Another wanky Guardian article - the 'anguish' of finding a good school ....

[disgustedbythehypocricy]

This is the most BOAK-inducing thing i've read in a while.. it's so bad i honestly don't know where to start!

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/04/andrew-penman-schools-education

[cyteen]

Yes, this occasioned much eye-rolling from me as well.

[cornsilk909]

3 years? What a drama queen.

[claig]

agree with you, typical hypocritical champagne socialist. An atheist and socialist with the morals of an alley cat and the scruples of a snake.

Love the name disgustedbythehypocrisy. I assume you were thinking of the progressive Labour party and its cast of honourable members when that name sprang to mind?

[squeaver]

God, reading that is like being stuck at the worst dinner party ever.

[amidaiwish]

i think it is pretty honest actually.

[TheHeathenOfSuburbia]

So you think he should have gone for the fake conversion to Catholicism, then, smallwhitecat?

[omnishambles]

Very honest to own up to the CofE thing though - most just bluff it out at Holy Trinity, Wimbledon - or wherever it was.

[BeenBeta]

smallwhitecat/claig - you got there first and I totally agree.

[Quattrocento]

Okay so he paid around £40k, caused him and his family an immense amount of disruption, admits to hypocrisy on a venal scale in public and all so that ...

... his son can go to a comprehensive with 63% 5 A-C passes and thereby avoid the dreadful school which had 49% A-C passes

Is the man mad?

[GetOrfMoiLand]

Crikey.

And the award for most anal-clenchingly boring and self-obsessed hand wringer goes to...

[Habbibu]

Quattro, you're missing the critical point. There was a Rude Boy at the terrible school. Allegedly.

[GetOrfMoiLand]

You can boil that article down to its essential point in one sentence 'I paid £40K so my children did not have to go to school with the Kappa wearing working classes'

[GetOrfMoiLand]

And yes, there were Murders In Tooting.

are there any people left alive in Tooting, or have they all been shot in the street, poor bastards.

[LilyBolero]

Well it rang bells with me, we have no decent secondary school near me, and I have been in a state of near panic since ds1 was in Y3 (he is now Y5 and it's getting ever closer).

[cyteen]

Yes. Don't underestimate the mean streets of Tooting.

[GetOrfMoiLand]

What is wrong with people.

If he had sent his kids to the 49% GCSE school it is more than likely as the offspring of the earnest middle class, his child would have achieved good grades.

He has shot himself in the foot, he should have sent his child there and at university entrance could have capitalised on the fact his child went to a 'sink' school and got into somewhere like Bristol Uni.

[SuseB]

Urgh - hated this article too. As a product of the Merton comprehensive system have to take issue with his view that his kids were bound to fail - certainly it didn't stop me getting As at GCSE and A-level and then a top-class degree at a redbrick uni - and I am nothing special, not a genius or anything. The 'clever kids' did fine even at the sink schools. My school was Rowan girls in Merton, so poor it has long since been shut down and is now a housing estate... He would have been horrified by it, no doubt.

[Quattrocento]

Think the rude boy had the right idea. Jolly discerning of him to be able to spot an idiot at 20 paces, peering through a glass door ...

But the marginal improvement in the school really isn't significant enough to devote all that obsessive effort into changing schools is it? I mean if he'd said he'd moved into a grammar school area where 100% of them get A-C, I'd have a bit more sympathy for the nerdiness.

[niminypiminy]

Phew so glad I wasn't the only one to fling the paper across the room when I read this.

Why don't they try asking a parent of a child with SN to write an article about how hard it is to find a school that will take their child?

[ZephirineDrouhin]

I was all ready to defend the writer, but having read it just want to punch him on the nose. What a twat.

Anyway he wouldn't have got his son into the good school in Tooting - catchment area is far too small to take in children from those leafy parts of Merton where there are apparently no murders.

Problem with faith school admissions is real enough though, but he's certainly not making a good case for it.

Wish me luck. I have to brave the Tooting streets shortly to pick up dd, and neither of us have bullet-proof jackets.

[TheCrackFox]

How much would a house have to cost to pay £40k in stamp duty? A lot. He could have afforded to go private but he likes to claim he is a socialist.

[Blu]

It made me WILD! I'm so pleased there is a thread about this!

I felt like writing to the Guardian and asking which school he has sent his children to, so that I can avoid sending my child to be educated alongside the children of liars (the faith school thing), and the children of parents so ignorant that they cannot understand how the overall average GCSE a school gets relates to what an individual child within that school can achieve. Or the children of parents so dim that they think that the 'contextual' score is only relevant if your child is of low or average ability, or the children of those who are prepared to be so patronising that any parent approaching schoo transition could benefit fom those so-called 'tips', or the children of parents who see being bi lingual as a reason to avoid their educational proximity!

I am a Guardian-reading middle-class parent, living and state-educating my child in a notorious borough with more stabbings than Tooting, for example. I'm not saying that I would be happy to see my child attend each and every school my borough has to offer (based on the standard of education and ambience of the school - NOT on it's demography and the perceived nature of that demography), and if we weren't in the catchment area of one or more good state secondaries, i might well move, and consider myself bloody lucky to be able to have the flexibility and capacity to do that. I hope I would manage to do it without that degree of self-absorbed whining and advertising my life as a community liar! How do thier KIDS feel about them disclosing the lying to get into primary school? How can you consider yourself to have taken a full role on the pastoral side of the church when you feel so cynical that you publish and be damned and don't give a toss about how your former church friends might feel about having been used?

I know faith schools are part of the system and therfore likely to be played like the system but how can that family have such self absorbed arrogance that they expect everyone to pat them on the back and chortle at 5 years of lying to everyone?

Andrew Penman, as a writer, you seem to manage to portray yourself as a prat. Maybe you aren't - in which case you need to review your feature writng skills!

[GrungeBlobPrimpants]

God my heart bleeds

"google knives and vandalism when looking at a school" FFS