Aibu to wonder why private schools produce more "well rounded" children? Is it the school or the parents?

If the OP is correct, i think its down primarily to the parents, they instill self belief in their kids and have the money and opportunities for their children to have more and better life experiences, possibly teach them the value of education too.
The PS then tops this up with Sporting & Cultural activities that the state sector no longer provides.

The public of course voted for the underfunding of state schools in favour of tax cuts.

Kids from poor families where the parents have no interest in their children, have a massive disadvantage.

If you have bright parents, who value education, good behaviour and have the means for lots of extra curricular activities, I do think all children will do well..

However, if you put that child in a failing comp, they are unlikely to achieve their full potential.

If you put them in a fantastic comp in an affluent area, they have far greater odds to do well.

If you put them in a good private school with 12 in a class and the incredible facilities on offer, it really is harder for them to fail.

It's clearly not just the academic side - I went to a rare animal that is a London grammar school where results, behaviour and teaching standards were exceptionally high. Yet it did not produce the life achievement or confidence that you see in public school pupils on the whole - it produced very clever but rather self-conscious people. We were all told how we were the top performers in the country but everyone felt a bit embarrassed and awkward about it whereas I wonder if there is less of that at private schools. It was generally a very middle class school but there were less privileged kids there as well.

Hard agree.

It's certainly not my experience - as a university lecturer and admissions tutor - that private schools produce more well-rounded students. On the whole, they produce more articulate and confident students, which is likely to be related to class sizes as well as parental inputs, but they are just as likely as any others to be narrow-minded, lacking in general knowledge and never to have read a book.

It’s both. Also - Mumsnet is incredibly anti private so really im not sure you’ll get an unbiased response.

Define well rounded.

The private school in the town I live (now a state school) was famous for producing either anorexics or nymphomaniacs so…

Maybe a strange little social experiment but I’m one of 5 children. 3 of us went to private day school, 2 of us went to the local catholic comprehensive. All same parents, all quite close in age.

my parents deemed that three of us were quite lazy and needed to be in an academically challenging environment to succeed - and two were so self motivated that they’d push themselves wherever they went. All 5 of us were party to these decisions and I genuinely don’t think there’s any resentment between us.

All 5 have at least an under grad degree + have had professional jobs outside of time off for children. Of the two maddest of us one went to private + one went to state.

hugely unhelpful anecdata…

but I think that fetishing / demonising private school as the answer / problem is very narrow minded.

successful happy people are often built by successful happy families. Generations of ‘enough’ and the associated psychological stability that brings are so hard to quantify and replicate.

if (mid forties now) look around at my friends who are largely quite happily married, stable friendship groups, decent support networks etc - then the overwhelming common denominator is happy family of origin.

a lot of them did attend private school - probably 50/50 - but again, that parental ability to pay for that comes from a place of historical stability. Expectation of future stability. Parental presence + interest not over compensating with money for their workaholism. Or at least not two parents doing that.

a lot of them had at least one parent who worked part time during their teenage years and was present.

I am absolutely not saying that private school isn’t a huge leg up. But it’s not the catch all panacea for dysfunction that some people think. Send a wildly dysfunctional kid to Eton and you get an egotistical and well spoken dysfunctional adult out the other side…

They absolutely can. And as someone new to private schools there’s definitely a few absolute twits that doubtlessly will end up as politicians.

but there’s also some really nice kids, really opened minded kids who don’t realise how rich they are because they’ve not been brought up in the competitive environment of state schools where your brand of shoe matters.

IME private schools can churn out a lot of over-confident, arrogant, unempathetic knobheads. Just look at the houses of parliament - although granted, that's more of a problem with public than private schools. If you ever wondered if Dunning and Kruger were right, just visit a private school.

I mean this is literally just the class divide.

It’s like saying why do people from wealthy families end up with better paid jobs?

Or why do rich people end up more successful than poor people?

The answer is because that’s the design of our society. There can’t be rich people without poor people working, making stuff, cleaning, buying over priced stuff sold by rich people etc.

If everyone was reared by every school to be successful academically, speak 5 languages, play the piano and compete at fencing or whatever, who do people think would do the things mentioned above?

Agree with this. I don't think there is any difference. You pay for the contacts and opportunities. I have met some privately educated people who were terrible at a lot of things, and state educated people who had a broad set of skills and very accomplished in what they did. It's about the person, not the price tag. Private education just offers more opportunities and a leg up whether you are talented or not.

@Kenthighst huge relief for us, but I worry for those left behind.

When I was made redundant during Covid, I used to listen to dcs practise reading at his old school, to try to get them back on track after lockdown. So many were struggling. 😕

My ds spent 7 years at a small state primary and then 5 years at a small independent.

He was strong at maths & science, weak at sport, ok at everything else. By year 6 he was angry, frustrated and miserable. He felt he was held back at the things he was good at while teachers focused on getting weaker pupils through SATs.
He was ridiculed and humiliated by the headteacher over his inability to play football and became isolated and depressed.

The (minor unfashionable) independent school has been brilliant. Encouraging him to achieve as much as he can in maths and science, and carefully undoing the damage and building his confidence in sports he will take part in. Giving him access to a gym, swimming and archery club. Finding things he enjoys. Showing skilled support, kindness and pastoral care. Aged 15, he will finally play football at lunchtime. He is happy and confident. A different person. 😊

I think it comes down to the resources of the school, small class sizes, the levels of bullying the school tolerates and in his case the decency of the teachers.

This is all utter nonsense. Sweeping generalisations.

It is both.
If you pay fees then you have skin in the game so more invested.
Paying fees then also gives access to a whole host of extra curricular activities every day, not just once a week.
Add to that smaller class sizes to grow confidence, teachers who have freedom to go off piste in lessons and explore depth as well as breadth.
All subjects taught by specialists with MA/PhD level (at DDs school) so the passion and knowledge for each subject is there.

Add to that (probably) more money for travel outside of school and life experiences. I say probably more money because obviously some DC are on bursaries or are at SEN specialist schools.

I think it’s good schooling in an affluent area with good extra curricular provision that helps combined with parents having the budget to give their children experiences and attention . I don’t think it’s as simple as private v state . My kids were nowhere near as self assured as their privately educated peers at primary level . They are teens now and I would say that has now evened out. One has been exclusively in state education the other recently transferred into the private system

I think that’s fair. I also think that @Echobelly ’s post about entitlement, while entirely true to an extent, only works if that entitlement is only on offer to a small proportion of the population —- ie the ‘polish’ simply wouldn’t be appealing if everyone left school with it. The doors, by definition, can’t be open to everyone. The supposed cachet of a private school is only there because only a tiny percentage of the population attends one.

I also don’t think it’s general. At Oxford my college had a lot of ex-public schoolboys. Some were classic Hooray Henrys whose grandfathers had built the new cloisters, came from castles in Scotland, were in exclusive dining clubs and left for big City jobs and marriage to a Cressida. Some, from the same schools, were deeply ordinary, had got into Oxford on good A levels and a confident interview, but certainly, if they felt entitled to the world, no one had told the world.

If state schools are ‘bad’ they end up in a cycle of underfunding because they’re undersubscribed.

Each child brings the school money but if people don’t pick the school they end up still having to pay the same amount of teachers but with less money.

1 form entry schools suffer a lot in this way.

It’s mostly true though isn’t it?

First world problems and all that

What I don't understand is why state schools can't replicate at least some of it - they manage it in other countries.
Some can and do.

In my experience they're the ones where overall the pupils and families value education, want the children to do well, the families value a range of interests.

In other schools staff are busy trying to create a sense of calm, order and safety because if they call parents to say their child is preventing others from learning, refusing to follow simple instructions, and is being verbally abusive to staff and students, the response from the parent is to shrug their shoulders or worse excuse behaviour. In these schools a huge amount of time is taken up firefighting and dealing with a lot of issues that aren't really education.

I've worked in both. Family cultures make a big difference. In one school I ran lots of enrichment activities. In the other I was too exhausted to run them and the staff who did try to offer nice things found they were terribly attended.

Lol - it wouldn’t be mumsnet if the convo somehow didn’t get turned into something to do with gender indentity…