to find it incredibly irritating when in certain circles school fees are talked about as if they are a necessity, not a choice?

[emkana]

Like Emma Thomson currently on the Women programme on BBC 4, or very often in the "Style" section of the Sunday Times.

There's more people on here that are very anti private schools, it's obvious every time someone starts one of these threads to be honest.

UQD - If you have time to count threads/posts then you have less school fees to pay more time on your hands than me

I do admit to wading in when I see a poster being pilloried (sp?) for choosing an independent school without anyone looking beyond that at the real situation.

Yes, it is probably more than the national average of 7% - but then I would hazard a guess that the proportion of degree-level educations/professional careers/pick your indicator of middle-classness is also above average, so it's hardly surprising.

I freely acknowledge that we are lucky to have the luxury of making the choice between holidays and new(er) cars and private education, but what annoys me is the assumption that if you can afford it at all then money is no object - it is still a choice and it does leave money a lot tighter than it would be otherwise - but we have decided it is worth it for us and our DC (as I keep reminding myself as everyone else goes on holiday and we fix the house instead )

As an aside BelledeChocolate, if ds's school was foolish enough to advertise in the Sunday Times (for what?) it would be a cold day in hell before I shelled out for the PTA buying my own cakes back every sixth Friday .

Maybe the vast majority of people just don't bother to contribute to these threads

Precisely.

I do like Mark Steel's take on how people justify going private:

'Then eventually you'll hear their catchphrase: "Because you can't put your principles before your children."

In other words, you must bring up your children with no principles because the two can't possibly go together. Principles are things you can have when you're young, like a gap year. Whereas people like Nelson Mandela are a disgrace for carrying on with them. If he had any decency, as soon as he had kids he'd have dobbed his comrades into the apartheid police and spent the reward money on a chemistry set or a telescope.

Anyway, imagine if poor people took the same attitude, and said: "We had to get Bruno into a decent school, so we robbed the rich house by the park and flogged all their jewellery.

"We don't normally approve of breaking and entering, but you can't put your principles before your children. And we were very ethical about it because we didn't shit in the wardrobe."'

Can we just lay to rest this myth - often put about on here - that buying a house in the catchment of a good state school is somehow "fees by the back door"?

I mean, it may get you the catchment you want (and there are no guarantees) but it is still the same state system.

It's not as if, thanks to a bigger mortgage, you suddenly, magically get a school with smaller class sizes and a posh uniform and tennis courts and a well-equipped music room and well-spoken, highly-qualified staff - and all the other things I'd expect if I were paying for a luxury item like private school fees!!

Belle your maths falls down at some point because independent schools (in general) have longer holidays - so your holiday childcare options are both more limited and more expensive.

hester i repeatedly had the same as you last year. on one occasion i was actually commiserated with and then asked 'don't you care'?, so insulting it left me speechless.

So i'm afraid the fourth set of parents to ask and then give me the glazed look got very wound up when I blithely commented how amazing it was that so many people had the capital set aside to underwrite fees to end of education. My 'Gosh, do people gamble with education funding like this nowadays then?' It was a very studied wind up. Which worked.

Of course it took mn to alert to me to fact schools even flog fees insurance - uqd it is strident topic isn't it

Well sorry, you said "not every area has a grammar school" as tho that were the only reasonable alternative to private school.

Sorry if I've misunderstood.

@ "school fees through the back door" though. I could resent that remark if I wanted. Have we all got to live in the least nice area then, if we want to be egalitarian? There are council houses here too y'know

(not many now tho as Maggie sold them all off)

Love that quote Boffy .

Way, way more than philosophical debates about private education (I am ideologically opposed, but also would absolutely be prepared to be a hypocrite if I thought it would save my child from horrible bullying, for example) it's this thing of denying privilege that bugs me. Presumably people are embarrassed about acknowledging they are wealthy, so they always have to pretend they're just ordinary families who are nobly making sacrifices. Implication: if the rest of us also gave up our 60 fags a day and beach holidays in Marbella, we could do it too. Well no, we damn well can't, you need to be wealthy to make this kind of choice. This matters because it ties in to the other half of the argument, which is about how these choices feed future social inequality. So you get wealthy people denying both their class privilege now, and how they are supporting further social inequality in the future.

Anyway, I'm tired and beginning to betray all the shortcomings of my state education. (I do have a Latin O level, mind.)

Some of them are dire madonna.

clary The one ds used to go to cost £9 for the after school session, £7 for the breakfast club, £28 (ish) for the holidays per day. They may have changed them by now though so they may be higher. Add on travel costs for me to get him home and there and to work as it's too far to walk on the bus as I can't drive (about £10 a day).

Belle - untrue, I think it is about even.

Grimma - my point is that if you had this conversation in a pub or a party or a lecture theatre, it would be very unlikely to be 50-50.

stealth - not counting, it's just a feeling (ooh, dancing on the ceiling). And the idea that it is a choice between paid education or paid cars/holidays is misleading too. There are no free consumer items. Education is not a consumer item. (Or shouldn't be.) And for an awful lot of people it's not an either/or.

Can we just lay to rest this myth - often put about on here - that buying a house in the catchment of a good state school is somehow "fees by the back door"?

No, but it is a 'choice' denied to people who can't afford it.

Exactly hester, that gets my goat, too.

There is no way we could afford school fees, not for one and definitely not for three children, not matter how much we would scrimp and save. Absolutely no way. And we are not even that poor.

haven't read the thread emkana - but yadnbu. The Telegraph does it too - factors in school fees to articles on the cost of living/cost of bringing up children - just like you ay the Times does. drives me mad

Grimma - my point is that if you had this conversation in a pub or a party or a lecture theatre, it would be very unlikely to be 50-50.

Of course. But here, we can read the thread title and some posts and decide if its a subject we're interested in or not. Self selecting participants, nothing like a population cross-section.

If you were having a conversation in a pub it would be very unlikely to be about many of the other subjects aired on here! (unless you have some very odd drinking pals )

Maggie did everyone a great dis-service by selling off the council houses, the ex-council houses in the more affluent parts of our city are expensive to buy as the people that own them wish to cash in on having a good secondary school on their doorstep.

BOF Dear husband always used to shit in the wardrobe when on a job (It's a man thing). But at least we got the kids privately educated and away from a life of crime. One's an estate agent the others an MP.

Love Mark Steel
My mum is always saying "oh but if you could afford to send (DS) to private school you would". Eh, no, we wouldn't.

I am not against private schools. I am more fully in favour of the individual making their own choices than I am about anything else.

My parents (public school) had very strong ideas about the benefits of comprehensive eduation and (they told us) it was particularly important to the comprehensive experiment that people like us (comfortably off, seemingly intelligent) were not creamed off to private schools, leaving behind the less well off with the less motivated etc. So, according to them, it is the parents who scrimp to keep their kids out of state schools are responsible for failure in the State System.

Chris Woodhead (bless him) was involved in a group of no frills private schools called Cognitas.

If I lived in the place I used to live in London, I would privately eduate, home educate or move. That act would make local state education worse. It's a toss up between doing the best for the country, or for the future skills base of the country, and doing the best for one's children. Most people, I think, would put their children first. I would, if the local school featured stabbings.

Putting one's children first is a natural, admirable human action. But don't, DON'T make out in any way you are doing the state system a favour.

Redbin

UQD - I do take issue with that. It is a choice. DH and I work hard, always have worked hard, and the harder we work the luckier we get (to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn) so we are 'lucky' enough to be able (just) to afford school fees. If we chose not to, we could afford lots of other things instead. How is that not a choice ? I am not saying it is a choice everyone has, however hard they work, but it is a choice.

It's a bit difficult, though, ethically, to argue that people shouldn't live in nice areas. What's everyone meant to do - all live in council houses in one big, soulless estate?

In the vast majority of cases they're not just doing it for the schools. And sometimes it's just a case of where you "roll up". I know heaps of couples who bought their first house on this side of our city pre-children - just because it was near their friends, in the area they knew, near the pubs they liked to go to, near the shops, near the bus/tram for work, near the University for PhD study, etc... and wouldn't have had a clue about schools. They would never have dreamed of moving to the other side of the city where it's cheaper (and where the worse schools happen to be) as it would have inconvenienced them greatly.

My DH gets highly irritated by this, too.
Seems to be his colleagues at work that annoy him the most! I guess they know that all the people they are talking too could afford school fees, so they figure it is ok. It is the way they bitch about them [the fees] that gets him the most, as if they are hard done by or something.
Don't have this problem in my staff room! A few of my colleagues send to private school but they would never moan about the fees there! They seem to view it as some kind of dirty secret.