If you didn’t go to a private school, what do you think about those who did?

[hanginds]

Do you feel they had an unfair advantage? Do you care? Do you think they don’t know about the real world?

I really struggle to connect with colleagues who were privately educated as they seem almost entitled to the job. They seem fearless about finding alternative work if needs be, yet I just don’t have that confidence. I assume it’s their background as it’s the only difference between us in the academic/work context.

‘Yes, perhaps state education should get its own house in order before coming for private schools’

yes, state schools. Go sort yourselves out! it’s all your own fault, the Tory government slashing investment, cutting budgets, pushing teachers to the brink, underfunding, ALL of it.
you’d think the fact 94% of kids are state educated would make the state schools sort THEMSELVES out!

…ah, the untouchable moral principle of prejudging people on the basis of the background they were blamelessly born into. Superb. Tory attitudes prevail, from generation unto generation…

Don’t really think too much about it. I was lucky enough to go to a top performing grammar school but we live in a non-grammar area and my kids go to the local comp. My DD and her bunch of friends all went off to college in September with straight 7/8/9 (A grades in old money).They’re all applying to Oxbridge and Russell group unis, so I don’t think they missed out academically or pastorally. I suspect it very much depends on the school. Independent schools work really well for kids who will benefit from a bit of extra support or attention. My friend has children with ASD and they couldn’t cope with their (excellent) state school so she moved them to a smaller, quieter, independent school and they’re thriving. Financially it’s a struggle for her but it’s clearly worth it for her family.

I think “inequality’s between state schools” is a red herring. The comps are so enormous in pretty much most cities their catchment areas encompass all different sorts of housing areas / demographics.

But there are huge discrepancies in state secondary education. If 94% of people are educated this way then perhaps Labour should have made it their policy to balance state schools around the uk instead of concentrating on a knee jerk policy of taxing private schools. I'm sure 94% of the public would be delighted with that policy.

Of course it's not a red herring. Unless you are happy to write off schools in deprived areas?

I agree, but that doesn't mean that it's a level playing field for all of those kids.

As in, I agree that many comprehensive schools have a very diverse intake. Not that it's a red herring.

Inequality within the state sector is the most important issue to tackle.

The area I moved away from had extreme differences between schools. The catchments of the best two schools were only maximum 1 mile and were almost exclusively expensive housing.
I don't think this is unusual in London/outer London.

Where we live, most secondary schools have quite diverse catchment areas from a socioeconomic perspective. Primary schools tend to be much more homogenous though.

FFS. Well clearly the best way to level the playing field and remove all unfairness in the system would be to ban all children from all education.
I feel like this is the way some in this thread are going anyway… first they’ll come for the private schools, then it’ll be the good performing state schools, any tutoring? No, too unfair, ban that…. and so on and so forth.
I work with some of the most deprived children in the country. Trust me, their problems are not going to be any better by penalising private schools.

That was one of the reasons we decided to move away. There was such an obsession with school catchment. You needed to be within 0.6 miles to definitely guarantee a place as if you bought at say 0.9 there's a chance you might miss out and you've just bought a stupidly expensive house for nothing. It created such a class divide because often people were only really choosing those schools BECAUSE they were more MC.
If you looked at the progress scores of schools in more deprived areas they were sometimes actually better, but lots of social issues due to the huge class divide.
I didn't particularly like the feel of the area we had to buy in, and we would have had to stretch ourselves mortgage wise, so decided to move and we are glad we did.

"The rich" will always find a way to stash their offspring away from the commoners. Home educated with individual tutors, or send them overseas if needed. Or just exclusive schools in exclusive areas.

Yes indeed. I will be interested to see how these exclusive educations will be banned.

Here in Scotland our schooling system is completely different - high schools tend to be pretty large in numbers as we do a single school from 11-18 (no sixth forms) so typically there is a Catholic state school and a non denominational state school in each town, which means differences between schools is probably less pronounced - however there is massive discrepancies between the attainment of the wealthiest 10% and the poorest 10% - even when they go to the exact same school.

Therefore, it could be concluded that private schools have no impact on pupils grade attainment - the rich ones flourish regardless, and the poor don’t.

I don't know if anyone has the stats that compares attainment between state and private for the same demographic group, but I'm pretty sure private schools on the whole make a difference to attainment.
You can't compete with much smaller class sizes, less disruption, better facilities etc.
I went to a school where our maths teacher was so sick of the students she refused to engage with the class and just put the page number on the board and sat and read her book, in my GCSE year!

If something like 93% of kids are state educated, surely that should be more closely reflected in oxbridge intake

To be fair, I think it's less than 93% at sixth form level.

What do you mean by “demographic group”? Age? Gender? Health? Wealth?

I presume you mean economic group. And it would be easy for a layman to do with a reasonable degree of accuracy. As a teacher, I track this in my (state) school. I need to know the average income band (split into deciles) for the postcode each of my kids come from. We are continually comparing our top 10/20% to our bottom. We have specific interventions for our bottom 20%. We do a LOT of tracking of data - not just based on postcode income either - we do the same for FSM, ASN, care experienced, and so on.

It can safely be assumed that the majority of private school pupils would be in the top 20%. Therefore, all you would need to do is compare the attainment of the top 20% in my local state school to the attainment of my local private school.

Not perfect, but very easy to make a pretty accurate comparison. If I was able to get data about postcode income from a private school then great; but something tells me they wouldn’t be forthcoming with that information (because it would show how exclusionary private schooling is for the vast majority of the population)

I think 18% of students in the UK are privately educated post 16.

So oxbridge intake still needs levelling up

I think they are trying. Trouble is, those pesky private school kids keep being intelligent.

I don't think any prestigious private school would be ashamed of having children with rich parents. I mean, if you can afford 25k a year after tax then you are likely to live in an expensive area.

Not if you want the best of the best, then it should be the smartest and intellectual people , rather than state vs private ect

And the fees are clearly available on the school websites, so I don't think you need to dig deep to see that of course they are financially exclusionary. It's not a big secret.

That's the thing with some people they say they want a level playing field of only state schools ect, but the way human minds are, you can have everyone at the same starting position with the same subject information ect, then soon after there will be some who excel, some that are ok, ect.

Even if the starting point was equal, it will never be a level field