to ask if you can afford a 'private' school in the UK but have chosen to send your child/children to a state school why?

[Foreverexhausted]

My three year old DD has just started a nursery attached to a fee paying school. I chose the nursery because it is by far the best nursery in the area but unfortunately we can't afford to send her to the school itself as fees are £15k per year per child and we have two children.

We have friends who could afford private schooling but their children are in state schools and then others who can't afford it but are just scraping by because they like the status of children attending a private school.

Onestep we do what we can to address the injustices. For me that means I do not feel morally able to send my children to private school. I know my children do have an advantage because i'm white and middle class. And quite frankly that's awful. We'd all agree about that. And while there's nothing I can do about that for my children, I do what I can for others- so I read in school, I volunteer for a charity helping a disadvantaged group.

And I think that, in the absence of abolishing private schools the govt should remove their charitable status (and yes, I do know that not all indie schools have this status, but most do).

(I don't feel superior or a saint by the way. I know i'm lucky because I had the wherewithal to make a choice to live in a good area with reasonable schools).

AnnaNimity - but we all do what we can to address the injustices. Why are people who send their DC private villified for the head start they give when people who live in big houses and go skiing and pay for piano and tutoring etc aren't? Why is one so much more frowned upon than the other? I completely see that injustice is cruel and unfair, but why are only some injustices undesirable.
@BertrandRussell - are you around to answer?

Onestepmore
I think the main reason that people are vilified more is because having a child at private school is tangible.
It’s often used as an insult in mn - ‘awful public school educated snobs’; ‘I’d never vote for an MP who’s an Old Etonian’; ‘what do these privately educated twats know about life?’ and so on.
If there’s a public figure from a well off background who had every privilege as a child, all seems to be forgiven if they went to state school viz. the Miliband brothers.

Personally I don't villify anyone for giving their children the advantage of private school. I don't want to do it and I don't want people telling me that this is self indulgent and somehow letting my children down, that's all.

The reason I personally think it's different though from the other things you mentioned os because you can live in a fancy house with a big garden and still mix as equals with your neighbours in small flats. Private school is about segregation. That might not be the reason you chose it but it's the reason many do. It creates and perpetuates bubbles of privilege.

But still no one has answered my question. Why is it OK to have any number of other privileges but not that one? No one ever answers. I always ask...

I just answered from my own perspective. It's a privilege designed to segregate the privileged from the less privileged.

No it isn't. It's a set of individual fee paying schools each of which sets its own standards of educational excellence or mediocrity, strictness or laxity. And its own policy of funding bright, less privileged pupils or not, depending on its individual ethos. It's not a one size fits all keep the oiks out system. But that' how it's painte don MN.

You could say that streets of expensive houses are designed to segregate the privileged from the less privileged. You know your neighbours will have a certain standard of living or they couldn't afford to live near you. But that's OK. Why?

Personally i don't live on a street like that and wouldn't want to. My neighbours are council tenants on one side, an upper middle class family the other and there's a HMO opposite. But I also don't see any of the other privileges you mention eroding the universal nature of the state offering. Housing is a shit show, I agree, but me going to live in a council house isn't going to improve its lot. It isn't the same situation at all.

My kids are at the local state school. We could afford private if I worked full time but I worry we couldn’t afford uni fees (if relevant!) and there is other stuff we should spend the cash on.

I am in Scotland and can see state education is in a crisis, however and it greatly saddens me to see teachers leaving the arts (especially music) marginalised

That said, my kids are part of the community. They have lots of friends nearby and are settled. The kids at the private schools are excluded. And I do agree that many parents of privately educated kids are absolute pains in the bum!

Maybe if there was a social contract that we'd all chip in for universal free-at-the-point-of-delivery housing it would be analogous. As it is, state housing is considered to be intended only for those who can't afford private sector housing and is deprioritised for investment accordingly - exactly what I fear for the NHS and schools if they lose their universal character. This is all about fundamental political beliefs though - if you don't see it as fundamentally different you won't see where those who object to private school on principle are coming from.

@longestlurkerever
Housing is a shit show, I agree, but me going to live in a council house isn't going to improve its lot.
I totally agree. (And fwiw, we live in a street that is predominantly council houses and flats that lots of people wouldn't touch in case something rubbed off on their DC - God knows what)

But how is you sending your child to state school helping? If anything, those who send private are freeing up a place in a nearby state school for someone who needs it. Locally the good comps are massively over subscribed and some children have to take two buses to get to a really rough school.

I feel like I'm coming over as a pest but I still haven't seen any intelligent argument for why one inequality is so wrong but others are absolutely normal and fine. I do genuinely want to understand.

How do you feel about private healthcare? Can you see that it erodes the NHS offering? To me schools are the same. The reason being that state provision will only ever aspire to be world class if it's a universal benefit. Other benefits have a sort of charitable status but people aspire not to use them. They then become subject to belt tightening cuts because charity donations are nice to haves that are the first to go when times are tough. This isn't what I want for state education, and I see sending my children there as part of the social contract that supports it being world class. If you don't see universal world class education as sacrosanct then you won't see it from the same point of view, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at?

Sorry world class universal state education as sacrosanct, I meant. If you're just as happy for the best education to be given by private providers, as with housing, then you're coming at it from a different point of view and I do respect that. It's the "well I totally agree but I love my children so wouldn't go state" argument that gets me riled.

I agree with longestlurker's point about segregation. That is a very definite and undeniable aspect of private education, and one key reason why I send mine state.

There is a huge difference where I live (moneyed SW London) between the parents at private and state, and I mean difference in attitude more than anything else.

I am glad to avoid those parents!

The kids at the private schools are excluded

Calledyou do you mean that the state school children refuse to have anything to do with the children at private schools?

That's not a necessary inference from that statement, is it? Of course children tend to mix with their friends more than children they know less well, and school is the obvious place where children make most of their friendships

Longest no it’s certainly not a necessary inference. I just wondered what the pp meant.
She could mean the privately educated children don’t get to know her children and their friends so are excluded.

I pay. In order to have round the clock care and i like small class sizes - I was in a small state school class at primary school and I think that is important.
There needs to be more investment in education and I think class sizes is a good start.
Apart from that I don’t think I am paying for much else. I think the breadth of extracurricular stuff isn’t important because you can only do so many (fairly pointless) activities and you can pay for this wherever you go.
I wouldn’t pay if there was 16-20 in a class and I could have before and after school clubs nearby.

Class size is the obvious difference between state and private education but the evidence that this makes the difference everyone assumes it does is mixed.
See for example: httpss://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11675669/Class-size-has-little-influence-on-the-quality-of-teaching-expert-says.html

Until you get down to the very tiny class size then learning is still done by incentivising independent learning to a large extent.

For me, the problem is not at an individual level, but at a societal one. We live in a society where it is expected that the movers and shakers will be privately educated. Where rich people (I know I will be lambasted for this, but people who can afford private education are rich) will only use state education if they "don't need" to go private. So we have a ruling class who have no experience at all of the education that 93% of children receive. It is such an entrenched privilege that most people don't even notice it. This has two effects. First, nobody has any incentive to do anything about the things that are wrong with state education. Second, it is a self perpetuating bubble that extends to all of public policy. I think private healt care has a very similar pernicious effect.
Housing is different. A lot of poor people live in crap housing and that should be a public spending priority. But, once you are warm and dry and safe and have enough space and good facilities for washing and cooking, where you live in itself does not bestow privilege in the way that going to private school does. If you want to spend your money on a mansion in the Cotswolds then fill your boots. That will not directly impact on the lives of other people in the way that private education or private health care does.

Yes this is what I meant by a privilege bubble too and decent housing for all being the goal, rather than necessarily equal housing

If you want to spend your money on a mansion in the Cotswolds then fill your boots. That will not directly impact on the lives of other people in the way that private education or private health care does.

Well up to a point. A 12 bedroom house in the Cotswolds could house several families in a time of acute housing shortage.
I think the reason why big houses aren’t frowned upon like private education is because then the question would be asked:
Q. How many children have you got?
A. 2
Okay so you don’t need more than 3 bedrooms - unless you are prepared to rent out the remaining bedrooms to lodgers.
Loads of people live in houses bigger than they actually need including I guess Jeremy Corbyn.

That's a totally different set of moral arguments though. There's no reason in principle why one person having a large house should stop another person having adequate housing and I think the analogy is very strained in the absence of a commitment to universal state funded housing.

Whether or not someone should have a much bigger house than the need is an interesting argument- but I don't see how it's relevant here. And I don't get the Corbyn reference either....