To think there must be tons of private school

I mean this is just nastiness for the sake of it

People ask questions just hide the thread if it’s not for you

I imagine MN has a lot of advertisers based on its relatively wealthy, well educated demographic.

For starters, you need time to post, especially in the day. There seem to be a lot of wealthy ‘SAHM’ of much older children. You just can’t do that any more without a high earning partner.

Those frothing threads are funny in that the average income, lifestyles etc of your average private school parent are well known and documented, but most on those threads seem to be making ‘huge sacrifices’, have profound SEN or be fighting for the country in the armed forces. Now that would be a strange demographic for a parenting site…….

over-represented or are just really noisy and demanding of attention, the way the privileged often are.
besides being rude you're sounding judgmental.
sadly many state schools appear to be failing at providing some serious basics ie functional toilet facilities, teachers and support staff.
you can't blame people for being interested either simply online or in real life about alternative provisions.
mn seems to have many parents with children who have diagnosed and undiagnosed SEN and this group of children are not getting the education they should be.
some independent schools cater to these needs. should specialty schools for this group of children be included in the vat cash grab?

Even if people with children in independent schools are over-represented on MN, does this matter? People will post if they're interested. If not, they won't. Of course threads about independent schools will be more relevant to that particular demographic. People come and go anyway. There are threads on all sorts.

Advertisers know. MN knows because that's what they sell to advertisers. That's what pays for all of this.

MN is well-known to skew more highly educated than the general population. That's (one of the reasons) politicians come on here and not on Netmums (the other being higher traffic). There are a number of academic papers out there which cite this also, if you Google.

OP, it's not 7% in private schools, By sixth form it's 17-20% nationally. In some areas (eg certain parts of London), it will be much higher than that - maybe 50%? It's very area-specific.

If you doubt this, have a look at the Secondary Ed board on here and the whole annual hoopla on the 'SW London independent school 11 plus' threads. Lots of people find MN when researching certain schools and entry processes as these threads show up on a Google search. Then people may hang around and cross over to AIBU. Same with 7 plus or 8 plus entry to certain schools, or CE. It can be very competitive so people find 'support threads' (and then get even more wound up) 😁

This observation and the threads themselves are confirmation bias at its best.

At any moment, MN has hundreds of threads. People post on ones that catch their eyes, and complain about the prevalence of other ones that catch their eyes.

This is a current policy which is clearly different between the main parties in an
election year. However MN skews class wise, it certainly has a higher proportion of people with school age children than an average walk down the street. Of course this one attracts attention.

Even if MN were an even, representative sample of the UK, which it isn't, the vast majority of the UK's population lives in southeast England, and thus there would be way more posters from that area than anywhere else. London alone has a larger population than Scotland and Wales put together. MN is also known to skew more affluent and educated than the population average, which increases the bias towards private schools, and school selection is much more salient if you're paying five figures per year per child for your choice. You aren't choosing in the same way if your DC goes to state school.

Long story short: MN has posters of all income levels and UK locations, but the prevalence of SE private school threads is nonetheless natural given the above.

I think MN is more mixed than the perception. I find many more people on here complaining of not being able to afford to spend £20 on something or declare they buy everything second hand out of necessity not ethical reasons. Lots of worrying their dc will be looked down upon as they live in a small house/flat and sneer at snobs shopping in Waitrose.

I don't know why MN I'd thought of as being so middle class. I'd say it's a very broad range of people on here

I think there are loads of mums from London and the SE. When we were looking for preps in rural Oxfordshire I got tons of replies about some very small schools. Privately educated kids go on to dominate most well paid career pathways in the uk so which school to choose was always going to be a hot topic. It's also a huge amount of money to invest in your kids. Mumsnet seems quite polarised in its population. It's either very wealthy or poor. There aren't a lot of average earning mums. If you've never had a child in a good private school then most people would have no idea how truly inadequate state provision currently is.

@Enuffs only 36% of all children go to sixth form. Of these 36%, 17% are at private school. So in summary, there are not more children going to private sixth form, it is simply that the children who go to private school tend to stay on until sixth form.

Probably more people here using private tutors for their children. Imagine there will be squawks if/when VAT is applied here too!

It's 20% of kids by the time you get to sixth form and some counties like Oxfordshire it's 20% of all student right down to reception. I think Mumsnet is at least 30% private school parents. It's how a lot of us got here.

@shepherdsangeldelight netmums local boards are good. I would never use MN local boards.

Population of the U.K. - about 67million. Population of London/SE plus those who commute in etc - well numbers vary from 8-14 million.

So that’s one huge chunk of the population congregating in one area of the country so of course there will be a bias towards posters (assuming the majority are UK based) from the SE, taking about living and education, plus the posts about people visiting and looking at jobs/morning to the SE etc.

Just very vocal.
And all the stats show that those who send kids to private schools are in the top % of earnings, in spite of what is claimed on MN.
I prefer to go by actual research and evidence as anyone can post anything anonymously claiming anything about their own situation, that may or may not be true.

And as long as the Local boards continue to be underpopulated it would be completely pointless to direct people looking for advice on boarding or even day schools across a wide area to them. Particularly when posters with knowledge and experience of independent schools tend to gravitate to the Education topics.

Interesting there is a post currently by someone from Hong Kong asking for advice on 4 specific schools - in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Nottingham.
Overwhelmingly the feedback is that no single person can tell her about all 4 schools and she needs to find out about individual schools and areas.

I do think that local boards should be used more. I suspect many people don't know they exist. The one for my area is basically dead.

On the local board, which is where you’d find parents who know the schools you want to discuss?

That would be a laughably inadequate option! Parents based in Aberdeen or Brussels, moving to England, comparing three different boarding schools to two grammar school and the catchment areas in towns they might move to?