I have heard and it would be nice if someone confirm that the full costs in fees to the CAA for a school that offers CPL and IR training including extras such as simm approval is a little over 20 grand a year.
From the current CAA Scheme of Charges:
Initial approval of CPL: £1277
Initial approval of IR: £1277
Initial evaluation of FNPT II: £7334
Annual continuation charge for CPL: £1141
Annual continuation charge for IR: £1141
Recurrent evaluation of FNPT II: £1654
All of the required manuals can be produced internally (the format is in AMC1 ORA.ATO.230(c)) or farmed out to a consultant for, say, £2000.
The fee for an external auditor seems to vary between £400 and £700/day and you can probably get away with one audit/year.
Thus total costs for initial approval, assuming that you get everything right first time, will be about 12,000 and recurrent costs about £5-6000 per annum. Not exactly cheap but certainly nowhere near £20,000 p.a.