If a few rows are still missing after review, try a wider screenshot or a PDF version of the same document instead; if neither is available, enter the missing figures by hand on the Costs page.
✕ Not supported
A short list of formats the tool can't open at all.
Password-protected PDFs, files over 25 MB, and formats other than PDF, PNG, JPG, CSV or XLSX. If a document falls into one of the categories above and doesn't extract cleanly, the fastest path is usually to enter the figures by hand on the Costs page: it takes about as long as fixing a bad extraction would.
Set adjustments used across the family. Individual fees can still override them.
Choose which costs appear in Costs, calculations and reports.
All twelve defaults remain available; custom categories can be added and removed.
Set the academic calendar used to place costs and transitions correctly.
Choose the country, currency and curriculum that structure this calculation.
Data & preferences
Manage scenario names, five saved calculations and portable backups.
Current scenario
Name this version so it is easy to identify later.
Saved calculations
Copy a plan before testing another school, country or assumption.
Import & export
JSON preserves the complete calculation. CSV supports analysis. PDF creates a readable record.
Move to another device
EduScope stores everything locally, so moving from this device to another (e.g. desktop to phone) takes two manual steps rather than happening automatically.
- Open EduScope and tap "Already purchased? Restore access" (near the top of the page), then enter the same email you used to buy it. This unlocks that device.
- Back here, tap Export calculation above and send yourself the downloaded JSON file (email, AirDrop, cloud drive — whatever's easiest).
- On the other device, open Settings → Import & export and use Import JSON to load that file. Your plan will be exactly as you left it.
Your forecast stays on this device unless you choose to export it.
Family details and costs are stored locally. Uploaded documents are processed locally and reviewed before values are applied.
Restart the guided setup without deleting the current plan until the new setup is complete.
Restore the example family while keeping the tool ready to explore.
Permanently remove every calculation and setting stored on this device.
Quick answers, or send us the details directly.
Open common answers or contact Life PM support.
Fill in what you can below, then send it as an email: we pre-fill the subject and lay out the sections for you.
Your family's education forecast.
Projected costs, peak spending year and upcoming fee changes across your chosen forecast window.
Pressure overview
Child breakdown
Cumulative cost overview
Sibling overlap
Each child. One complete education journey.
Keep dates, schools and stages together so every future fee lands in the right year.
Enter fees and growth rates for each child.
Select a child tab, choose Fee schedule for year-by-year accuracy or Single estimate for a quick projection. Set inflation rates per category, then save when done.
A complete record of the plan behind the numbers.
Generate, save, copy, print and export without losing the live year-by-year detail.
