How are private schools spoonfed or pushed?

[OfCourseWeCan]

I often hear this and have seen this mentioned on several threads.

My DD is only 6 and is at state so I am really just curious.

Depending on one's definition of spoon-feeding I think most of it happens in the state sector. They are taught to pass an exam with nothing in between and it shows!

Xenia

they still do massively better in later life than state school pupils - take any institution or b ody or board or group of b ishops even or MPs or whatever and even after graduation the private ones continue to prove their worth so any myth that they cannot work things out for themselves just isn't true

I think you'll find that a fair few privately educated people come from monied families with contacts.

That's why they land the best jobs. It has ever been this way.

It's not what you know, but who Daddy knows!

I'm afraid I have to agree with Xenia. I was incredibly self-motivated and did well academically despite not attending a particularly good school. I entered a really competitive, tough profession and despite managing to get through the numerous hoops, I knew it all came much easier to those people who'd had a better (usually private education). It took me a while
to conquer my fear of speaking to influential people within the industry. That probably held me back. I got there in the end but it was far more difficult for me than others.

In hindsight I think they probably respected me for doing as well as I did but it took me a long time to realise that.

No doubt there'll be a flood of anecdotes all attempting to discredit me. This is not an anti-state sentiment. It is my experience. It wasn't fair and to be honest I'm not sure I want my children to go through the same experience.

I think it's true that young people from wealthy backgrounds (however they are schooled) are at an advantage...however I do think it's far too simplistic to say Daddy got them the job.

DH gets inundatated with applications for jobs and none of them are offered one becuase of Daddy.

They must have a 2.1 or a first form an RG university. No exceptions.
They need to be very exceptional to stand out from all the other candidates, many of who are from abroad.
They need to be articulate.
They need to be abale to travel to wherever they are sent.

He says thst the first barrier to employing most state school pupils is quite simply that hardly any apply.
And he would love to employ young people from backgrounds like his, but what can he do?

That said, I completely agree that being from a wealthy family helps...

You are far more likely to have received good advice on A level choices, university course choices etc.

You won't have been put off a good degree at a good uni because of choice.

You may have a second degree or have studied abroad - all costly.

You won't have been put off law school due to cost.

You will have easily obtained work placements via contacts, but moreso, you will have been able to live in London unpaid.

Exactly Litchick.

My DS1 (in last year at 'top' university, blah blah blah etc) has been offered 4 weeks work experinece on a broadsheet paper....... brilliant!!!

But he can only take it up because we can afford to pay for him to live in London for a month.

How on earth does anyone manage to do this, if their parents can't pay???

I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it at his age.

It really is awful.
I don't think either DH or I could have done what we did in the current climate. Where would the money have come from?

In fact, I completely agree with something Tony Parsons said the other day (now that's a strange feeling) that many middle class children are not in a much better position than working class children to get certain jobs, as althouhg educated their parents are not rich.
In order to fund everyhting these days for your DC you have to have serious wonga.

I agree Litchick. I have known many parents who have scrimped, saved and gone without to pay school fees only to discover that their children still cant join the seriously 'in' crowd. There isnt the spare cash left to pay for the even more expensive school trips, music lessons, sports tours.

To join the social 'elite', private education isnt enough. Parents need serious money and their own good contacts. Without these I suspect that many parents would be better off using the school fee money to pay for extra tuition, skiing holidays etc.

Skiing holidays? Relevance?

Cortina "I was surprised when friends at private school had been told what to do to make sure that they got the very top grades at A'levels.

"It seemed a B could be turned into an A through a series of secret, clever tricks. The examiners had a tick box list and if you met the criteria the A was yours for the taking.

"No one told us about this 'code' at our state school."

This is exactly it - I went to a private girls school and we were essentially taught how to pass exams and get the top marks we personally could. If the question is x, for example, you need to mention y and z.

There's more resources (eg I had a series of fundraising calls last year looking for donations to help them build a £1m lecture theatre. I judged a Young Enterprise competition - the only state school that took part was much less uptogether and knowledgeable about what it took to win - and when one private girls school didn't win they all burst into tears "because we always win it"). There's also smaller classes and of course more parental pressure - because they're paying for it and expect to see results. That's only natural - and also only natural that it does result in better academic performances than the same people might achieve in the state system, where essentially you seem to have to work all this out for yourself. (Though every school is of course different). And if you do that, you are more likely to be naturally capable, rather than taught to succeed.

However, I think parents can replicate this to some extent in the state system as long as they know themselves what the rules are. But it's hard. I know that a girl I was at primary school with, who at the time was clearly cleverer than me, went to the local secondary modern and got five O-levels. I got 11 O-levels, four A levels and a Russell Group degree. Go figure.

Having been at a private school, I'm all for my children going through the state system - with that parental support of knowing how it works (and that includes something that's in the news at the moment - the pointlessness of taking certain A-level subjects if you want to get into a top university.) My DH, on the other hand, was badly bullied at a state secondary, thinks he underachieved academically (though we pretty much do the same thing for a living now!) and would do anything to avoid that happening to our DC.

bullying can happen anywhere, though!

Gnome you may well have a point, though of course it depends on the state alternative.

That said, most of the parents at DC's private school are pretty wealthy and alhtouhg choices have to be made in respect of how to spend money, I don't get the sense that it will be either school fees or paying for uni, internships etc.

Most folk fully intend to pay for the lot.

These children have a very gilded existence.

Gmajor7 - skiing holidays - highly educational (as can all holidays be) especially for teaching important lessons about gravity and reading danger signs in foreign languages.

My point was that once parents arent paying for school fees they have a lot less debt more money available for buying other things which substitute what was missed out on by not going to private school.

You can buy an awful lot of spoon feeding/extras if you dont have to pay school fees.

As did Tony Blair with tutors from Westminster School and buying a flat in Bristol etc.

But we haven't used contacts for the older childen to get jobs. Not everyone does. A lot of children proceed on their own merit or their own application and in fact in many places there is reverse nepotism (if you're connected you can be discounted because they need to seem whiter than white). Although a lot of other things definitely do need some connections to get into.

Was it ever easy though? I applied for 110 jobs before I left university and I was virtually top of my year. It's always been pretty hard.

Spoonfed is a derogatory word which doesn't describe the process mentioned above. Good teaching isn't spoon feeding. Bad teaching in state schools if they don't tell you how to sit the exam is not something we should praise. However in both sectors teaching beyond the syllabus as well as having the chance to look at past papers and the like is a good thing.

My DS is 5, and in Reception at a private primary school. That's the first compulsary year, last year he was in Upper Nursery.

He does have some "homework", but it's not like sitting down to 3 hours of quadratic equations every night or anything. It's going over phonics, sometimes, or drawing a picture of his bed, or writing down what Mummy's and Daddy's names are, that kind of thing.

He loves the school. It's very friendly and a really nice environment. The classes are very small - 14 in DS' class, same for the other class in the same year. Each class has a teacher, and the two classes share 1 full-time and 1 part-time assistant between them.

It's also a very lefty, Islington school - no uniforms, teachers (including the Head) are all called by their first names, not Mrs Smith or whatever.

Cortina, having taught in both the independent and state sectors I can say that in both cases I have gone through the mark scheme with GCSE and A Level students. No difference between the two in that respect.

It's more likely to be down to the teacher.