To think when you’ve experienced a good private school…

With the brilliant start you had in life, why can’t you afford to send your DC to private school?

i have friends who went to private school, who had parents who paid their house deposits etc & they still need gp to help pay for their gc fees. It's not uncommon.

With the brilliant start you had in life, why can’t you afford to send your DC to private school?

Yes I agree with this

With all due respect OP, you say that you were privately educated - that doesn’t seem to have translated into a high earning position (given private education for your DC is out of reach). And yes I know, how much a person earns is not an indicator of happiness or ‘doing well’.
There’s so much more to education than just school though. Like someone mentioned, parental input is the biggest predictor of a child’s success at school.

Context: I'm a state school primary teacher 20+ years' experience living in a county with full state grammar school system.

State schools have been underfunded for well over a decade. My daughter's grammar school subsidises their provision with parent donations (which are huge, and they are really beggy). Son's upper school (where the 80% of kids in the county who don't 'pass' their 11+ go) has 1/3 of children eligible for free school meals, loads of deprivation, pupils with 'behaviour' (mostly unmet needs) and hardly any teachers who are qualified or are not supply. These kids spend most of their day marking time, very little learning takes place.

Basically, the school system is chronically screwed, with many lost opportunities to get our children on a path to success.

My point is that there are huge inequities in the education system in this country. Paying for private / independent may seem like you are paying to game the system to avoid the depressing state of state education. And you are. However, we ALL pay for the failure of underfunding education...the impact of this is already apparent with the huge numbers of young people not in work or education. And this costs a lot of taxpayer cash, which would have been better invested in their earlier years, giving these kids skills they can use (to benefit us all). You've got to invest in our children if you want someone to look after you in your old age!!

State educated here, husband private educated. Mother of three children - one autistic, one possibly autistic and one seems NT at the moment. We can't afford private. They had a fab infant school which was everything we wanted from school, so far the large juniors has been good academically but questionable otherwise. They will likely all get into a good secondary which scores highly in exam results but at what cost? The class sizes are large, the pastoral support isn't there. It really worries me for the future, especially for my two neurodivergent ones. There is one secondary that doesn't perform well in exams. You might think that might be more nurturing but nope, the bullying there is just more public (fake accounts on Facebook groups posting stuff about pupils).

@B100000 I think there’s a discussion to be had on what “doing well” is? Lots of people just think it’s exams. Everything else they pay for and it’s not part of school, so life is compartmentalised. I liked that my DDs had lots of things that were part of senior school that enriched their lives. They liked being in a harmonious school and enjoyed doing so much with school friends. They didn’t necessarily have top notch facilities at school but they did have an environment to explore life beyond the curriculum. The great thing about most private schools is they they are not strict. That’s something I would really value now.

@Tiswa that's where my friend in Ewell is. I thought Glyn was by far the best (excluding grammars) but that's only boys?

"Educational achievement is mostly predicted by parental input and engagement, not which school you go to."

Absolutely this. Highest correlations are mother's (yes mother, not father) education level and parental input. Much more than private state etc...

We are Stoneleigh so lots of choice including being there for grammars!

It was only when I started working in state schools that I became very very grateful that mine were in their private schools.

@Tiswa interesting, I have loads of friends in the area. One who lives in Worcester Park, they had one very good choice & one ok choice. Another friend wanted Rosebush or similar which has a small catchment, one in Cheam had to be in a very small area for Harris and another in Ewell focused on a boys option. We were looking at moving around there so I'm intrigued where the best bit is to access all the best options as my friends haven't found it.
Plus I thought that area was bucking the falling birth rates trend.

If you still have that fund, could you move, or could you use the money to pay for interesting extra curricular activities / travel?

None of mine particularly. We are in a large northern city in school with a very mixed catchment. They all have done well.

Not my little pocket and not with the falling birth rate! DD would have had 3 (1 was due to a low birth rate year)and DS definitely had the choice of 3 and that has remained constant in all years

there are however black spots in other places near us in Worcester Park way

From your list the only thing our outstanding secondary doesn't have is a swimming pool. Excellent drama though. We aren't in London and our state school had a waiting list of >300.
What happens with threads like these is misery. Private schoolers have not seen a good state school and many times are just looking for confirmation bias trying to prove their moneys worth. Not all private schools are amazing and not all states are non competitive to private. Many states are better than many privates. Some children don't thrive in a private setting and some children care more about other things than the swimming pool. There's still economics attached to it though. In ours you pay for a nearby home, rather than the paying the school. Still, you get the house in the end.

Surrey/London borders so you have the grammar system of the Sutton Grammars and Tiffin, 2 single sex schools that used to be Epsom Grammars and a couple of other really good schools.

Apart from the grammars isn't it quite hard to be in the catchment for more than 1 state school here though? @Tiswa

Here is my useful. I think it's outrageous that money buys education.

Maybe go and live abroad and recognise that the British hysteria about schools is really culture-specific. Lots of places just send their kids to the nearest school without giving it another thought, and aren’t fixated obsessively on giving their child an education that’s restricted to under 10% the population. It’s basically social anxiety.

Good God I'm so sick of rude posters who post inane or rude comments without contributing anything useful to a thread.

I went to state school but my children went to private. When my DD was looking at sixth forms (we were moving and she wanted to go to all girls instead of coed she had been in) we looked at an Ofsted rated Excellent all girls state school. The Open Day though was badly organised and revealed that there was no dedicated Sixth Form study area, no separate Sixth Form anything. My DD came out saying there’s a reason you pay for the bells and whistles.
interestingly, she’s now at Durham, and she says there’s a real anti private sentiment - which goes against what everyone says about it! None of her current friends went to private school.

Good God, I didn't know people like this were real.

I'm not in your situation but I do feel my oldest children got a very different state experience to my youngest. Things have changed over the last ten years. I'm relieved all of mine will be out of the school system from July.

Maybe it would be better to say when you’ve experienced a good school it’s really hard to accept that your dc will have to be in a poor one?

That's exactly what I was going to say.
I'm sure we all hope that we can give our children at least as good opportunities as we had ourselves, preferably better. Feeling you can't do that, for whatever reason, is bound to be upsetting. But believing that will necessarily be the case if they go to state schools is a bit fatalistic. My DH who was privately educated was a bit like this but now he'd agree that our state schooled children had a better education and much happier school days than he did, and anything we felt to be missing was fairly easily provided in other ways.
Of course there are some terrible state schools (I went to one so am under no illusions) but there are also plenty that are good enough and some that are genuinely excellent. It's not necessarily a disaster OP.

Part of the trouble is they always say the public can vote with their feet but when only 1 local school is decent you have no option but to pay for private as they can't take everyone. Now that is further out of most people's reach it just puts extra strain on the schools which are getting it right with more and more kids going through the mess of a state system instead.