To think private schools should be banned?

[BethanyBoobs]

Why should someone have a better education just because their parents have money? Why should someone have a better chance of getting into university because their parents paid for their education? It makes me feel uncomfortable that people can buy their kids an upper hand when it comes to education.

I feel the same way about private health care too.

IMO private schools should be banned. Everyone should have the same chances when it comes to their education.

I don't think that you need to worry more and more people are being priced out as in the article.
It will never be fair, Jassy is quite correct.

Delph I was using that as an example as state schools don't always benefit gifted or exceptionally bright children. If somebody wants to pay for their child to get that better education so be it. Those who pay for private health care are not always rich, some save or are loaned money. Time and time again people are let down by the NHS, fobbed off by Doctors when they have an underlying serious illness that requires urgent treatment. If people want to pay fir another opinion and further investigations and op so be it, their right.

Of course they don't minifingers, which is why communism failed and George Orwell had it right!

I think trying to legislate for equality of opportunity, nevermind equality of outcome, is bloody difficult. Even if private schools were abolished, what are you going to do about private tutoring? Or even about parents who have more time/motivation to encourage their children with their education? Unless you remove every possible perceived 'advantage' to ensure a completely level playing field, there will continue to be inequality.

More people would home educate- would you stop that too?

"For instance, would a selective private school (or any private school for that matter) admit a student if they were a child of a gay couple for instance? Probably not. I don't think they're covered by the same discriminatory laws as state schools. Unfair for everyone."

We have several of the above at the private school our children attend - why wouldn't they admit them? A private education is a privilege - we make many sacrifices so our children can attend, there are plenty of parents in the same situation as us.

Where I live, the state schools outperform most private schools.

Outrageous.

Assuming private schools are better shows you don't really know what you are talking about.

Some of the best schools in this country are private schools. This does not mean private schools are generally better.

So no need to ban them IMO

I suggest the OP reads the short story "Harrison Bergeron", in which equality is forced upon people to a grim and logical conclusion. I remember reasons this years ago and being blown away by it. Google has a good summary of.

Striving towards equality of opportunity is laudable but we are not all equal in terms of physical and mental attributes, in terms of family structure and support, etc, however much we want to believe that "all are equal".

We chose to sent our DC to state school, we also chose to spend quite a lot of money on "top up" tutoring in their final 3 years... And we spend our own free time encouraging the DC in various activities. How would the state stop more people doing that if they banned private schools?

I should have said 'most British' people care nothing for fairness when it comes to their own children'. Because Scandinavian countries tend to have much less socially divisive education systems and it works well for them. But they are countries which value equality.

We are more like the US these days.

Yanbu, an awful lot of guilt coming out in this thread. I think we all know that if private schools were banned the standards in state schools would skyrocket overnight, to the benefit of everyone. No need for tutors, and swimming lessons are hardly the same tu

... Hardly the same thing! They don't advantage your university and employment opportunities in the same way.

Unfortunately some people would prefer to advantage the few and not the many, a view shared by our wonderful government.

I don't see how state education would improve if private schools were banned, if anything it would get worse because the schools would have to cope with extra children and very little extra budget.

Wanting to ban private schools smacks of jealousy to me, and it's not a nice trait. There is no reason why children can't reach their potential though state schooling.

Parents will always do what they can to help their children achieve, but unfortunately some parents will always be disengaged and uninterested in education. Concentrate on those parents if you want to narrow the gap between the lowest achievers and the highest. Bring the bottom up, but don't try to bring the top down just for the sake of narrowing a gap.

We need highly educated people in society.

I'm jealous - I'm willing to admit it.

I'm jealous that my lovely, clever hardworking little boy is less likely to secure a place at a prestigious university than his privately educated, less bright cousin. It's unfair.

I try not to let it get me down but it does also strike me as bitterly unfair that a disproportionate number of places at the three very good local grammar schools are snaffled up by children coming from private schools. How can clever children in state schools being educated in classes of 30 compete on a level playing field for these places when they are up against similarly bright children who've been educated in classes of 16 children classes where all the disruptive ones have been weeded out ?

I think everyone (including the OP) has missed a point about private education that makes the fact that only some people can afford it especially unfair, and not just another example of how more money buys a better life. Education is a "positional good", giving one person a leg-up means pulling them towards the front of the queue for prestigious university places/top jobs, which necessarily means disadvantaging all the people they've queue-jumped.

Contrast with healthcare. To use an example from this thread, if someone buys a better wheel-chair, that doesn't cause the quality or quantity of wheelchairs provided to NHS users to go down.

Some years ago, before they were in office, the Conservatives were advocating a voucher system under which the state would pay for pupils to go to private schools. However there was an interesting condition attached: the vouchers were not allowed to be a part-payment of fees that could be topped up with private money. They could only be used at a school whose fees were low enough to be covered by the voucher. I think a reason for this is that it was recognised that the government shouldn't help people who could afford to pay extra to queue-jump people who couldn't.

I agree that education is a 'positional' good.

However, another point I think is being overlooked is there are very many definitions of what is 'good' or 'advantageous' for a child.

I may be in a pretty rare position of having my daughter attend two primary schools in very deprived areas - free school meals over 30%, English as a second language well above average etc, etc - and now she attends a private school thanks to my critical illness insurance and the fact that my local council didn't seem to notice that a lot of babies were born in past ten years and have built no extra schools...

Yes, her private school is lovely and offers her many advantages re learning musical instruments etc. The uniform is lovely and no one is smashing up the classroom anymore while the rest of the class is evacuated to the playground.

But there are certainly deficits to this type of education. The levels of stress and anxiety amongst the parents for example seems extremely high; constant worry that their children are not achieving, worries that the class size is too big (at 18!!), pressure on the children to achieve, children not being exposed to different ways of life, appreciating diversity etc.

Not every child can grow up to be Prime Minister. I do think it matters and it is a significant disadvantage, if you grow up unable to communicate or relate to anyone outside your very narrow social group.

I think we are all at risk of fetishising education at the expense of all other areas of a child's life; emotional intelligence, ability to make and keep friends, resilience, curiosity etc, etc.

Not true at all minifingers, my state comprehensive educated son went to a much more prestigious university than his cousin who was privately educated from 3-18 yrs.
State schools can perform better than private ones in some cases!
My friend's DD started at Oxford last year. She was not unusual from her comprehensive.
Stop worrying about what you haven't got and make the best of what you have got.

All I know is my DCs secondary school is closer academically to private schools than it is to some of the secondary schools in the lea. That for me is the difference we need to address. As grammar schools prove some parents will go to the lengths their wallets will allow for their children, myself included even though I morally object, I still bought into catchment. Closing of private schools would be impossible with free schools.

IMO private schools should be banned. Everyone should have the same chances when it comes to their education.

Well I can tell you now that banning private schools won't do that. It would barely even scratch the surface of the problem. It would just level the playing field a bit for all those the quite clever, middle class, state educated (probably grammar school) kids, and give them a fighting chance of getting ahead of the quite clever and extremely rich or upper class privately educated kids.

It would do fuck all for thick kids, and fuck all for lower middle class, WC or poor and disadvantaged kids of any intellectual ability. They'd still be poor and disadvantaged and they'd still be going to the same 'bad' or mediocre schools largely in non-affulent areas.

Show me a 'failing' state school with terrible results and serious issues with behaviour/attendance in a middle class, leafy, expensive area with a high intake of middle class affluent parents. There isn't one.

Which does rather lead one to the consider the idea that there is probably no such thing as a failing school - merely failing pupils. And that is almost always linked to the low socio-economic status of the parents, whether we like to say it out loud or not.

People have this odd notion that by forcibly mixing up up the intake demographics (social engineering) we can somehow make a 'bad' school 'good.' And yet we are told time and time by people who like to champion the poor plucky underclass underdog that it's the schools that fail the children, not the other way around, and that socio-economic factors (or just good old fashioned class) have no real bearing on intellect, on aspiration, on discipline, on performance, on behaviour etc. And that there is some sort of conspiracy to keep poor children from proving that they are all as clever as the next person.

The reasons why poor children are (on the whole) statistically less likely to achieve in education are very, very complex, and it's probably impossible to ever significantly reverse or eradicate that. Unless you want to start eradicating the real causes of it, ie. practising eugenics, or forced sterilisation of the feckless, the vulnerable, the intellectually impaired, the criminal, the substance abusers, the mentally ill, the violent, the lazy, very young parents, lone parents, parents with lots of children they cannot properly support, financially or otherwise, children of poor immigrants who have English as an additional language, in fact anyone at all whose personal circumstances might have led to a label of 'disadvantaged' being stuck on their child. Because they will always make up a significant proportion of the people who are poor, and a very significant proportion of those children who consistently under-achieve in education. some of those children are disadvantaged from birth and by far more than just the school they get lumbered with.

Of course there are plenty of poor (and sometimes high-acheiving) children who are not significantly disadvantaged by their parents, but as far as the statistics go they do not get separated, (apart from by ethnicity) and I imagine they are largely judged, measured and monitored by their socio economic status alone.

Until very recently, we had our children educated privately. A couple of years ago, we moved out of London to a rural location (East Midlands). AS our children already went to a private school, we decided (without giving it the requisite consideration) that we'd continue on that journey.

Needless to say, the private school here (although o.k.) wasn't great. And certainly the difference between the State and Private provision wasn't as great as it had been in the South.

There are some less tangible 'advantages' with private schools, but the crunch for us came when it was suggested that our DD be given additional tuition (at 15 per hour) to improve her math skills. There was no doubt that the extra help was required; however, I felt that in another school, this would be givne as part of the normal education. I quickly came to the conclusion that we could save several thousand pounds a year, send the kids to one of the 'Very good' State schools in the area and use the savings to pay for any private tuition that was necessary.

In a nutshell, improve state education, and the case for private education becomes weaker. There will always be a significant minority that will always choose private education; however, for most wouldn't bother unless there was a real benefit in doing so.

I agree you can't just 'blame the school' - the problems at my daughter's first two schools were largely, if not exclusively, due to the social problems of many of her classmates, some of whom were violent, unhappy and very disturbed.

But what troubles me immensely is we now have a system where ALL these children are shoved into the same school whilst the middle classes flee the area and buy all the houses in the catchment area for the 'naice' school.

I think all 'parental choice' has done is allow for the creation and perpetuation of segregated ghettoised education. Or at least that is my experience in London and in Bristol. And this is to the detriminent of us all.

ALL state schools should be 'good' schools.

op, in case you are still reading.

Life is not "fair". Never will be. You cant change it. No one can. We are all born different from the start. It cant be undone.

Jealousy is a difficult emotion. More difficult if people with "more" than you are nearby and rubbing their circumstances in your face. I suggest you read up about how to handle it.

The one thing you could console yourself with, maybe, and if you must, is that people who have kids there, at least one parent is likely to be working incredibly hard. And that has its drawbacks on the entire family.

Provision in the state sector is very patchy.

This is issue that needs addressing.