to be amused that the more exclusive a school is..

[seeker]

.. by faith, fees, ability, aptitude..whatever- the more diverse a community the school's parents say it is.

I can think of loads

But I don't live in London.

usual nor do I.
As I've said many times I live in the land of the wonderful Hampshire comps.
BUT because they are in comparatively leafy parts of Hampshire the economically exclude those who live in the centre of the city.
My DCs school ticks all the other boxes though. Even rural poor. But our area is not at all racially diverse. The Polish kids are shaking things up a bit though as they make their way up through the school schools ... for the better.

Seeker, how diverse is your child's academically exclusive grammar school?

"ANY selective school automatically excludes bright kids of indigent parents"

Have they done away with scholarships and bursaries completely then? Because they certainly used to exist in the not-too distant past - I know someone who was at a very "exclusive" school on a scholarship until only a few years ago.

Not very diverse at all, soupdragon- 2% FSM, about the same SEN, a very slightly higher number of BEM children than other secondary schools in this very white area. But I don't pretend that it is. Or pretend that it does not have a negative impact on the other schools in the area. Or argue that it is a fair and equitable system.

It would be interesting to gauge how exotic and seeker were to feel if they were educating their dc in south London I think.

Say more, marriedinwhite?

Just thank your lucky stars

It depends how you want to define diverse.

If you want to define it by ethnic mix then YABU. For example DD goes to a private school. There are 18 in her class. The mix is one Chinese, 2 Afro carribean, 4 Pakistani, 2 Indian, 1 Sudanese, 1 Australian and 7 white British. There are 2 other classes in the year with similar make up. If she went. to our local school five minutes in one direction the class would be almost entirely white British and if she went five minutes in the other direction she'd probably be the only white child in the class. Both are good schools in their own way and if she'd been offered a place at either we would have sent her but she wasn't. Given the school she was offered we were lucky to have the option of private.

If you want to define it by socio-economic backgound then YANBU as it is true to say that the fees deter the vast majority of those who can not pay (unless they get a scholarship or bursary)

Sorry I mean fees EXCLUDE rather than deter those who can't pay

Do they say that? I can't say I have noticed. I usually find it's the opposite - that trendy left leaning MC types like to go on about how diverse their child's inner city state school is.

@babybarrister that is true about ethnic minorities. they tend to be more academically ambitious than white people of the same socio economic standing (to make a massive gernealisation) and are well represented at the best state and small private day schools ime

I went to a bog standard comp. But I used to be involved in a company which used to deal with public schools. A lot of these used to take a lot of foreign diplomats' children, or the children of very rich Middle Eastern or African parents who wanted their children to have "an English education". So in that sense they may have been much more racially and culturally diverse than my Cornish school which only had five non-white kids in my entire 8 years there! Not because they discriminated, but because that was Cornwall in the 1980s.

They would not be socially diverse, though.

seeker, I really don't understand what you are saying in your OP. I don't mean that sarcastically. I just don't have a scooby what your point is.

Maybe it is because my dcs attend school in south London.

after the cartoon in Private Eye
how many pupils at top public schools are the children on Chinese Communist Party Officials
"Were you involved in the murder?" "Harro" egalitarian my arse - they nicked it they spend it
Public School / Oxbridge (money UTTERLY belying the academic rules) / Harvard (where's your check book) / Ferrari (MLR checks are only for little people)
TEE effing hee
makes me more willing to steer mine to OTHER RG
other than the cheap digs - that counts for a lot having slept in during exeats

One of our local comps, cofe, reasonable Ofsted, is 1/2 white, 1/2 black, very few asian. The white children are middle class on the whole probably 1/2 are there because the parents can't afford fees, the other 1/2 because of political principles - the black children on the whole come from the estates in a different part of the borough. There is very little mixing and the environment seems to operate as two separate societies. It's actually far from healthy and not very appealing. Another local school has a permanent police presence at home time. Yet another has been on the verge of special measures for the last 30 years, another is almost entirely Asian. London is just so scary as far as young people are concerned and in spite of the talk about diversity it seems to operate far more as pockets within larger pockets with very little cross over beyond the e&d veneer and so much hatred underneath. I don't know how it's to be changed - I want it to be but I couldn't risk the wellbeing of my children by making a stand. Well we did for two years and then moved dd.

Equality was so much easier a concept at my Kent grammar school where there was one mixed race girl who was adopted and everyone genuinely believed everyone behaved the same on the inside.

My DC's school is not particularly diverse but in many ways our lives arent . What I mean by this is; We are white and catholic and have friends who are black, asian, muslim, hindus etc, however they mostly all in good jobs and reasonably well off and this is because;

We made most of our friends in Uni so they tend to be in fairly similar positions
The street we live in has families like ours - 1 or 2 parents working most owning their home and we socialise with these people as do our DC's
Children attend different but all good schools - there are good state and religious schools nearby so their friends tend to be from their classes
We both work in professions whereby people have to have achieved a reasonably high level of education so these are our work aquaintences

Life just isnt all that diverse for a lot of people.

I came from a 'poor' background and clawed my out and I know how hard it is. Education is your best bet but if you live in a shit area a good one is hard to come by regardless of your religion, skin colour etc. At the end of the day if Mum and Dad dont encourage reading, hold conversations with you etc its going to be hard to get out. Sad but true

Seeker you know full well that people often make this point, especially about private schools, when they get "informed" that all private school children are white christian, never met an ethnic minority etc

People like me and babybarrister above then have to point out that actually, in London, a lot of private schools are ethnically and religiously diverse. My sons' prep in West London is ethnically and religiously diverse because West London is ethnically and religiously diverse.

OP do you mean ethnically diverse, or economically diverse?

The bog standard state school I work in has 300 children, one of whom is black and 4 are Eastern European.

The Prep my DS attends in the same town, (250 children) has 20+ black and Asian children, a couple from Eastern Europe and several from North America. So it is more diverse in the way diverse matters to me.

The local Catholic school is even more ethnically diverse, for obvious reasons.

Do you think people you know are telling lies about their schools? For what purpose?

I might be being thick here, am not well ATM, but I don't understand the OP's point.

ds is about to move from an exclusively white middle class STATE primary school (in a tiny village) to an ethnically diverse but equally middle class independent school. He will probably get to meet children from a much wider variety of backgrounds at the new independent school tbh.

I don't honestly think that mixing with loads of affluent middle class children of lots of different colours is exactly diverse, is it?