Paying to keep your child away from certain types of other children… I don’t understand?

[Reasonthis]

I’ve seen so many threads recently bashing people who use private school as a way to remove their child from an environment with other children who may be challenging, disruptive etc.

I am completely against private education for a whole host of reasons… but surely if you send your child to a state school, even then you hope they don’t mix with the ‘wrong’ types? Ie those who are disruptive, rude, aggressive etc? Surely you also want your child as far away as possible from that?

I am absolutely amazed that there is suggestion that kids should be around that environment as it’s ’real life’ and shouldn’t be segregated for example by private education . Are people actually saying they are ok with their children sharing a classroom with kids that really aren’t interested in learning and have no values instilled in them by their parents? I will forever use the state system but if I knew my children were mixing with other children who didn’t give a shit and were disruptive, I would do all I could to keep them away from it. Isn’t that just sensible?!

We put our daughter into private exactly because the behaviour of other children in her outstanding state preschool attached to our local outstanding primary in a nice rural market town. She was continuously coming home hurt, complaining of children being rude and the class being disrupted because of individual children at 3.

We lasted half a term before we moved her to the local private school, unsurprisingly not had a single issue since. I wouldn’t put up with that sort of behaviour in my life so why should a three year old child be forced to be put up with it?

Absolutely my point. Life is unequal in many ways and because of this, many people feel a sense of unfairness (whether justified or not).

M son is autistic (EHCP). It makes me sad that parents want to keep their children away from him as he is considered “disruptive”.

Agreed(ish).

They are often issues related parental pressure and alienation.

Drug abuse and eating disorders are statistically higher among private school kids, per person (remember hardly any kids actually go private).

He has echolia and Tourette’s. He will become the loudest child in the room if the room is noisy by screaming.

I appreciate your sadness as a fellow SEN mum (my youngest has ADHD).

But parents want their child to be able to learn and acheive the best they are capable of, which I'm sure you also want for your child? The challenge is balancing the needs of all children so all children SEN or not, have their needs met. Our SEN children's needs do not take priority over non SEN children's needs to learn, to feel safe. If my child is negatively affecting the learning experience of other children, it tells me she is dysregulated and her needs are also not being met, and at this point she us not learning. If, with the appropriate support, she still cannot regulate within a mainstream class, then we will look at other options, for her benefit.

My oldest (non SEN) has had to put up with being scratched, hit etc daily by a child with SEN, this is not ok. Yes, children need to learn to be tolerant of children who look different, talk or behave differently etc. They do not need to be tolerant of being hurt and having their learning disrupted.

I went to a party hosted by some private boarding school kids when I was about 14 - my friends and I (state educated) were quite shocked as cannabis, tobacco and alcohol were available - those kids were quite wild in comparison to us.

Well my son is also autistic and there's absolutely no way he could cope with that, in a classroom or anywhere else tbf.

Yes, your view is precisely why my privately educated daughter now teaches in a specialist SEN school serving some children from very dysfunctional and deprived backgrounds. She got five of her Y11s Grade 4 GCSE English and onto NVQs at local.FE Colleges. She works tirelessly for their success and support. She has DC going to school nearly every day who have been out of the system for up to two years. She constantly works with their parents and some if the cards and emails they have sent have been humbling.

But yiu know, she's just an arrogant, over privileged tosser who doesn't understand the lives of anyone else.

DS, an academic, who has already had a monograph published, is lecturing, admittedly at an RG but is deeply involved in widening participation.

May I gently suggest you stop spouting utter boileaux.

I had the option to privately educate my children.
they went to the local comp.
we are in a fairly rural area, the comp has a very mixed catchment. To be fair, there wasn’t really anything too awful - no knife carrying reported by my kids, a bit of weed but no major drug issues.
yes there was some bullying, smoking (one of my kids!), etc.
i actively wanted my children to understand and value people from all walks of life. I’m glad they went to that school and I would make the same choice again.
also - my friend has two boys same age as mine and they were very badly behaved. They didn’t thrive in state as they were unpopular so, luckily for my children, hers went to a very expensive private school.

The people I met at university who were happy to drop their plans with one friend when a more socially beneficial plan came along, despite having already made arrangements, were privately educated.

This didn't happen among the people I met who weren't from private school.

So, obvious nasty twats? No, the behaviour of the private school kids from the outside appeared just as nice and friendly and polite as the behaviour from the state school kids.

But the actually valuable friendship qualities of loyalty and being a nice person seemed to disappear with private school kids when they got a better offer for anything. They were out for themselves in a way that the state school kids I met weren't. It's very hard to see this from the outside but it's painfully obvious when actually befriending people.

My children went to private school. So did my husband and I. There was nothing snobby about my kids school. The parents were from a wide background, but what we had in common was that we all wanted our children to work hard and value education. And that’s something so many people in this country don’t value. A school education. So many cultures value education, why don’t we?

This isn't my experience at all, and I went to Oxford from a state school, so I was surrounded by lots of private school kids. I also taught in a private girls' day school for 10 years. Of all the many schools I've worked at (state and private), they were in general the loveliest, kindest, most appreciative students. It's clear from the alumnae events etc that many of them made lasting friendships, often lasting many decades.

In a village close by to here, there are some notorious drug dealers who live in a godawful monstrosity of a multi million pound house and send their kids to a local private school. Just because people are wealthy does not mean they are the sort of people you want your kids to mix with.

It’s not that parents want to keep their children away from your child socially. It’s that they want them to have a chance at an education without having to learn alongside screaming in the classroom every day. That kind of environment doesn’t benefit anybody.

It’s a myth, a lie actually, that private schools
children are somehow angelic and state school children awful… obvs NOT true or 94% of us wouldn’t use state school…
and as for the behaviour of private pupils, well, how about the several cases in private’s schools of the ‘well-behaved’ pupils making deep fake porn fakes of their classmates? Or the boarder just convicted of murder? Or the studies saying that private school
children start drinking and taking drugs earlier that their state counterparts?
or how about the ‘rape culture’ at Exclusive Dulwich School?

oh, and yet another teacher at another private school has been convicted of being a paedo…

Private parents are trying to buy
social privilege, but obvs it’s not always the done thing to say that so… dress it up in other ways.

‘It’s that they want them to have a chance at an education without having to learn alongside screaming in the classroom every day. ’

Wise. The. Fuck.up.

You honestly think it’s private school or ‘screaming’. Of course it’s not. FFS.

@AllProperTeaIsTheft I went to Cambridge from a state school. I did not find that people were on a day to day level unpleasant or didn't make friends. They did.

That's why I said it's not outwardly apparent. You would see these people in friendship groups for decades.

But the values were shared. There was more out for yourself social behaviour in this group that I witnessed with state educated children (those two groups mixing and making friends frequently of course) and it was just a shared accepted value in those circles.

People with shared values make friends with each other that last decades.

But the behaviour was noticeable on a longer term scale in subtle ways if you had standards that superseded this self interested social way of interacting.

I'd calling social climbing lite, and the number of people who engaged in it is high enough that would also manage to make strong and lasting social connections. But it's a low standard and a selfish value.

I like the idea of private school opportunities but want to avoid my children absorbing this self interested weak social integrity.

So most of them are fine

I meant "more out for yourself social behaviour in this group THAN I witnessed with state educated children"

Not at all, I think it provides a healthy empathy in life. Afterall a lot of the disinterested kids in my secondary school were kids I knew since 4 years old. I knew who had parents that had divorced, had mental health or immigration troubles, kids that had dyslexia so bad they couldn't read. Yes they annoyed me at times but I just got on with my work. Now I follow them online at time and many of them have had successful lives, maybe not in the way some people measure but they're not people I'd avoid. I also went to school with kids who had physical disabilities including a family member, it's really important I think. I still remember them too and everything they had to deal with. To be honest the worst kids were the rich ones. My husband went to a top state school in London and agreed, he hated all his classmates and wishes he'd gone to the school his primary school friends went to

I can summarise my post. I never met such self interested social climbers til university where I met privately educated children.

The social climbing of course worked. Nobody was friendless or mean or wasn't able to make lasting connections. Not at all.

Not all private school kids were like this, but all of the subtle social climbers were private school kids.