To think it’s hard for a middle class child to attend a working class school?

[emoliant]

I mean a predominantly working class state school in a deprived area like an ex mining town. Where the child is one of the only middle class ones and gets bullied for being different or posh.

It's hard being noticeably different from your peers at that age.

I'd say class / family finances are one of the less noticeable differences.

I was a girly swot who "spoke posh" at a Black Country comp in the 70s. Never bullied.

I think accent can be a problem if everyone else's is different. I remember one 'posh' kid in our school getting a bit of shit for that, though there was definitely another kid whose dad was a doctor and he seemed to be fine. Neither was bullied so far as I know. The focus for bullying was a family of kids who were a bit neglected and smelly (unwashed clothes etc).
I think you'll be ok - likely you're not that different from everyone else in the catchment area.

Nice try.

That's not something I've seen or experienced. Children who bully will find any reason they want to, there doesn't need to be a real reason.

At primary in my experience not at all but that is London where people are not generally obsessed with people not speaking with the local accent as they can be in other places. Kids who are bullied will always find something of they want to.
To be honest it doesn’t matter about the wealth of the parents more the approach of the school and whether diversity is welcomed and bullying stamped out.

It should be fine, just make sure to remember to remove their shoes before sending them to school and ensure that they have had some tution in using a small blackboard with some chalk.

In my experience, the parents whose children don’t go to that school think it’s more of an issue that it actually is.

I would imagine that it would be much harder the other way around. In my experience the parents of disadvantaged kids in schools where that isn’t the norm really stick out and don’t get welcomed into the fold. My daughter goes to a state school in the ‘best catchment’ in our town and the there are two mums who are genuinely shocked whenever they are spoken to. I’ve seen other parents completely blank them or obnoxiously talk about how skiing is affordable at parties when these women have literally said something alluding to their tight budgets. Hideous.

I didn’t grow up working class, but my mum came from a working class background and her side of the family are gifted at making people feel included. That’s been my overwhelming experience of ‘working class’ families.

Actually, I taught in one that did. And she was a little star that just dealt with it!

Ignore the chippy comments, OP.

It was a long time ago but I was in a secondary school like that, a very large very mixed comprehensive. There were 360 kids in my year - 12 classes of 30. I was relentlessly bullied for the first 2 years for doing my homework, not swearing, not telling the teacher to fuck off, not smoking, being a virgin, getting good marks in tests. It was a bit better at the start of 3rd year (Scotland) when we were streamed by ability and the kids in my classes were the ones who wanted to be there and wanted to learn. Most of the disruptive kids left during S4, either because they were old enough or just stopped attending. Last two years were better, the number of kids in the year shrunk from 360 to about 60 staying on for Highers. I think about 25-30 of us went to uni.

For my own kids, we have purposely chosen to stretch ourselves and buy a house in catchment for a really good school where the demographic is very different and the kids are there to learn and not be disruptive bullies.

YY to those saying anything can be a target for bullies and any child looking noticeably deprived will be far more of a focus, tragically.

This is where grammar schools did their thang; before they were infiltrated by Jemima and Jonathan tutoring the hell out of Imogen and Rupert in order to secure places away from Simon and Sharon from their state primary.

Where the child is one of the only middle class ones and gets bullied for being different or posh.
There's no excuse for bullying but curious to know how the other kids have come to the conclusion that the child they're bullying is 'posh'?

I grew up in a deprived area and was sent to a school in a solidly middle class area. I had zero problems with kids at school but the kids in my home area totally ostracised me for being ‘posh’.

Despite all the handwringing on the baby names forum, people don’t usually get bullied because of any specific characteristic that you can change. They get bullied because they are perceived as weak. That’s not an excuse for it at all, but it does make this sort of thread pretty pointless, given that we don’t know the child in question.

Funnily enough I do actually remember a middle class boy in my very working class school - and yes he was picked on for being posh, and I think he ended up having to leave. I remember one of the things he was picked on is being excited to have a new baby sister - that was the height of 'lame' in my school. But then again so was coming in with a new haircut

It's miserable to be the odd one out of a situation.

In the vast majority of high schools there'll be a mix of kids, even in the roughest areas.

I also think that only kids who come across as odd or really deprived will be the targets, sadly.

This was me, I went to school at the top of a council estate and there was no mixed housing or integration between areas at all at that time. One big issue was clothes, I wore lovely print dresses and sandals, and by 9/10 this was something I was teased about, but nowadays we have uniform and that might help. My mum was into wholefoods, again lunch-times were interesting with my wholemeal home-made pizza. I wasn't terribly bullied or anything, but I didn't find many kindred spirits until I went to a comprehensive with a more mixed intake.

Yes, it was in my experience. I was remembering it today actually. They sang songs about ‘p*-bashing’, were mindlessly racist and homophobic, were obsessed with class which I never mentioned or had any preconceptions about before I went there yet called me a snob (‘you live in a council house’ would be thrown around as an insult between them). No aspirations, no intellectual curiosity, massively threatened by all of that. I will no doubt get slammed as a snob on here too but any ‘snobbery’ I have now is based on what I experienced. I was sent there by intellectual middle-class left-leaning parents who, while they didn’t mean to, let me in for five years of hell and bullying which has had a lasting effect on me. It was the sweetest day of my life when I left and there is absolutely no way in hell I would send a child of mine to a school like that ever. I’m sure predominantly middle-class schools have bullying and forms of prejudice as well, but at least ambition and hard work wouldn’t be sneered at, and I doubt they would have been so crassly, overtly and mindlessly racist either.

Can 100% be a problem. A middle class child isn't "boasting" when they say they're going riding tonight/on holiday in the summer. Children harp on anything that's different, so a different lifestyle will be one. Same with learning aspirations. Eg at some schools doing your homework + trying hard makes you a bullying target.

And good luck with saying to the school "my child is being bullied for being middle class". You'll get as much sympathy as this thread unfortunately.

My dad was a miner who contracted after the strike of 85. He was making £1500 a week in 1988. My mum had a good job already. We lived in a huge house and had new cars, holidays to Florida etc.

I wasn’t bullied for being middle class but in a pit village where nobody had fuck all, the girl who lived in the old vicarage five times the size of everybody else’s house stood out a bit and I was treated differently.

Tbh is the difference that big in 2024?

I just didn't 'fit' in my primary and my children didn't 'fit' in one of the schools they attended. My foreign husband was ignored at the school gate for the entire year. We moved to a more diverse area at top primary and it was much better and found lots of like-minded people. Not everywhere is the same at all, despite wishing it were this way.

This was my experience at secondary school. Bullied for being posh, living in a big house and called a snob even though I wasn't one. Snob just meant you didn't have the local accent. Things improved when were taught in sets and there were other kids around from more similar backgrounds to mine. I remember thinking it was so unfair that they could be horrible to me for living in a big house and I couldn't say anything back.