If you can afford private education but remain in the state sector cont.

[happygardening]

Thought I repost the OP although the debate has moved on a little .
It's going to be hard to avoid this becoming another state v private thread, but what I'm interested in is a slightly different take on that debate. It's not "which is better?" but "if you think state school is better even though you could afford private education, then why is that?"

The question is based on the assumptions that the DC in question is/are reasonably bright (so might benefit academically from academically selective education), that the state school is non-selective (as most people don't have access to grammar schools), and that you hope for your DC to go to a good university (to make the £££££ fees worthwhile!)

I've been mulling this over ever since I heard some maths professor from Cambridge talking on the radio about the age-old private v state inequality of Oxbridge admissions. He was all for improving access for state school applicants but said that the simple fact was that for maths, even the best state schools generally teach only to the A-level syllabus, whereas the best private schools take their maths/further maths A-level candidates well beyond the syllabus and so the state school applicants are at a huge disadvantage - they simply don't have the starting level of knowledge required for the course.

This made me wonder: with this sort of unequal playing field, if you have the choice of private education, what reasons might you have not to take it?

Would be interested to hear from those who've made this choice - how it's working out, or if your DC have finished school now, how did it work out? Did they go to good universities/get good jobs, etc? On the other side of things, if you paid for private schooling but now regret it, why?

My DC go to a state school by the way.

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Your average middle class family won't move abroad but the vast majority stumping up £33 000+ a year are not you average MC family. Of course theyll move abroad more so than ever before come from abroad anyway or have houses in six different countries and then they will still access the top universities anywhere in the world and many will go on to be the movers and shakers that were destined to become whether or not they sent Bertie to Eton UK or Eton Singapore.
To solve this problem as has been finally accepted in the developing world requires a sustainable bottom up approach empower those at the bottom give them the resources and help to lift themselves out of poverty address their many problems they may not become movers and shakers in one generation but in one generation if you could generate a healthier literate population living in homes of high quality where crime was not seen as the solution to their problems and free from the worry about where the next meal was coming from then maybe the second or third generation may start to believe that HE is within their grasp.

^^ Hear, hear happy.

There are other boarding schools in other countries that due to the currency rate may even be cheaper. And one of the "inofficial" benefits of the system (for the UK government at least) is that apart from bringing up Britain's elite, they may also be educating the future leaders / movers and shakers of other nations. The loyalty you may be instilling in them could be quite priceless. Once you have a British prime minister educated in China's Eton, you may get what I mean.

Tasmania - bllcks about loyalty. You can't talk about the hugely wealthy being happy to up sticks and live elsewhere because they already have 6 or 7 mansions in different countries around the world anyway and talk about loyalty in the same breath. They will remain "loyal" to the UK only so long as the UK provides them with what they demand and when it can no longer provide that, or no longer provides it as well as some other country, they will happily move on, leaving their detritus behind. That's at the very best a symbiotic relationship, but many would consider it parasitical. It has absolutely nothing to do with loyalty.

Other world leaders educated at our public schools have shown very little in the way of loyalty to the country as a whole, as opposed to its housing stock and shopping opportunities.

Other world leaders educated at our public schools have shown very little in the way of loyalty to the country as a whole, as opposed to its housing stock and shopping opportunities.

as opposed to its housing stock and shopping opportunities

Unfortunately, though I disagree with them buying the housing stock (simply because I don't think it should be seen as investment/consumer discretionary stuff, but rather something you need in order to live)... governments probably generally like the above. Because someone somewhere in the UK will make money out of it.

When the abolition of public schools was seriously mooted in the 60s and 70s the major public schools all looked at properties to acquire in France.
Parents would not have to move from the UK. They'd just have to put their kids on Eurostar at the beginning of term.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I have read a lot of the comments and I'm a little depressed at some of the remarks about Oxbridge.

I'm an Oxbridge don who does admissions (at one of the oldest colleges), and I am passionately committed to getting more state school students into Oxbridge. So are a great many of my colleagues. Yes, Oxbridge has a long way to go in terms of increasing intake from state schools, but huge efforts are being made and change is happening. Access schemes and open days are slowly but surely making a difference.

There is not a contradiction between admitting more students from state schools and admitting the best students, because in my experience the state school students ARE very often the best. They have shown initiative and achieved their A*s without necessarily having the benefit of small class sizes and lots of one-on-one attention. Once they are admitted to Oxbridge, they find all the one-on-one interaction with tutors extremely stimulating, and they thrive. Some students from independent schools (though by no means all!) are already bored and jaded by the time they apply to university. (And believe me, in the interviews, it often shows.)

My particular subject is taught especially poorly at state schools compared to many independents. This is a shame, and yet, once they are admitted, the state school students catch up.

The admissions process is not gimmicky; there is no magic formula. In my field, candidates have at least two separate interviews, sit a test at their school before they arrive, and submit samples of their schoolwork along with their UCAS form. Sometimes a candidate interviews poorly, or receives a low test mark, or submits schoolwork of dubious quality, but is admitted anyway, because it is the whole profile that matters, no single element of it. The application is also 'flagged' in a number of different ways to alert us to whether the candidate has been in care, or if they come from a school or a postcode that has not historically sent many of its students on to university.

The system is not perfect, because in the end, there are not enough places for all the bright candidates. But there are other good unis in the UK apart from Oxbridge, as others on the thread have pointed out. Some subjects are even BETTER taught at other unis than at Oxbridge (gasp). However, the bottom line is that if you are a good candidate from a state school and apply to Oxbridge, you have a better chance of getting in than a good candidate from an independent school. There, I've said it. But NOT ENOUGH STATE SCHOOL CANDIDATES APPLY. Their teachers don't encourage them to apply, and their parents don't encourage them to apply, and they don't apply, and then lots of mediocre candidates from independent schools do. And it's a crying shame.

I will descend from my platform now. And yes, my DC go to state school. I want them to have the best education I can give them, and to me that means studying with children whose parents don't necessarily have many thousands of pounds to spare per year.

marfisa - wouldn't you agree though that getting a 93% state school intake would be mathematically impossible (because I think that's what many people here seem to expect).

I've done a bit more reading, and although only 7% of students go to private school, this increases to 18% of those over the age of 16. And since you are likely to be over 16 when you do your A-Levels (and can't go to uni without doing those exams), the number we are meant to look at is this:

82% state school v 18% private school

Now, Oxbridge requires very high grades [let's say 3 A/A*] according to the prospectus. This is what most candidates will be looking at, too, when they list their unis on the UCAS form, and if they know they're far from that, they won't apply, because it's basically like throwing one option away.

According to this article, almost 1/3 of independent school students get 3 A/A* at A-levels while only 1/10 of state school students do.

That would make the people who MEET THE ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS for Oxbridge the following:

57.7% state school v 42.2% private school

Which is what the intake of Oxbridge currently is!!! In fact, Cambridge seems to even highly favour state school kids!!!

If I looked at entrance requirements alone... it's not a mystery to me why we get to those student ratios. It's all relative! If we look at the 93% v 7% argument, then yes, it looks unfair. Look at the spike of A-level students after the age of 16... yep, still a little unfair. Entrance Requirements??? Totally fair.

The only other way to push up state school intake would come very close to social engineering and blatant preference for state school candidates...

Another set of figures would be interesting but it's not something schools are going to volunteer eagerly: the proportion of applicants at specific schools such as Westminster, Eton getting offers in relation to the total number who applied. I the hit rate for state schools by comparison will be at least comparable, if not high. Huge, huge numbers apply from these big name schools, but only the success rate is published.

I'm certainly not expecting 93% state school entry to Oxbridge- that would be bonkers!

Tasmania-it's important to remember that there are state schools and state schools- the vast majority of the state schools that send a decent number to Oxbridge are grammars. Which are selective, largely middle class and only exist in a handful of LEAs. So if you dig a little deeper into the stats they tell you a different story.

I would expect the hit rate etc.

seeker it must be pretty obvious to you by now that it's you who needs to dig deeper into the stats.

Yellowtip- why? If somebody says that there is a X% of state school pupils going to Oxbridge, without qualifying what sort of state school, then surely that warrants investigation.

Information on hit rates here

My local secondary school sends nobody to Oxbridge and hasn't done for years. Yet it's not in a grammar school area nor in a deprived catchment.

I think last year they sent 4 to Russell Group. Shocking stats in my opinion!
And there are very many bright kids going there, many (shock horror) from MC families.

Seeker - the "hit rates" in the report you refer to seem to relate to A-level results, not to actual applications to the universities concerned?... so not what Yellowtip was referring to.

Absolutely, musicalfamily. The schools that most kids go to don't send them to Russell group.

We need to find out why that is and change it. Rather than saying "don't be so negative- loads of state school kids go to Oxbridge- just look at this list of grammar schools"!

We know why those really at the bottom of the pile don't send their DC's onto HE of any description but why don't others. I'm sure I read somewhere that the majority of UK people describe themselves a "middle class" so what puts them off? Are they really intimidated by gowns and mediaeval building surely just as to resolve the problems experienced by the underclass requires a multi pronged approach its not that straight forward.

It's not straightforward at all. But denying that there is a problem isn't going to help.

seeker I understood the HT at Westminster to take any student aside who was not intending to apply to Oxford or Cambridge and to ask them why not. If the vast majority of the school applies, then the hit rate, though higher than most, isn't stratospherically high compared to some of the poorest performing comps.

The difference between top grammars and top independents is overwhelmingly about differing parental ambition. Which is interesting, since that alone would suggest that grammars aren't the exclusive mc ghettos that you'd have us believe. I think the numbers may be slightly skewed by some grammars sending a disproportionate number to medical school too, though I'd have to check up (from memory I think one of the Essex girl grammars is very notable in this respect whereas in a different thread peterenas said that her DS was the only medic in his year at Eton for 2011 entry, which is astonishing given the size of the cohort).

You'll see that this report refers to the critical thinking approach deployed in many top schools (but evidently not at the grammar at which happy observed :(). It also refers to the crucial duty that teachers have in getting fully informed for their highest achievers and enthusing them - and their parents if need be - which is something five took exception to earlier on in the thread.

Very glad too to see marfisa putting pay to the notion five put forward that interviewing applicants exposes female and/ or non white and/ or obviously poorer students to discrimination on the part of the tutors. Personally, I'd have thought an arrogant little I-love-me public schooler would get far shorter shrift....

seeker You have to be realistic. As I've shown above, it is the fact that people need to meet the admission criteria, too. Get me the figure that shows how many people at the schools you're talking about actually get 3 A/A*? Because considering you're more likely to get that at private school and - if at state school - more likely the wealthier ones with pushy parents... it's a no-brainer.

Sorry - there's a limit as to how fair you can possibly be. I have the feeling you want someone to get in despite not meeting minimum requirements based on where they are from.

Basically, you have to admit it: you're calling for affirmative action/positive discrimination.

There are loads of people from "ordinary" comprehensive schools getting 3+As and A*s!

seeker Who's denying the problem; not me far from it.
"The difference between top grammars and top independents is overwhelmingly about differing parental ambition"
We need to get this in to perspective. Being MC does not mean that your ambition is for you children to be hedge fund managers on the ST rich list with houses all over the world and 600 ft yacht and a garage full of Ferraris and Astons. For a significant minority stumping up £33 000 PA per child this way of life is the norm. If you sending three children that £500 000 in senior school fees this is not the income of the middle classes outside of London the home counties and affluent Shires most peoples houses aren't worth that even those sending two children are going to pay over £300 000 for boarding school fees and thats only for senior school. These are not parents with your average middle class jobs; teachers nurses university lectures and high street lawyers and as importantly not the landed aristocracy all those we know in this category sending their children to top boarding schools are not paying the fees from single farm payments, sheep, rent from cottages or even wheat most have other jobs mainly in finance. They are super ambitious people who are also super ambitious for their children.

Tasmania, useful post at 1:56