Areas where state schools are better than private?

[Narrie]

Does anyone live in an area where the state schools are really better than the private ones? I picked this up elsewhere but am afraid to comment there.

I have lived and worked in the Midlands where there are few private schools to choose but the state schools are not very good. I have lived in Nottingham, where again I felt the state schools were poor.

Even in London there were some awful schools and private was best.

I currently live in Cornwall having got here working in Exeter, Plymouth and Barnstaple. None of the state schools were good there.

Just wondered where the good state provision is. Is it just odd schools within a mass of poor provision or are there really whole areas where state schools are better?

Thanks.

(PS I have my own DC in a boarding school partly because of the state schooling and partly because we move around so much)

I can't imagine why it would be relevant if I had gone to Henrietta Barnett etc- it is only something that I would mention if it came up in conversation, which is only likely if I came across someone who came from the same area. There is nothing worse than someone who gets stuck in the past. Unless you happen to know someone who went to a particular selective school, or failed to get in, you wouldn't have a clue how difficult it was to get in(or care). I don't live in London and don't have girls and so can't show any interest in how difficult it was to get a place.

I went to a very hard to get in school and it's only ever come up once with an employer (soon after graduating) and that was in a 'do you have enough experience of the real world?' kind of way, so it can cut both ways.

Mordion you are being silly. Loads of people from all sectors don't aspire to Oxbridge or even university at all and not always because they aren't capable. Poor unfortunates indeed!

@gelo not at all. Xenia keeps telling us how the private schools have the majority of the best university places sewn up. Because they are so much better. Imagine not achieving that given such a massive head start

I hope Xenia won't mind me breaking a confidence- but her girls went to NLCS. Not sure if everybody knows that.......

I can't remember what that stands for so it would fail to impress me.

seeker you are mean. When she did not comment on me quoting the data from her home LEA ...

I have looked it up- I know it is prestigious because Xenia tells us so- but I know nothing about it.

You never heard of Miss Buss and Miss Beale?!

Having a statistically higher likelyhood of a given outcome doesn't translate to being a 'poor unfortunate' if you don't go down that path and I think you know that all too well. There are many routes to earning loads of money (which I think is Xenia's hope for her dc) and indeed her older children seem to prove the point that oxbridge isn't necessary. My self made millionaire friend went to a good school, didn't go to Oxbridge, didn't get that great a degree at all, but it mattered not one iota.

I only know of it because a very favourite book of mine was 'A London Girl in the 1880s', an autobiography of a pupil at North London Collegiate in its early years under Miss Buss.

I know nothing of it now - for all the reasons stated before in this thread, that schools are only discussed between people who come from a similar area, as vanishingly few of them have any kind of reputation (good or bad) outside the local area.

That's a great book. As we're its sequels. Did you not do the whole miss buss and miss Beale thing in history? Or are you very young? (Bracing myself now to feel old).

Yes- I had -but not enough to remember which girl's school.

If I lived in London I expect that I would be familiar with all the schools- but it hasn't been necessary.

"Cupid's darts do not feel"

Mordion - at last I have discoivered someone else who has read them! They were back in print for such a short time, I can never find anyone else who has even heard of them.

I shall now ask whether you have read 'My Friend Mr Leakey' as that is my other 'book that I love that no-one has heard of'....

"How different from us"

[It was a rather oscure book by the famous Cambridge scientist JBS Haldane, which ends with words to the effect that he will write more children's books when people have stopped inventing such horrible weapons. As far as I know, he never did.]

I've read that book!

If there were no private schools, I wonder what percentage of people would get the best university places and jobs?

Mr Leakey? Or London Child of 1880s? Or [asks in hushed tones] Both??

Teacher my um read all 4 books when she was a child - the ladies she was evacuated to gave them to her as part of their 'aspiration campaign'. She bought them for me in the early 80s. DD1 has read them, too

I'm afraid I haven't read the other book you mentioned. Sorry.

My 'book I love that nobody has ever heard of' is The Cuckoo Clock. I don't think it has any relevance to this thread though.

London child, sorry! My mum had it because she went to NLCS and reveres all mention thereof.

"Both!"

drops "The Wind on the Moon" hopefully into the conversation

Nit Clearly the main criterion would be knowing what happened in the Old Shippen.