To think that senior officers in the armed forces should use state schools for their DCs

[soul2000]

I think it is wrong that many senior officers have a perk, that in effect is worth 40-50k pa in benefit in kind. There are state boarding schools, grammar schools and all types of state schools available.

Why should public sector employees, have this ludicrous benefit when there are state boarding schools, and if there was more demand more state schools could open boarding houses anyway.

I think this is a throwback to the 19th century, it is totally wrong in todays world. Today schools are having to make massive cut backs in all kind of expenditure, yet some officers DDS/DS are getting lessons in how to stage the perfect dinner party. This paid for by the struggling taxpayer who is forced to educate their DCs by comprehensive..

As a teacher and now as a parent it has brought it all home to me how much harder it is for forces children and families.

As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't give a flying fuck how much extra money is spent on educating children of forces parents, other than knowing it probably isn't enough. Either we have armed forces, or we don't, and for as long as we do, we owe it to servicemen and women and their families to do the best for them that we can.

We can argue about a somewhat insidious "officers and men" attitude which probably used to boil down to "private education for the commissioned, secondary moderns for the non-commissioned", and that sort of stuff probably could be done better. But the basic contention, that service personnel tend to have children with disrupted educations, is sound. Fixing that is the cost of doing business, and a cost almost everyone is happy to pay.

friday your post just made me cry!

Its so lovely to see that you support for forces families, my family, all of my friends families.

It is so hard being a military family. The days, weeks and months our families suffer and struggle - and then there's women on here completely slating any way of our families getting any extra help.

Walk a mile in our shoes....