To think it’s hard for a middle class child to attend a working class school?

You’ve missed out the fact that if middle class kids are bullied it’s their own fault for thinking they are better than everyone else/showing off about their fancy holidays.

So what we’ve learned from this thread is:

-MC kids can’t be bullied
-Bullying isn’t really bullying if you’re MC
-If MC are bullied it’s because they’re “aren’t robust enough”
-MC people should ensure their kids are educated with other MC kids.
-If they can’t afford this they’re not MC but delusional
-MC should bully or beg their gps for school fees
-MC kids are “pissheads” and “lazy tossers”
-Bullying makes you a better person

I was bullied in secondary school for being "posh" and "too clever" we were working class but my dad was from a very middle class home. I had older parents who were very strict on how we spoke, what we could watch on TV, how we dressed etc.
While I appreciate a lot of the values I was taught it was very hard being so differnt from my peers and as I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find where I fit in. Not quite middle class and not quite working class. I do find, though, that I am able to talk to pretty much anyone in any social situation.
Kids can be cruel about anything that is "different" so while my experience was tough others may be fine.

I know plenty of MC kids who are lazy tossers who know their parents will swoop in with tutoring and sort them out with good work experience via their connectionsI know plenty of WC kids who work extremely hard.

It’s not holidays that’s the issue. It’s accent, clothes, academic interest and desire to study.

I haven’t been in this situation but I don’t think the kids will notice apart from maybe noticing if the MC kid goes on some fancy holidays. And that is unlikely to be a source of bullying. Should be fine.

Always being alone when you have to find a partner for something <shudder>

You can be protected from a lot by having a best friend. It only takes one person to hang out with to mean you don’t stick out as a target. That’s one reason why some kids will be absolutely fine as a minority while others will be miserable.

Some children are better than others at being chameleons, whether as working class in a posh school or the other way round. My friend who was got at for not making sufficiently middle class style choices was not the only working class girl in the class and in fact the other was less well off (eg shared a bedroom) but the other was far better at blending in. But then why the hell should she have had to?

I went to the local inner city comprehensive. My parents were in the process of moving and had zero intentions of me going. Then they got divorced…

I won’t pretend I’m middle class but a rumour did start that my parents were millionaires because my dad was spotted carrying a brief case. My parents were considerably older than my peers and extremely pro education/extracurricular activities/making me ‘rounded’. I think their age/parenting style is what made me not fit in, I was only allowed one stud in each ear, natural hair, wasn’t allowed school uniform from Rev like everyone else or a drawstring bag…

I would keep my extra curricular activities on the down low as they were seen as really lame. I never did feel like I did fit in but I think my mum made sure I didn’t. In all honestly it’s something that’s always been on the top of my priorities to ensure my DC don’t go through the same.

But, I can slip into that inner city school girl in a second ‘Oi you starting?’ Or ‘You what?’ I can switch between my accents in a second - I honestly don’t know what my real accent is. I don’t feel like I put on either one. I do feel more rounded being able to get on with all walks of life and being grounded.

All kids are bullied to a certain extent

It doesn't have to be persistent or particularly obvious bullying to be damaging to a child. Imagine spending the majority of your seven years of primary school with no close friends and no one really wanting to play with you. It's pretty horrible.

It was mostly quite gentle mocking to be fair. Met a lad now man I was at school with as an adult and when he heard what I was doing sighed and said “yes well you always were posh” 😀

Accepting that a child can be bullied for not having the local accent, same style as everyone else etc isn’t the same as saying that children from the working class are unpleasant. It happens both ways, children just tend to pick on any differences. Several people have said here that they were picked on for being posh in one school then mocked for not being posh enough in another. If it develops into persistent bullying the school should deal with it, but often they don’t.

@emoliant are you sure you are middle class OP?? are you not just a wannabe?? most people are working class!

But ‘mixed socioeconomically’ is much easier because then no one class stands out. The real difficulty is for children who are the exception in an otherwise homogeneous school.

Honestly, at primary school it only makes a difference if the parents make a big deal of it.

I teach at the primary in the next village along from ours. All very leafy and ‘middle class’ etc, until the catchments were adjusted to account for a small housing association estate being built in the next town. Our FSM percentage has increased a lot, and the school overall is now more mixed socioeconomically. Children are still children, they make friends with who they want to, play with who they want to etc.

Older DD5 is in reception at my school and loves her friend X’s flat because it’s all on one level and has two sets of bunk beds. She also loves her friend Y’s house because of all the fields they own and can play in. I don’t really care who she mixes with, so long as they’re decent human beings.

Yep, this. I went to boarding school and was bullied there for not being posh enough. I was terrified when I then was pulled out and sent to the local comp…where I was treated with respect and made some wonderful lifelong friends.

It's hard being different at school and that's always been the case.

I was teased at my working class school because I didn't have the local accent ( even though I was born and raised there)

I had my parent's posher middle class accent as they never allowed me to developed the cockney/essex accent of my peers.

DH moved from Manchester to Essex as a 10 year old child and had his northern accent violently bullied out of him at secondary school.

We had to move my DD from her school due to bullying. She had been to a lovely middle class state primary school in our affluent little town but as she has a learning difficulty we decided to send her to a well regarded outstanding academy in the neighbouring town as it was known to be supportive of children who struggle academically. School had a deprived catchment area but had great results. It seemed to be a great choice.

We got DD in due to having priority to go to any school of our choosing. A few others from our town got in on sports ability. All of the kids who went there from our primary school ended up moving to other schools due to the bullying. They just couldn't fit in. It wasn't helped by the fact that our town is well known for being a bit posh and full of rich people.

She was teased for having an expensive back pack ( the hard wearing £80 fashionable one that all the kids in our home town had at the time ) We immediately bought her the £20 tote bag from New Look that was the "in" bag at her new school.

She was bullied and called "rich girl" just because she was spotted by some boys being dropped to school in our new car.

She made a friend who after being invited to our home went back and told everyone about our big posh house ( actually just a 1930's semi) so she was teased about that. It then seemed that the other girls felt she needed to be ostracised just for being from "posh town"

There was a big cultural difference between my parenting style and that of alot of the parents at the school and when I didn't allow DD to have the same freedoms that her friends had she was othered. Some of the things I wouldn't allow were for basic safeguarding reasons. County lines was a big thing around that area.

The bullying became too toxic and we moved her to a private school in the end ( there were other issues around the school's zero tolerance discipline policy too - it wasn't just because of the bullying)

I should have originally sent her to the local academy in our town but it didn't have the greatest reputation for SEN support. She would at least have fitted in socially.

Looking back now mine coming to the end of their schooling any issues with other kids it’s not been WC kids that have ever been the problem for mine.

Hopefully it’s better now My teens at a girls state school not aware of this issue they all seem to rub along pretty well irrespective of accent / parental income.

Dd 2 has incredibly eclectic friends from the two extreme ends of the social scale which I really like.

I work in a working class school. Noone cares if anyone is 'posh'. It's nothing to do with your child being middle class 🙄

I was brought up in a working class area of the North West that has a very strong and distinctive accent. Anyone talking “posh” would have been at least teased. Children tend to pick on any perceived differences. The people saying it must be hard to mix with the plebs are being a bit naive.

This was DS and exactly the same scenario except we are also Southerner's and he is mixed race, Chinese and English.

He did get a bit of you are so posh and a bit of racism. We talked about it, he is very good at sport and honestly that reason meant it was all over pretty quickly. I may get lambasted a bit but when he came home from school the first time and relayed the teasing especially the ‘talk China for me’ I told him he could be secure in the knowledge that those kids would never have much money or anything more than a basic life with small minds.

It can be hard for them to be different to the norm, but they may still end up with more opportunities and have more support at home. I think the worst situation to be in in a rough school is to be poor and different in some way. Because then you don't have the protections of being from an well educated and/or affluent family either, you're bottom of the heap in every way. The middle class (ish) kids I know who went to state schools did better than the other kids who were bullied in school, but didn't have the resources for therapy, extra curriculars, support to get to university, etc. there was no buffer

Some lovely victim blaming on this thread.

I was a middle class child that was picked on at my working class primary (not a particularly deprived area but not posh either). Of course I wasn’t going around thinking I was better than everyone else, at 7 I didn’t have any idea about social class. And being middle class wasn’t about having better stuff than everyone else, it was about having the wrong stuff- the wrong accent, Clothkits clothes instead of what the bullies called ‘fashionable’ clothes, not having local family. One girl would sometimes bring me handmedowns because she felt sorry for me and I was so thrilled to be able to look like everyone else 😂

The teachers loved me and I used to come top in most things which made it worse, I remember one teacher yacking on to the class about how she wished she had a whole class of me because I worked so hard, and I was sitting there mortified thinking ‘please stop’ because even with my limited social skills I knew this would make it worse.

I was friends with the misfits who were also outcasts for whatever reason including proper deprivation, one girl was called fleabag because she was always messy, I think her mum had left, one girl was a victim of childhood sexual abuse though we didn’t know that at the time.
In my 4th year things were better because I and one of the most popular girls in the class passed the 11+ and we became friends.

I will never forget my first day at grammar school, the sheer joy of discovering I fitted in, that I would have friends, that I wasn’t different or wrong.

Anyway guess who got picked on at grammar school, that’s right the popular girl from primary. I didn’t even twig at the time that it was class based because it was nominally about other things that were a proxy for class like her wearing too much makeup or having a perm, but looking back it is perfectly obvious what was going on. We talked about it later and it was clear we had very different memories of school, my perception of my secondary was that there was hardly any bullying, she remembered it as stuck up and snobby. It’s amazingly easy to be oblivious when you’re not the target. (The other person in our class who was picked on was the sole Asian girl so I suspect you can add racist to snobby.)

I am in touch with a few people from primary and generally life has not been kind to the ones who were victims there for reasons of deprivation (my friend who went to grammar school with me switched to college for sixth form and did fine) while yes generally if you’re bullied for talking too posh this is not something that exacerbates existing struggles in the same way. It doesn’t make it ok to dismiss though and the ridiculous idea that if you are bullied for being posh you must have brought it on yourself either by showing off or by being weak and therefore pretty much deserve it just sounds like the sort of thing the bullies would use to justify being vile.

I would say it depends on the accents and how different they are. Accents is what will always be noticeable.

Being different from the norm in any environment can be difficult. And people who say kids don't notice difference have, I assume, never met a child.