Headmistress attacks parents in national press

"Targeting that money at the most deserving is all very well but a school population made up only of the super rich and the underprivileged is an unhappy mix."

Can I suggest that there are very, very few children on bursaries at private schools who can truly be considered 'underprivileged'.

granola Part of the problem is that these schools are operating in a growing market. The shortage of good state school places is really biting, in spite of the success of the London challenge. it is only going to get worse as the pupil bulge really starts to come through, and it was first felt last year, in some suburbs the pupil cohort in 2017 will be 40% larger than in 2013. Gove's approval of multiple Free Schools is hitting a mire of site shortages and planning delays. Venture Capitalists are entering the private school market www.radnorhouse.org/meet-the-team.php www.albion-ventures.co.uk/about/Emil_Gigov.htm and this is a school that has looked at the market and come up with a competitive strategy that encompasses seeking to be academic but including the parent body in the community (cafe on site etc.) to a greater extent than other schools. It is very popular with parents.

I can't speak for the SPGS parent body but at the other schools there are plenty of less affluent parents, first time buyers who are stretching themselves, perhaps a mother going back to work, remortgaging, downsizing house to afford fees (all common stories being fed back to a local campaign group who are trying to hold the LA accountable) because they cannot access a good school place. At our four local outstanding comps there were over 4000 in borough applications (vast majority first preference) for 850 school places. The Council admit most of those who do not get places disappear from their lists. The tutoring racket industry around here is frightening.

Add to that plenty of families from immigrant backgrounds or other cultures who make education their first financial priority and also may be taking on multiple jobs to pay. In a lot of these schools the proportion of BME is actually higher than neighbouring state schools.

Certainly at DDs school it was not possible to identify who was on a bursary. Yes, there are bankers, lawyers, and other city types, and a sprinkling of media types too. However there are also GPs, teachers (one partner anyway), Engineers, Salesmen, people with businesses engaged in import / export with India and the Middle East, SME owners etc etc etc

I don't see that mix changing, in fact I think entry will become more competitive as people who would have gone to a good state school find themselves excluded by shrinking catchments.

MMM, If you are paying £1000 a term more for day school fees than at SPGS, you are paying more than the gross salary of a teacher on the main pay scale in outer London: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/341951/School_teachers__pay_and_conditions_2014.pdf

When school fees for a day school actually exceed a respectable middle class salary, red lights should be flashing.

The private schools are losing their real "friends" with this lunacy.

Nobody wants a whole new profession of "wealth reduction consultants" to help people get bursaries and to take over the territory abandoned by the schools saving plans people (those plans have turned out not to be adequate for the purpose).

Heads must take a long hard look at how they got into this hole. Instead of digging deeper, they should concentrate on getting those fees back down again. Where there's a will, there's a way.

My DDs went to a school where all bursaries came from fee income. More and more parents were behind with the fees but could not access bursaries as they were not poor enough! For people who have seen incomes drop, in some cases substantially, but others work the system to get a bursary and are not poor at all, makes for an unhappy mix. As I said earlier, the day fees at my DDs school are £1000 a term more than St Pauls. I suspect the fee hike at St Pauls was to extend bursary provision. The dinners the High Mistress hosts for the richest, hand picked, parents are for the same reason. The same happened at our school. Exclusivity, for the parents who belonged to this club, meant preferential, exclusive events at school (their own carol concert for example) and they were known as "Friends". It divided parents into them and us non-friends! However, girls schools do not tend to have huge endowments and fee income is vital but where some parents are really struggling to pay full fees, support the school and their daughters appropriately, but do not have enough spare money to give in addition to fees, it is upsetting to be considered very second class. Often the richest were never seen at the school, until there was a special event for them!

Poisonwoodlife, you make some good points there.

My worry is that the "money they have available" in these hyper expensive schools is coming almost entirely from an increasingly tiny proportion of the wealthiest 1% of the population. Targeting that money at the most deserving is all very well but a school population made up only of the super rich and the underprivileged is an unhappy mix. The excluded middle will ask if that sort of community is one which deserves tax breaks. That's what is going to threaten the existence of these schools and much faster than most of them seem to realise.

Re:state entry to St. Paul's, I suspect the reality is that the many parents who make a calculated decision to send their children to state primaries but tutor to go private are happy with the many good london schools that charge lower fees, and super bright natural geniuses go to tiffins.

The idea that state school children are so far behind that they can't possibly catch up sounds very suspicious. Ironically, taking the speech into account, it might be implied that you get what you pay for and you get who can pay for you...

(No disrespect to OP - I am sure there are many great parents at SPGS)

Actually, unis make huge efforts to stagger deadlines, and spend a lot of time planning across modules. But with hundreds of students all doing a variety of modules it's not possible to predict every student's work patterns. Instead we expect, beg and nag them to plan their workload and do some work early. Mostly they manage it - it's certainly a useful life skill.

Some of these schools have better reputations than others in terms of their emphasis on public service provision and bursaries and trying to get out into state primaries to facilitate and encourage applications from bright pupils who might not even think of applying. Most of them have it hard wired into their ethos dating back, sometime hundreds of years. I have just done a trawl through the websites, nothing on SPGS, NLCS, LU (though they used to have a very strong reputation, not sure how their activities have fared with the relentless rise up the tables) apart from information on how to apply. G&L seem to be building a page on primary school partnership and LEH have chapter and verse (though of course all may be doing the same activities but it is significant to put it on your website)

www.lehs.org.uk/public-benefit-provision/81.html

I think MN164s ideas are interesting if probably not workable but in the real world I do think parents should be expecting the schools to be proactive about targeting the money they have available to those most deserving rather than as a means of getting the brightest / most talented to advertise their accomplishments on your website (I have heard a lot of parental moaning about that in relation to GDST schools), not that I am sure how you define that (unless there is enough money to truly achieve needs blind) but setting the aim is a good start. I wonder if current SPGS parents know or care what the schools strategy is?

Certainly when I challenged the bursar on why they had so few pupils from state schools the answer was that they were too behind (presumably those with targeted prep at eg Bute) and the school could not bring them up to speed to keep up with the pace in Year 7. (And yet they offer places to pupils from International Schools following the NC?) At other schools they deliberately use Year 7 as consolidation to bring state and private to the same level. I would love to be corrected on this, and told things have changed.......

MN164 I have been as open as I have because of the anonymity, to out the school might also out the girls / families concerned. And I do not in any case think it fair to tarnish its reputation by highlighting one particular year group when so many girls, including my older daughter have an excellent experience there. As I have said before you can get a dysfunctional year group at any of these schools, and examples of both frenetic anxiety and affluent neglect at all, the more central, the more selective, the more likely. The irony was that I decided my younger one would not even apply for LU or G&L because I had heard of the exploits of some of the pupils but in the end her friends moved as refugees to the unusually lovely year groups in both schools. As you say just bad luck.

upset my DD is currently moaning that she has not been able to accompany any of her friends to the Hungergames movie because she has so much due in at the end of term. Unis are really really bad at back loading work in the terms /holidays, and there is certainly no planning between modules to make sure it is doable. It is an annual occurrence and last year it very nearly broke her and I was worried for her mental health, perhaps partly because, in spite of illness, she couldn't bear to let even one deadline or the standard of her work slip (perfectionism?). So maybe these crises are in a weird way preparation for the real world? Not that I am advocating it in either environment. However it does mean we are going together the week after next when this year's crisis is over.

And if you are worried about it, understand what she is up against and there when she needs you it is not affluent neglect. I am still neglected until things go wrong

"Top Private Schools Slash Fees" would be a more welcome front page headline for everybody. In my view, that's what these heads should be concentrating on, not on the behaviour of a small number of parents amongst the increasingly tiny sliver of the population who can afford the fees.

As rabbitstew says, an increase of "only" 3% pa is still unrelated to any increase ordinary middle class families can expect to see in their own incomes. These schools are fast heading to a different planet. Or their doom. One or the other.

If only "leading" heads would lead their schools back to reality.

Upset - 8:30 - 4:00 is indeed not excessive if coupled with 10h30 of homework. I quite understand that it is the extra-curricular stuff that eats into family time.

ie compound interest is a real bugger.

But people on other threads have said you should budget for around a 5% increase every year in any private school. That may not come to a 38% in 5 years, but it's still nearly a 28% increase. This is also an unaffordable speed of increase for most people. What's more, I've just looked on an "Independent School Fees Advice" website which says that private school fees have been increasing on average by 6% a year in recent years, which would make a fee hike of nearly 34% over 5 years... Making the fee hikes at St Pauls look only mildly extortionate. Apparently, this year, average increases in private schools' fees are "only" around 3%. Wouldn't it just be lovely to find a savings account that paid you that amount of interest?

Yes, Toomanyhouseguests, the head must realise her school is racing ahead of others on the fees front. A question raised above is whether this financial pre-selection is a deliberate attempt to make the school more exclusive. If it isn't deliberate, it's literally careless. A 38% fee hike in 5 years must have been terrifying for ordinary salaried professional parents who signed up for the school 5 years ago, unaware this was going to hit them.

Still just wondering, why is St Paul's so much more expensive than other day schools? £21K/yr vs £15/yr at a more typical day school. What is driving the difference?

I have a DD in yr6 at a state primary. We are looking at private options. Of course, we've heard of SPGS. We googled it; saw the fees a third more than the other options and that no uniforms were worn and decided it was probably for people with means FAR beyond our own.

DING
Lightbulb moment

At private schools - mine included - pupils do GCSEs well GCEs in my day in the subjects that matter and are free to attend classes in fluffy subjects without an exam at the end.
So the number of GCSEs is lower but the breadth of the curriculum taking place is probably wider.

At state schools, teachers have to prove what they are doing in moderated and tested evidence for every minute of every day or the DfE slams the school for wasting money.
So if a subject is on the timetable there has to be an exam at the end of it - hence the higher numbers of GCSEs and no unexamined subjects.

I did science A levels but remember spending much of my free time in the Art department.
State schools do not have the resources to leave that sort of space free.

So actually the head of SGPS is trying to get the parents to ease back and let the girls find out who they are
rather than the parents planning the whole of their lives out.

Have all class sizes shrunk? When I was at a west london girl's day school we were taught in classes of 3 x 30 until o-level for everything except mfl and maths. Obviously that was decades ago...

MN 164 If these schools are to return to their roots, they should cut the luxuries. 5* accommodation and every bit of sports equipment under the sun might be nice for the super rich who could afford them but they are absolutely not essential for the kind of education the founders of these schools envisaged.

There's plenty of scope for increasing class sizes. From 22 to 26 could make quite a difference to fees but would have negligible impact on the pupils.

Yes, maybe she is paying too much attention to the squeaky wheels.

OP You and other parents need to get this message across to Ms Farr. It sounds like the school is providing all sorts of brilliant opportunities to your DD but that the head hasn't spent time finding out how family life is affected and how the silent majority of parents deals with it all. Nevertheless she feels able to hit out at some demanding parents whose complaints do reach her. In view of the huge fees the school receives from you, I'd call this "affluent neglect" on her part.

The split by profession etc wouldn't work, people wouldn't fund others to that extent.

And as fees increase parents probably do expect more so extra stress for the Head is a by product.

Class sizes

Ready to be corrected, but from my open day visit - Tutor groups are 11, but the classes are 22. Not sure they would save that much by doubling the tutor group size as that's a relatively small part of the day (I think). Increasing the class sizes would make them larger than other schools which charge less already.

Bursaries

I agree that taking 33% in from low income is likely to be totally unachievable, but what a great target that would be!

Private schools have about 10% of students on bursaries, often part not full fees. They need to do a much better job of opening up their intake to:

• survive the political mood,
• justify their charitable status,
• re-align themselves with their historical root (educating the poor) and
• to help to address Ms. Farr's issues with "snowploughs" and make some more snowballs.

Selecting families

There is plenty of scope to select families, not just students. The private sector can do what it likes, unlike grammar schools. Given the level of demand for this and other schools they will not suffer empty seats and, despite what many might think, not will the standard of their intake drop. There are many students whose parents can't afford the fees with or without help that are every bit as capable.

OP sorry for derailing this thread a bit. Shall I stop?

Poisonwoodlife

Absolutely, I acknowledge and agreed with your point some posts ago (this is turning into a long one isn't it?).

"Your post also illustrates how much is down to luck, rather than the school - the older daughter's peer group being somewhat different to the younger's."

I'd still find it useful to know which school that was, as would others given the clear West London readership likely for this thread. G&L, LU, St James, St Aug.?

That said, you point remains that there is a degree of "luck" wherever you go.