Want your children to be able to go to uni?

Thanks for the clarificatin, Jack.

RRocks

Let me just point out that currently about 35% go to Uni. Roughly 30% of boys and 40% of girls.

50% was the Labour target.

Just nit-picking - no real point to make .

Granyted - it was Newwaves contention that all privately educated kids are TNGs that pissed me off and that they have an unfair advantage over others. You should hear some of my friends who work at private schools having done years in comps on the social problems of those in private schools. Seems to be same shit, different setting.

Agree about the expectations, but that is surely the fault of the state education system at the moment, that it's the league tables that are the drivers as opposed to getting the kids to do solid academic GCSEs if they can. I do not think that 50% should be university educated; as I said elsewhere, 50% of my students would not have been suitable, and some should have been gently discouraged from doing AS levels as well.

Not sure that admission on merit is elitist but, even if it is, the current proposal is definitely elitist as only the wealthy will be able to pay for their children's university education and few students outwith a certain social class will have the confidence to take a debt of, say, £80,000 when they don't know what kind of job they will get.

I feel strongly that the governement is ignoring the best way of tackling this issue and tackling it in a way which is injurious to the life chances of lots of people who would make good use of a university education. If people on Mumsnet think that a return to the old system (not the current system in England and Wales, and not even the system current in Scotland (for now), but free university educatin for a smaller than 50% proportion of young people) is the best system is there some way of expressing that in a poll vote? Would people on Mumsnet want to go back to the old system which was free but restricted to the more academically able?

RRocks

scaryteacher - you're confusing quality of education with continuity of education - you can get excellent education in other countries, but clearly if you move round a lot it won't be continuous.

Not really sure why this is relevant to this thread - the number of private school pupils who board is not that great, and you'e talking about a small percentage of the boarders.

Doesn't really extrapolate out well to the major point being made, that going to private school tends to give pupils a greater sense of entitlement, higher expectations and a better chance of getting into a good university.

A number of us on this thread have argued just that, though - for limited free places to be given on merit.

Don't forget that in the US, which the new system is often compared to, there are enormous numbers of bursaries - both my brothers, who did postgrad at US Ivy League colleges paid nothing, as they got one of the many, many scholarship thingies.

There is no system like that here. Oxbridge, for example, has huge wealth, but use it to fund their reaearcg, not their students.

Heard Lynne Featherstone on the radio just now (on the news). She will be voting for the fee increase. She said (iirc) that it was the best option on the table.

Because no-one, as you correctly surmise, wants to be seen as elitist, RRocks.

I hope you're right about the Tories, I really do! Not terribly hopeful, though.

Hi Granted,

^Of course that's what the Tories want to do.

They want to ensure that only the rich can get to university, however stupid they may be, by removing all competition from bright but poor students.

Isn't that obvious?^

Perhaps I'm naive about the Tories, but I don't think that they want less bright rich children to go to university instead of brighter less well-off or poorer children. I believe that they are completely out of touch with people who are not in their own social and financial world. Anyway, my point is that they have managed to get everyone arguing about whether students should pay for their university education through higher tuition fees and compound interst on loans or by a graduate tax. Either way the student pays; only the detail of the timing and the unfair anomalies differ. I have heard no-one on radio or telly question the premise of their argument.

Labour introduced the notion of having 50% university educated and the Tories have quietly accepted that as the premise of their argument. It costs a lot to give 50% a university education, so we have to change the way universities are funded, they say. I don't believe for a minute that a significant number of Tories believe that we need 50% of the population to be university educated, but instead of coming out and saying that (because they think it is politically unacceptable) they say students have to pay and here's how without acknowledging that students paying will in itself make the cuts in attendance at university or acknowledging that it is the less rich to poor children who will be denied the chance to go.

Why is no-one arguing for a cut in the number of places on the basis of academic ability as a means of solving the funding problem?

RRocks

fair enough. not sure that's a worldview that can just be switched off when they get here though!

That's why the FCO send their kids to board when they get posted there then Granted.

The point is that FCO kids and HM Forces kids may need in some cases to be at boarding school so they can have continuity of education, especially from Year 9 onwards. 12 moves in 13 years in some cases does not help with academic attainment imo. It pisses me off when all kids who are privately educated are written off as TNGs, when the majority of them aren't. I have met several very TNGs in the state sector too.

John Hemming is coming on Jeremy Vine to explain why signing the pledge then voting for isn't a contradiction together with 2 of the students who occupied his office.

I have heard that they are going for amendments today, ahead of the vote. The 21K earnings limit will rise by the rate of inflation every year instead of every 5 and loans will be available for part time study, I thought the latter was included as it was.

granted -

"Frankly to fail to get a grade C at GCSE level in most subjects you have to be pretty dim or just very badly taught."

I've seen mixed ability private schools with a high number of SEN pupils, which expect all their pupils to get min 5 GCSE C grades. They seem to achieve it too!

scaryteacher - I taught in Kazahkstan - if you're on a Western salaary, you can get a very good education! And make some pretty useful contacts with govt ministers' kids, mafiosi kids, etc.

There were a number of Westen kids at our school.

Can't speak for Afghanistan.

As for the navigating the exam system comment - perfectly possible to do that in the state system, if the teachers are prepared to take on the examining. Doing that improved the grades for my department no end, and in one case, a series of lunchtimes on how to structure answers for one child who just couldn't pick it up in class raised his predicted grade from an E to an actual C grade achieved.

Campergirl. I was talking about a 'sense of entitlement' to go to a good university. I'm can't comment on their sense of entitlement to a good degree.

Exactly Jackstar - I once had a colleague who accused me of encouraging the students to aim too high, of raising unrealistic expectations of what they could achieve. My argument has always been educationally that it's better to try and not succeed than to be too scared to have a bash in the first place, as if the kids are encouraged and shown what the the qualifications they need for their career.

Her argument was that they were better staying in their comfort zones and not try to achieve too much after GCSEs as they might fail.

This was in a comp....so agree with your comment on the lack of expectation in some of the state system.

Newwave, have you thought that some kids go to private schools and board as their parents have mobile careers, and some places they go won't have suitable schools; Kazakhstan and Afghanistan for instance? That doesn't make them TNGs, but kids whose parents want them to have an education.

jackstar, I find it very intriguing that you conflate a sense of entitlement with high aspirations and a commitment to fulfilling one's own potential. IME as a university lecturer, they are more often in opposition to each other - i.e. the student with the sense of entitlement thinks they can just sit back and expect to have their 2.1 provided by the university without any further effort on their part.

I am not mapping that onto educational background, because I don't generally have that info about my students - it's an observation of their behaviour.

So agree, BoffinMum - both with the analysis of the existing school system and suggested subtext.

The poverty of aspiration is what really, really infuriates me - I went to grammar school, my DH went to bog standard comp (now in special measures). I've seen his books - his teachers failed to pick up on basic errors - even English teachers not correcting spelling etc.

So many people I know have no understanding of what they are capable of, just accept what the school tells them with no concept they could achieve more than that. My kids do well at school at least in part because I have very high expectations for them - I believe very, very few kids are not capable of 5 good GCSEs - certainly nothing like the astonishing numbers that fail to get them now.

Frankly to fail to get a grade C at GCSE level in most subjects you have to be pretty dim or just very badly taught.

Dare aay that's pretty controversial, though.

I don't think many of my school mates had this so-called sense of entitlement, and I certainly wouldn't say that's something I suffer from. There was a major expectation we would work in meaningful jobs, most likely in the public sector, and give a lot back. That seems to have manifested itself in real life.

I do remember being taunted for the school I went to, and called 'posh' and a 'knob' and suchlike, but when I think back to those who did this taunting the most, they seem more bothered by the type of car they are driving or whether they can dress their kids in expensive football strip. Who are the snobs now, eh?

I see private school students' sense of entitlement as quite natural. Their parents have paid a lot of money to ensure they get a good education and achieve their academic potential. The whole point is so they will aim high and expect to do well.

It's the wide spread lack of this attitude in the state system that's the problem.

It does exists in many grammar schools and in academically focussed comprehensives.

But, IMO, where academic ability is perceived as nerdy by pupils and elitist by teachers, bright state school pupils will have no sense of entitlement to Oxbridge or any other RG Uni.

Incidentally you will find a lot of ex-grammar school and independently educated people running things in this country. It's not because we all subverted the examination process. It's because we learned to analyse things in depth and present a case when necessary with some substance and authority. These are skills all schools should be promoting.

God forbid that everyone should be able to question what public authorities and private businesses do in our name, though. Then they might be called to account! Much better that 80% of people are kept fairly ignorant so they work hard and spend money and never question their elders and betters.

The problem is not so much that we have independent schools, it is that some of the maintained schools are so dreadful and so many kids get fobbed off.

One of the main reasons I stopped classroom teaching because I couldn't bear to watch this happen any more. Bright kids who would have been considering joining some of the professions after going to my (independent) school were being actively steered towards low level clerical type jobs with little chance of progression, jobs that were well beneath their capabilities. There was a poverty of aspiration and expectation. It was somehow fine for them to just get 5 GSCEs with A-C as they were other people's children.

This is what we have, first class education (best of independent), business class education (more prosaic independent and highly selective maintained schools), standard class education (comprehensives in leafy suburbs) and no-frills education (the rest). Too many kids are dumped in the last category.

Well the big problem is many averagely intelligent pupils at private schools get top grades, whereas their state educated counterparts do not.

The privately educated are not more intelligent (in most cases), they have just got the present examination system down to a tee.

So the Oxbridge system of extra tests/interviews etc can weed out those who have just been taught (very well) to the test. Obviously the privately educated may be more 'confident' in the interview, but arrogance and sense of entitlement confidence doesn't equal raw intelligence.

The problem is getting pupils from not v.g state schools applying to the top universities in the first place (and actually taking the 'right' GCSEs and A levels in the first place).

The whole education system is deeply unfair at the moment, if anyone is particularly interested in 'fairness' that is??