Headmistress attacks parents in national press

I think CF treads a dangerous path. She risks alienating parents and also being accused of making any failing on her part the fault of parents. Ultimately, I think she is trying to do good though.

MN164 My DD didn't have much choice, for various reasons she was defined as different /to be excluded, which actually was not an entirely bad thing, though hurtful and damaging to self esteem, since she and her different friends (many of them from different cultures) soon developed a confidence in their different identities. You would hope that that would happen anyway by sixth form but sadly not, the alpha clique were still hissing "snake" at anyone who dared sit in their seats in the sixth form common room.....

I think you do have to throw nature into the mix, sometimes pupils have problems in spite of the parenting. And I have one DD who would have been sucked into undesirable activity (though not ever I hope exclusive behaviour that was not respectful of others and difference) if we had not held tight to the boundaries. Wasn't that another of Clarissa Farr's rants, about parents who didn't set boundaries? www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8844580/6000-a-term-St-Pauls-offers-parenting-classes.html

Some of those issues of teenage behaviour have been around for years, and regardless of type of school. Rachel Johnson, Boris's sister wrote about being excluded by the alpha clique at SPGS. I think the issue of parental behaviour contributing to it to the extent it does is a new one though, and that is why teachers are speaking out. In my experience the teachers at these school have strong moral values themselves and are genuinely appalled by some of this behaviour and the effect it has on the young people they teach.

OP I can't help thinking that taking offence at this stage is rather shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Both Clarissa Farr and the GSA have been adopting a role of lecturing advising parents on parenting for years. the GSA had a whole website, which seems to have disappeared, "My Daughter" which did just that.

Poisonwoodlife

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.

Did you find that the 20% factor in your daughter's year/peer group sucked her into the "undesirable" activity? If not, then that is surely down to your parenting first and foremost, with the school supporting (as best it could with those issues so dominant.

You've helped me distill this some more. In my opinion, the order of importance of pastoral care is:

1. parenting and home life
2. luck
3. peer group
4. school choice

OP
Perhaps this is aligned with Clarissa's speech?

Fayrazzled I would have been absolutely delighted to have returned to Yorkshire and bought up my children up there, attending the excellent local schools. But that isn't how my life worked out, in fact it can't be how all our lives work out, can it?

I would also have been delighted to have sent my daughters to the excellent outstanding local comps but in common with thousands of other local parents we were a road or two too far away. Our borough has for decades operated a very successful deterrent school place strategy, don't even try to provide enough good school places for all the children in the borough because when placed on very long waiting lists they can be relied on to move or go private to secure a school place for their child. So 30% of primary and over 50% of secondary children are privately educated, and a lot of those parents are not very affluent, and the decision is a difficult one both socially and financially.

Still more parents in private schools come from immigrant / ethnic minorities who are overrepresented in private schools, compared to the Comps but regard education as the first financial priority.

Even at SPGS there are pupils whose parents would have happily sent their child to a good comprehensive or just devote all their financial resources to their child's education.

MN164 You are quite right of course that the pupils with the problems highlighted as occurring at SPGS are a segment of the pupil population. in my older DDs year they were around 5-10% which did not give them much leverage over the general mores within the year which remained consistent with what you would expect from the ethos of the school, which as well as academically successful does try and instil respect for others and an awareness that with privilege comes responsibility. However in my younger DDs year they were nearer 20%, with some truly terrible home environments and levels of parental self indulgence . That meant that they did manipulate the school mores and sucked a lot of other girls into creating an exclusive cliquey environment, with disruption in lessons and outrageous behaviour outside, drugs, binge drinking, an emphasis on being size zero, sex tapes on you tube etc. all designed to generate attention for themselves and feed their self esteem And long queues outside the pastoral Heads and Counsellors Office, absence to spend time in the Priory etc. and a school left struggling to deliver on what most parents had expected. When my younger DD moved to another school for sixth she was amazed to find such different and inclusive values prevailing. I am quite sure 2% is underestimating the scale of the problem by some margin. I don't get the impression that the situation is much different at SPGS, some of those girls had sisters there.....

Which is why I welcome the Heads trying to put a marker in the sand that highlights that this parental culture is damaging their pupils, and not just the ones whose parents behave in this way.

EG
No.

My guess is your daughter is lucky whatever school she goes to as I think you're doing a fine job as parent. Maybe that's a nicer way of making the same point.

Come off it MN164

They will do, WordFactory, and lots will have grade 8 distinction at a musical instrument as well!

fromparistoberlin73, I'm sorry, I know it's not ALL West London and North London parents, but it's a convenient kind of shorthand. I even lived in West London myself for a time. (Before I saw the light and got out to Yorkshire).

makemelaugh I agree. While some of my comments are a little tongue in cheek, I think lots of us can recognise some of the behaviours Clarissa Farr is referencing. Above all else, parents seem to be so over-involved in their children's education and lives, stage-managing all aspects, in a way our parents just didn't.

thecountess you don't need 10A*s to get a place.

That said, quite a number of the applicants in front of me, do!
Certainly, they all have over 6 ( and sorry but we don't conflate A* and A). Plus excellent AS results. Plus...

EmilyGilmore

Whilst I like evidence, anecdotes like yours suffer from statistical weakness plus observational bias. You have made a judgement about a school based on 2% of a single year's students. Even if you cite a few more individuals it just doesn't follow that your daughter would "suffer the same fate" not least because you would be parenting in a very different way to the parents of the girls you met.

Equally, you could name any North London private school (maybe any state school too) and find at least 2% of a year that you also didn't approve of in some way. You'd easily find some who are neurotic or depressed or have an eating disorder or simply failed to live up to your expectations from any particular school.

In my opinion, parents forget how much their own influence (or lack of) affects their children and parents believe schools have far more influence than they do. Schools are there for academic education and to provide pastoral "support". They aren't there to "make a person". Parents have all the responsibility and capacity to shape their kids beliefs, politics, personality and happiness. Anyone that thinks the school is any more that a support system for what comes from home is mistaken.

There's much more to Yorkshire than decimated coal and steel industries. But of course, doesn't every place have its own stresses and issues? It's just I'm fairly sure 99% of Yorkshire's parents aren't fretting over what their child's HT may or may not have said to the press about the parent-body at their school, whilst simultaneously fighting tooth and nail to get their children into said school and paying handsomely for the privilege. It just all looks a bit, dare I say it, indulgent from the outside.

Instead of focusing on SPGS and West London and feel that's not our problem, can I just say I found her comments very significant about the way we all feel about our children in the 21st century. We put helmets on toddler, we post on these forums the moment our child has forgotten their lunch box. I found it extremely interesting that she talked about a generation of children who will not have stumbled on enough obstacles because we do remove them ladies. Remove them we do when we can. Lets all admit it. Out of love but we do.

You West London (and North London, for that matter) parents

ahem. I am born and bred West London, and like many my children attend a state school. we dont all live in Chelsea you know!

Thats said, if I won the lottery-would i change school? Maybe--but would need careful consideration.

I dont envy them you know, its an ongoing pressure

get first child in, pay 25pa
get second child in, pay 25Kpa

and then never ever ever stop working, stop the hamster wheel. and always having to keep up with the Jones- yes they turn out well educated, well spoken kids but its very pressurised for some people who dont have massive inheritences

I dont pity them, but nor do I envy them

Yup.

I was struck by someone below saying 'Also exams have been made easier - so 10A alone isn't enough - it needs to be 10 (or more) As from a good school.'

Well, no, actually - at least, not if you're talking about getting into a good university including Oxbridge rather than some other goal I don't know about.
Not all schools will let you do 10 or more subjects and I know quite a few admissions tutors and none of them would make 'having got your GCSEs at a good school' one of the criteria for an offer.

Fayrazzled
Yup, the joy of never having paid for an hour of tutoring in my life,
never having paid school fees,
never having been through an entrance selection exam,
and still magically producing a child with 13 A*/A at GCSE,
among of a year group where some kids were delighted to get 5 C grades

Yorkshire has its own stresses, though.

The decimated steel and coal industires have resulted in some of the highest levels of unemployment in England, coupled with some of the worst schools.

Never has a thread made me feel more glad that I live in Yorkshire and left London behind years ago.

You West London (and North London, for that matter) parents do know there is a wider world out there and that the vast majority of parents are managing to educate their children without all this angst and hand-wringing, don't you?! And gasp, some of those children actually manage to do well!

(And as an aside, it makes me even prouder of the state school children who manage to achieve the highest levels of academic success every year, while being educated in a class where some of the children might not even get an A*. Imagine it!)

I think I'm just too northern and working class to be a snowplough.

I'll admit that over half term, when DD probably should have been concentrating on her entrance exams for the sixth form she wants to attend, we went on holiday .

feels relieved that my family circumstances changed as a kid and I did not take up my place at SPGS in the 70's (location not money BTW)

feels even more smug that I'm too poor to be able to worry about being a snowplough

I think the basic issue is that things have become more competitive; too many people vying for static or in some case decreasing resources.

So you'd struggle these days to get a TC in an MC law firm from a red brick. Sad but true.

And I'm sitting here in a coffee shop, looking at the applications of candidates for a place at the university where I work. We had a record number. We also had a record number of those who made it through the first sift. The bar just keeps getting higher.

Pah! West London stress is nothing ... try living in North London!

I hear you!

We intend to send out dd to private school but, goodness, I cannot bear the idea of her ending up somewhere like St Paul's. At my Cambridge college there were two SPGS girls in my year - they were both utterly neurotic and incredibly intense about everything - social committees, sports clubs and, of course, their weekly essay crises. I had tutorials with one. I don't know what they were trying to prove, or to whom. Here's the thing: they both now work at magic circle law firms.

Whoop de whoop. How thrilling.

My sister works for a magic circle law firm too. She went to a very average independent grammar in the middle of England and a redbrick university.

Same destination, completely different routes.

What's the point??? Ultimately I just want my dd to be happy and well-educated. What more do the parents of St Paul's girls want?

i read that, made me laugh that The Times had it on the front page!!!

I think you are right to be upset and suggest you write a well worded complaint

she was speaking at a forum, and I understand what she refers to is a social trend - but its quite hurtful

you make some good comments, now write and tell her!

Moominmammacat

Don't need to try. I do.