If you can afford to send your kids privately SHOULD you?

[Flum]

Just that really

I hear ya Bonsoir and I do think that MN is stuck in its overly female, middle class circa 1991 bubble.

There is simply no comparison to how things are today. Simply saying, well I did this, or so and so did that, is utterly pointless.

House prices are absurdly high, jobs are rarely for life, benefits are being eroded, as are pensions. Tertiary education cost an arm and a leg.

All these things mean our DC will need very well paid jobs to be financially independent. And getting such jobs is becomeing ever harder with globalisation. One example: in DH's law firm, for the first time, there are more trainees from overseas than from the UK in the London office this year.

wordfactory - absolutely, overseas candidates are competing with British-born candidates for all the best university places and all the best-paid jobs in London and they often have a breadth of academic skill base that it is impossible to acquire in a British school. The best British schools are fabulous at turning out pupils who excel in three or four academic subjects and are also great sportspeople, musicians, artists, actors. But other nationalities excel in 8 or 9 academic disciplines, including several modern foreign languages at operational level and high-level numeracy skills, and employers find those skills more useful by far than Grade 8 violin and dressage...

Umm I live in a wealthy area, but I know quite a few Firemen, Nurses etc. who send their kids to my DCs outstanding schools. The senior sends several pupils a year to Oxbridge and other top Universities. They also tend to own their own homes, they may not be desirable 4 bed detatcheds in the "best" neighbourhoods, but they are adequate.
On the other hand DH is a high earner, but we can't afford private schools around here, even if they were right for our kids (which the ones on offer are not for at least 1). We need to live here because the jobs are in this area. We don't have generally expensive holidays (mainly camping in France), and have 1 car, DH cycles to work.

Well as Bonsoir pointed out there is simply no comaparison to what has gone before to the world our DC will face.

Perhaps those nurses and firemen got mortagages when it was possible to do so without huge deposits, or perhaps they had help from their family.
Who knows?

The reality is that most nurses wpuld sau they are not paid enough and most of us would agree with that. Would I want my DC to enter into a profession where everyone agrees the pay is crap? No, I wouldn't.

wordfactory Wed 16-Nov-11 08:41:19
"Cory it is possible of course, but extraordinarily difficult to rise out of certain circumstances."

I am not disputing that. What I am disputing is that any state school, under any circumstances, counts as "certain circumstances" which is what posters on this thread seem to suggest.

Let's face it, the vast majority of state educated school leavers do not end up on the dole. Even today.

That is my objection: the assumption that there is no middle ground between private education and the sink estate. Not that the sink estate is a miserable place. I am sure it is. But it's not something most state school children will ever experience- only a minority of the population live in sink estates.

I'm presuming the OP means that you have a moral obligation to your children to send them to private schools if you can afford it, rather than an obligation to the country as a whole to save it money (which is plain daft).

It just depends on circumstances. The state schools here are fine-ish and the nearest independent school is fine-ish, so I'll save my money, thank you, and do a bit of "shadow education" for the dcs. I would possibly pay for a really super duper public school which I feel would really benefit the dcs, but since I am not Fred Goodwin/a Russian oligarch/bloke who painted our house it is out of the question.

I don't suppose many people with the financial means would let their child languish in a "sink" school whilst they lived the high life. I think quite a few people on MN fail to appreciate that to afford a private education you need to be hauling in rather a lot of money (two dcs at local independent school would be £30k a year out of TAXED income) or have generous grandparents.

Though we know that the society of the future will be different, we don't know exactly how it will be different or what will be required of us.

I am old enough to remember the predictions made in the sixties about what life and work would be like in 2000- and they did not turn out to be exactly accurate.

I remember the 80s when people believed house prices would go on rising forever. And then the slump came and we bought our own house for next to nothing in the early 90s.

One thing that we can be fairly certain about though is that there will be more jobs needed than can be filled by the small number of private school leavers.

But on the other hand, that however well we educate our children there can only be a small percentage of absolute top jobs- and sending twice the number of children to expensive schools won't create double the need for surgeons.

interesting discussion. Agree with you cory there is a middle ground which suprisingly most of us occupy I suspect.

My DC will and do go to their very good state primary and may go the the state secondary or maybe private if that is what is appropriate. We are lucky and can afford to make the choice. But I do know that sending them the state route will not predetermine their life chances to any great extent as it didn't for DH or myself.

Dont see what it is to do with anyone what one choose to do with their money. A couple of months ago I saw a chap on TV saying that he thought that when people die they should always leave their money to children's charities. Of course they had a lady from the Donkey Sancatury saying the complete opposite.

Who are others to judge, where do we stop this, only have a 'standard' car, only allow people with children to have more than a 1 bed house and on and on

Interestingly enough out of curiosity once night me and a group of friends looked up our respective (Russell Group) universities and all realised (shock horror) that we would not get in to do our degrees with the grades we got as all of them have upped the entrance requirements by a couple of grades.

So my BCC and my friends' combination of lacklustre grades from bog standard comps, which led to Russell Group unis offers and decent careers would have been a totally different story in 2011.

Of course what we don't know is the impact of this rise in fees and whether there will be less competition for university places as a result. Who knows.

My point was though that you need to be doing a lot better at school these days to get into a decent uni doing a decent degree.

No, I want my children to mix with everyone in the community. I think private schools are far too socially devidive already. The children of the rich and poor need to mix as equals.

The pay of nurses is not that bad. Especially if they have additional skills or go into management. Teachers aren't that badly paid either.

My children do mix with children in the community. They go to sports clubs and holiday clubs that are nothing to do with their school and are open to all children.

That said, most adults and children tend to mix mostly with people from their own area and socio economic group. Society is divided whether we like it or not.

I don't want my children to mix with everyone in our neighbourhood. There are quite a few thugs I would like them to avoid.

They mix with a different demographic (the full range of race groups) in their independent schools which I am glad about.

To be honest, most boarding schools are likely to have a much broader range of nationalities that most state schools.

I am happy about the demographic ddcs mix with in their state school. Some come from quite well off families, others must be very close to the poverty line, most are probably from working class/lower middle class (the children of builders, nurses, teachers, taxi drivers), but I have not yet met any friend of theirs who has not struck me as polite and thoughtful. And quite a few of them have ambitions to go onto university. Which given the schools GCSE results and the A-level results of the local Sixth Form Colleges doesn't seem that unlikely an ambition.

But if I relied on reading Mumsnet I would have to conclude that dd spends her day surrounded by thugs and that they are all heading for a life on benefits.

Grammar schools are just as damaging as private schools, if not more so. I am so glad to live in an area with good state, comprehensive schools. Grammar schools in areas close to us really discriminate against the slightly less academic child. My teenager is bright, but probably not bright enough to go to a grammar school. Why should decisions about her future be decided at the age of 11? And I have worked in a comprehensive school in a town with grammar schools - it was not terribly comprehensive. To go back to the original question, it would be great if all schools could be excellent, and if private schools did not exist. However, I accept that there is freedom of choice, so this is not really an option. If I had the money for private school, I'd definitely not choose it for my child.

mindthegapp

I was privately educated. DH at a comp. We met at RG Uni.
We have a comfortable living, two cars, holidays, too much wine, plenty of extra curricular stuff for the kids, gym for all of us
but NO WAY could we afford to send them private school without sacrificing everything else
and without the riding / gym / music / tennis / dancing / travel
WTF would be the point of the posh school?

so we send them to the comp and from thence to good 6th form and thence to top unis - so long as they keep working hard
and thence to good careers
with me having been there when they come home from school, able to attend school events and take them to activities

i got a scholarship to a minor public school for 6th form
the teaching was less good than at my previous state grammar, so i wouldn't say private is better

and despite what people on here insist about scrimping and saving, it is NO FUN being the poor kid at a posh school.

A number of local private school children moved to the grammar my dd attends at the beginning of Y12. Most have found it very tough going - particularly thinking for themselves and doing work without being sat down and told to.

I consider myself very lucky that we are in a grammar area.

No.

Cory the other thing you need to consider is how globalised the working populations now is for professional level jobs in the UK. When Dh and I graduated from uni 20 years ago, the vast majority of workers in both private and public sectors were British but this isn't the case now. DH works in the city and in his team of 12 he is the only British employee. I work for the NHS and in my dept of 11 there are 5 non British employees all from the EU. All are highly qualified and have a very wrong work ethic, and I can't see the recruitment of foreign workers in the UK diminishing any time soon. Our education standards are rapidly heading downwards compared to other nations and our work ethic is often seen as a joke amongst my non British colleagues and friends. One of my Polish colleagues, whoses OP is a teacher, is now moving back home specifically because the educational standards are higher there. He says unless he pays for private education in UK his dc will be disadvantaged.

Our dc will have to Compete for jobs, not only with the privately educated in the UK, but also dc from other countries with educational standards and expectations far above those of UK so we do need to really raise our game in the UK if our dc are going to enjoy the same living standards as ourselves.

No but you should look for the best school locally for your child and send them there with no guilt about whether it's elitist or non-selective or scruffy or stripey-blazered. You know your child and what environment they'll thrive in. And if you opt for the comp, you can chuck loads of money its way to help improve the range of facilities.

Was just reading this thread (not realising it was an old one) and found myself nodding at a point, and noticed it was mine !! [bizarre and unwarranted occasion for preening emoticon]

I still see the same old quote on MN, thread after thread, year after year, that "I have chosen the schools best suited to my dcs" - as if everyone else has thought "Hmmm, excellent public school down the road... no, I won't go for that, I'll stick with the bog standard comp". No mention made of the fact that choice can be prohibitively expensive. There is a girls' public school a few miles away from here - I think it would suit dd down to the ground but if I "chose" that school since we're neither rich nor poor we'd be living in a tent after a couple of years.

Sitting on the fence here a little bit, I feel you should do what you have to do but be honest about it. However, it does annoy me a little bit that around one third of the children attending one of our local grammar schools were privately educated. It feels to me as if their parents bought them a place at a top academic establishment that is paid for by everyone and by doing so may have dis-advantaged other children who may have been more academically able but less trained for the tests.