I worked in admissions at a selective school. AMA

[AdmissionsChief]

I worked in the admissions team at a selective private school in the south of England until the end of last year. Ask me anything you like!

(btw I have namechanged for this thread)

What’s the most outrageous, entitled parent story you have?

Are you able to answer my questions @AdmissionsChief? (yesterday 09:16)

@gldd Sorry, I've been trying to reply to your post but I keep getting an error message. Let me try again below ...

Sorry I think I missed this one and have been trying to respond for about an hour! Think I'm there now.

We did not aim for any particular mix of backgrounds or sexes. The sexes usually did roughly equally at 11+. As for ethnic backgrounds - applicants to the school (and pupils offered/accepted) were very diverse, and reflected the geographical area the school was located in. I cannot imagine that it would ever be the case that one ethnicity would "win" all the places - but there was no formal policy on this when I worked there and I don't know if the school would consider it a problem.

How much discretion did the admissions team have? Ultimately the Head had the final say (and the governors, if the Head and the admissions team and SLT were all at odds). Which is why there were some children in that school whose interests were not best served by them being there, but the parents wanted it and they had the means to pay ....

Re siblings. During my tenure it was honestly pretty rare for a sibling to be measurably "worse" academically than the sibling who was already at the school. I don't know if this is because they were tutored (parents are NEVER honest about this!) or because "clever parents produce clever children" or what have you. We did turn down some siblings where it was clear that they would really struggle, and even turned down one of a pair of twins on a couple of occasions, but these were the exceptions because the siblings just tended to do well enough to earn a place on their own merits anyway!

What we always said to parents was - if it came down to a scenario where we only had one place available, and it was neck-to-neck between 2 children in every way possible then yes, the child whose sibling was already at the school would be offered the place. But that never happened in practice.

Unlike state schools, private schools can accept/reject for whatever reason they like as long as they aren't breaking any laws re discrimination. There were a few instances where none of the siblings should have been offered a place but, as always, the decision came down to money. Private schools are businesses and children are commodities in those businesses, not always to their benefit. Please note that I voluntarily left and would never work in a private school again - I have tried to keep my answers unemotional but there is an awful lot of lying and hypocrisy in private schools and I hope you can read between the lines of what I've been saying.

I have so many. Here are a few. I've started with the most spectacular, physically speaking. Please enjoy.

Parent (male) tried to land their helicopter on one of the sports fields during a match ... You can imagine the terror this caused. (Parent subsequently banned from attending all school matches no matter what mode of transport he chose to use).

Parent (male) threw a wad of cash at one of the receptionists with the words "Take that, bitch" after being repeatedly chased for late payment of fees. (We didn't accept school fee payments in cash - everything must go through a bank in order to comply with money laundering regulations/obligations). Watching him pick all the cash back up was hilarious, especially as it was a really windy day and pupils kept innocently walking in through the big automatic doors as he'd foolishly decided to come at break time, so the wind was blowing all the notes around everywhere.

Parent (yes, another male) uttered the immortal words to their child during a tour of the school, whilst being shown a lesson in progress: "Don't worry XXX, if everything goes horribly wrong you can always become a teacher like this poor lady here." This poor lady was an ex-City finance whizz who'd done a late career change into teaching, so she was used to dealing with entitled males, and she actually came over to where we were standing and put the idiot in his place in style, super-politely but very deftly . She was absolutely amazing.

Some of the worst parent behaviour doesn't consist of one big, awful thing but rather a series of "small" things that build up over time. So - parents who talk negatively about their children in front of them (and, conversely, those who praise their children far too much and in situations where it's totally inappropriate). Boasting, and equating academic success (and/or money) with success in general. WHAT ABOUT HAPPINESS??!! Looking down on people with less money / fewer assets. Refusing to believe that there has been an element of luck in their "success" (yes, being sent to a private school / working in the family firm / inheriting loads of money IS lucky in most cases, even if parents claim that this is purely due to their hard work and not due to any luck at all).

Parents who aren't polite to school staff are a huge bugbear. I think I mentioned in a previous response that sometimes things get emotional when dealing with an unhappy child, and obviously that is understandable. But parents who are rude for the sake of being rude are just dreadful. I don't know if they know that they are being rude, or if they do know and they simply don't care. Probably some of each. Just general tone of voice can be so aggressive. Some parents just seem to be incapable of sounding polite at all.

Another bugbear is parents who do not read emails properly. Argh. Yes we are all busy, but that is no excuse. If I send you an email entitled "Entrance Exam Arrangements for Tuesday 24 March 2026" and the first line of the email says, in bold and underlined, Entrance Exam Arrangements for Tuesday 24 March 2026, PLEASE DO NOT reply with "what date is the entrance exam"?

Also parents who falsely claim not to have received a particular email, thereby wasting everyone's time in re-sending it and going through the same details over and over on the phone. It's always the email that contains information they don't like - funny how that always happens! (The system at our school was very detailed and we could see exactly when an email was received and opened).

With bursary applications - the official policy often says awarded purely on financial need (as long as they pass the assessment process), but do they actually look at how well they do in the entrance exams and their other talents? Ie what they can bring to the school?

I saw someone else asked about how schools look at results from those already at independent schools and those from state schools, do they assess them differently?

We didn’t do any tutoring or preparation with my eldest, but my youngest isn’t so naturally academic and wonder if we should! School is not strictly academically selective but there are exams and interviews.

Really interesting - thanks for your answer. I can read between the lines, and I can certainly imagine a good deal of lying and hypocrisy. I wonder though, as you're anonymous, you haven't named the school, and you no longer work there - can you think of an instance where an applicant was discriminated against in being offered a place (possibly illegally), but the school justified it with a reason that was non-discriminatory? I would imagine that this kind of thing happens sometimes, but for understandable reasons is rarely discussed. A good one for AMA! Thanks again for your answers.

At my school - bursaries were awarded based on financial need AND they were allocated to the pupils who scored highest in the entrance exam. They had to be, because the demand for bursary places outstripped the available bursary fund every year many many times over. I have noticed that some schools have started to mention academic achievement in their bursary criteria now.

Sorry, i forgot to answer about results from private schools vs state schools. It does depend on the schools in question - children from a small leafy state school may well have done some prep for 11+-type exams but most state schools don't do this. Most prep schools are literally preparatory schools for the 11+ and/or 13+ so you would expect the children to have been prepared. Therefore I would say that a state school child's exam performance should be rated higher than that of a child who's been at a prep school.

However, my senior colleagues strongly disagreed!

Again - private schools are a business. The private senior schools need to keep the prep schools sweet.

The last sentence is interesting. My DD is in year 7 at an academically selective independent school with an academic scholarship, from a state primary school. (untutored). Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that the few girls in her year who are struggling most academically came from the feeder prep within the same foundation. Do you think these children are sometimes given spaces when they shouldn’t really be, because they’ve been at the feeder prep?

You are very welcome!

No I honestly cannot think of any instances of discrimination. If anything - and I say this as the parent of children with SEN - I believe that we offered places to children who really should never have been at that school, and who have gone on to struggle enormously there, some socially/emotionally and some academically (and emotionally as a result) 😪 I think we should have been far less "yayyy we are so inclusive, yayy aren't we all tolerant" and a lot more robustly focussed on individual children's needs. I was. But the Head and governors weren't. And I have left.

Not all schools are right for all children no matter how much money the parents have. Inclusion is not always the best policy for children. Also a lot of parents are totally in denial about their children's needs. I hope never again to have to hear a parent minimising their child's very real struggles with the immortal line "s/he is autistic but it's OK, s/he hides it really well." I have heard a version of that so so many times and it is awful.

I imagine that discrimination does go on in some independent schools though!

"Most prep schools are literally preparatory schools for the 11+ and/or 13+ so you would expect the children to have been prepared. Therefore I would say that a state school child's exam performance should be rated higher than that of a child who's been at a prep school."

This is problematic though, as just because a child has been to a state school, you have no idea how much preparation they have actually had (parents are teachers, tutoring, who knows what else). They may have had none, or they may have had tons. It's probably the case that in most instances a child from a prep school has been better prepared, but it may not be, and it's not fair on either child for them to be judged by different criteria.

Yes 100%.

I think there was a question about this upthread which I haven't answered yet. In my experience the pupils at the feeder prep are given a lot more leeway than pupils from non-feeder schools. This is VERY common and some schools are actually very open about it.

Well done to your daughter 😁(that is meant to be a big smiley face but it looks a bit odd on my screen....)

And they aren't judged, as I've said. It's just my opinion, based on the schools I know in our area, and my experiences in this field. I have never been in the situation where I have had to rank one child against another for the one remaining place so it has never had to be a consideration. But the prep schools near me literally tutor the children for the 11+ / 13+ remorselessly AND anecdotally the parents also pay for tutors, so objectively I would say that a lot of the prep school children who've passed through my school have had a big advantage in terms of admissions.

This may differ in London.

No doubt! It's just that it's a tricky avenue to go down suggesting that some admissions test results should be rated more highly than others.

That's a way of filling up the prep school, which is probably getting harder.

We moved our DD to a feeder prep in year 5, to avoid the tutoring and high stakes assessments. I was also a bit wary about her SEN needs and getting into a school that would suit her. Anecdotally, from my other DD at a different selective school, the children with SEN mostly came from the feeder prep. That's not to say that the school doesn't support pupils with SEN well. The feeder prep seems to have a lot more year 6 pupils than year 1, because parents decide to buy-in as their children get older.

Did you make any allowances for children coming from other educational systems who had not studied the national curriculum or common entrance syllabus?
I ask because one of my DC was rejected by an academically selective school at 11. We were coming from abroad. The feedback was that his maths and written English were not good enough.
This was by far the smartest of my DC - and they went on to study Maths and Philosophy at a very prestigious University and are now doing post doctoral studies in the US.

Yes, in some cases we would offer a place for the year below the one that had been applied for if the child had been attending a school that did not follow the English system and we felt that their lack of English (for example) was purely due to knowledge gaps / lack of teaching rather than lack of ability. But for Year 7 entry this of course was not possible, regardless of whether a child had been educated in the UK or overseas.

Although your child’s written English and Maths weren’t good enough at the time, they have clearly overcome this! And it may have been a very competitive year group with a high birth rate - so there would have been more competition for each place.