Private school vs private anything educational

[stopitstopitnooow]

If you have an issue with private schools, why? Do you have an issue with:

Buying houses in expensive catchment areas
Extracurricular activities such as music lessons, swimming, sports coaching
Tutors; language, 11+, GCSE

(Also, private healthcare, dentists, opticians)

I honestly don't understand the angst when it comes to private schools. Let people spend their money however they see fit.

The irony of this which is probably lost on your friends is all the other so called 'twattish' & 'snobbish' parents are probably thinking the same, so wonder which category your friends are in?

To be straightforward about school snobbery, there is a huge amount of virtue-signalling in the posts about preferring comprehensive education. It works as long as you live in a naice leafy south east suburb where all the families have a parent commuting to the City from Epsom and Esher and Guildford and Godalming,.

There's a damn sight less sympathy if you live in a rural catchment in the fringes of the UK, like Dartmoor or Cumbria. To say nothing at all about the pupil premium payable for disadvantaged children in inner cities. £7.5k per capita spend in Tower Hamlets is possibly needed, but there's a £4.5k spend per capita in Devon, where there aren't nice warm office blocks with paper-pushing work on tap. Our kids get a minimum wage job in tourism, agriculture, leisure or hospitality working long hours in rain and mud. There are no enhancements just because you live in a scenic area. So we end up with our ambitious young people leaving for a better economy in cities, and old people buying pretty cottages without services. It is profoundly depressing, but I admit that I don't have any answers.

If, like me, you were an early (late 80s) self-employed WFH pioneer, with a fax machine and a London practice/business, you sent your kids for the best education you could arrange. I looked at the local state schools and went, hell, no, I want my child to learn to read. Our vicar, who was a school teacher before ordination, said when he asked about where DC went to school and I answered, replied... where they still teach. Twenty years ago. TBF, things improved post 2015, but Covid lockdowns have been bad news.

I do live in a rural catchment in Cumbria. Everything and anything has been turned into homes. Passions nightclub - social housing flats. Scrubland - homes. The children's classes are at PAN.

I attended a state school. At eight, my vocabulary was that of a 16 year old. I learnt to play musical instruments, learnt French, German and Latin. It all depends on the quality of the state school.

In Cumbria, many jobs are NMW.

Virtue-signalling?

No, just gratitude for a brilliant and inspiring education that stretched and challenged me.

I am delighted for everyone who has been well served by the public education system that is for all. But we cannot forget the working class boys who are acknowledged as underserved and poorly treated educationally right now, Something like 85% of the population was born here, and half of them are male, so the UK is not making proper use of the talent available.

I am very pleased your education was so fulfilling @DragonMama3 .

?

My own feeling is that it’s a pretty lazy stereotype to call and expect private school parents and students to be twattish snobs. The school with the snootiest parents I’ve ever come across was a state infant school in Buckinghamshire. Snobs pop up everywhere. All schools - private and state - are not the same.

The real ( and increasing ) wealth divide is between those with assets ( property, share portfolios etc) vs those without. Rather than VAT on school fees they should do an asset tax whereby people pay a % of the value of their total net assets every year via their tax return. That would mean that however they spend the money- either on school fees or on buying the expensive house next to the great state school, the privilege to do so is recognised equally.

Careful! Some people went crazy that taxpayers were annoyed at the cost of 50-100 children’s education (£2.5million) being spent on a single SEN child’s schooling the other day so will probably react the same way to this.

Tbh I wonder how much of that is them playing down their perceived privilege when in the company of those they know don’t look upon it too fondly (“See? You’re the lucky ones really! My poor kids have to put up with those people!”). If they were praising the school I doubt it would have been as well received as bitching about it. Clearly they don’t think too badly of it in reality, considering they’re paying to keep their kids there.

The studies that show disproportionately high levels of private school children in upper echelons like judges etc are based on a generation ago.
Now, the irony is it is going the other way. I know one of the top private schools in the country. All the kids there are incredibly bright (they are the cream that has been creamed off). And 50% of them are having to go to the US because it is very hard for them to get into the top universities here (I mean Russell group, not Oxbridge). When applying for jobs there is a clear discrimination against these children, especially if they are not BAME. At some firms there needs to be a quota filled of people who got free school meals.
When this generation grows up, we will see that these ‘advantages’ are much less than they were a generation ago.

The other thing is - even if private schools didn’t exist - it wouldn’t give more opportunities to everyone else. A parent not paying school fees would pour that money into other things for THEIR child - not other kids, in poorer areas…

I am in my 50s and have never been against private school. Even though I personally went to a comprehensive school in a poor area in the north west, but I generally had the opinion that people should be allowed to spend their money on whatever they want. And if I had had children, I would definitely have hoped to be able to put them through private school.

As a 50 year old, I started work in a private school, in the finance department. For the first time ever, it made me stop and think as I hadn’t realised quite how different it was and what extra opportunities the children at my school were getting versus the ones I saw in town in the state school uniform. I am still not against private schooling but I am less at ease with it.

But the thing is @Krystall , if the kids in the private school had fewer opportunities, would it give the state school ones any more? Or would it just go down to lowest common denominator?

One thing which for me definitely doesn’t count as ‘opportunities’ is the school trips abroad. Parents pay through the nose for those. And they really reflect the type of holiday these families would be doing anyway, with or without a school involved. (Eg trip to Rome and Pompei, cricket tour to Barbados etc). People in state schools could be doing the exact same in school holidays, if they had the money. (Which most don’t - and there lies the root of the inequality).

I didn’t say abolishing private education would give other people opportunity, I didn’t even say I am now against private education. I am not, but I said I gained a new understanding of the differences. I have explained I went 50 years without ever thinking this was an issue, I just thought this is life, life is never fair. But since I started working at the private school, it has given me pause for thought, that is all, pause for thought as I had no idea of what a private education was like not having had one myself.

When I was at school only a tiny number of people ever went on an overseas trip, at my school a third of the students go every year. They also have theatre trips, book clubs, visiting authors, they play musical instruments, this did not happen at my comprehensive. And when the GCSE and A level results came out about a third of all pupils / parents put in for a review of at least one paper and of these about half of those got a new grade (I know this as a fact because I collected and refunded the payments and it was hugely labour intensive). At my comprehensive, I don’t remember anyone demanding a remark or if they did it was extremely rare. It is just that kind of privilege that I noticed.

Thanks. Very interesting. I grew up abroad where everyone went to state school. Only people going private were semi delinquent types or religious zealots who needed/ wanted special schools.
There wasn’t all this extracurricular stuff, or talks etc, but you got a good education.
But here, we have gone private as have heard bad stories of people who put their kids in comprehensives (London), and then have to pull them out as they are getting bullied or struggling with disruptive or aggressive peers. Interestingly, the difference is not in the teachers (nobody has criticized the teachers in the state schools, on the contrary - and i don’t think the teachers in my DC private schools are especially exceptional, they are just perfectly fine) - the issue was the other children.
Obviously not the case everywhere but these are real life examples, not media drama stories. And I just don’t want to risk that.

Times have changed for all young people. Remarks and foreign holidays are way more common across the board these days. All our local comps go to Iceland, skiing, USA at the cost of thousands. I think more of the household income is spent on these items these days. And as for exam marks the kids need top grades more than they used to, requirements for university are way higher! Our comp actively dissuaded most of the kids from getting remarked even if they were a mark away from grade boundary. Lots of the kids asked, perhaps it’s extra work for them and more difficult for a private school to ignore the requests? I think remarks are largely down to the school ethos and vary between individual schools. It really wasn’t a thing for anyone when I was at school though!

Our (private) school encourages remarks in certain situations, it's not just to please pushy parents. It's expensive though (unless the grade (not mark) goes up in which case it's refunded).

And I'd agree that positive discrimination counts against white, private school educated males, both for unis and graduate jobs. I don't have an issue with it in as a concept but it's inevitably a blunt instrument at times. Our local grammar and state schools are outstanding and full of kids from the same high-income demographic and many of the Asian parents at our school spend a lot on tutoring from a young age.

None of which is a problem but I'm not sure some of the criteria entirely achieve the desired effect of levelling up and reducing inequality.

I agree with your point OP.

Life is unfair. it just is. People are inherently driven to give their own offspring whatever advantage over others that they can - and in our society that means giving them whatever will help push them to the top of the greasy pole. Good school, nice house, lots of interesting hobbies and cultural capital, useful connections, confidence and plenty of money - so that they in turn can offer this to their own children.

Equality is a sham, it really is. No one is going to sacrifice their own children’s opportunities in order to increase someone else’s. It would be naive to expect this. It’s survival of the fittest writ large for our wealth-based, consumer society.

At my son’s school they run a language exchange. We live in a small apartment and our two boys share a room. There is nowhere to fit a third bed, so he will miss out on what would be a brilliant opportunity to visit another country and to have an exchange student come here. Yet his friends - who have richer parents and bigger apartments - will be able to benefit. It feels horribly unfair and it is: also, that’s the way our society works. I can hate it and acknowledge it at the same time.