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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Apply for a course because it's not popular ? That makes you laudably single minded about what?

Tasmania - it's ridiculous to say that attitude is all down to the Welfare State. Britain has centuries of history where there was an acceptance that some things only went to those at the top of the tree, long before the Welfare State came along. After so many centuries of building up entirely different traditions, depending on your class, you need to work pretty damn hard to coax many people out of their centuries-old mindset.

Yellow Some people who have set their minds on getting into Oxbridge apply for less popular courses. I guess chances of getting into Anthropology or so could be higher than, say, PPE... simply because there are fewer applicants. I have nothing against that. I was single-minded like that when I was 17 and paying for uni... and changed to one of the more popular courses once in. Plenty of people did that.

I meant APPLYING for uni. Predictive text playing up.

rabbit I am NOT saying it's due to the welfare state.

I am saying that rather than feeling like the victim of some non-existent conspiracy, you should look at the opportunities that have been given to you and make the most of it... rather than dwell on what others have (whether that be money or better support) and you don't.

Why blame someone of not encouraging you to go to Oxbridge when it's you who actually applies. You're the only one stopping yourself!!! And if you want to go somewhere else... good for you. But don't blame others when you haven't even tried.

"What really starts annoying me about this thread is that there seems to be an approach of cocooning kids in Britain way too much."

Tasmania - I agree. There is a widespread belief that people should be "looked after" by some invisible hand and that if people fail to achieve something (education, wealth, health, whatever) it is because there was some "unfairness" somewhere along the line that must be eradicated. That mindset is deeply corrosive.

Tasmania teachers are at the heart of this and have an absolute duty to encourage their students to aspire to the best that they're capable of. That's hardly mollycoddling.

Bonsoir Yes, it is deeply corrosive! Also, this handholding attitude doesn't work out well when the kids later apply for well-paid jobs that may peg them against candidates from abroad who may not have needed any helping hand on the way up. Because at my school no one got helped with applications! Their responsibility ended with my A-levels. It was up to you what to do next. And it was the same for most other people in the country.

With no helping hand, you learn to be resourceful. I often interview people for jobs and I find that's a trait many people lack here, but is seriously important. It's something not taught through A-levels. Whether they were privately educated or not didn't matter. In fact, I've rejected a few nice Etonians because of it. There were only ever a few who had it. And they came from ALL walks of life... whether it be from a council estate, raised by single mom background who somehow got thru to RG uni... to "posho" from Oxbridge. What shaped them, IMHO, is that at some point in the past they were challenged to be different and think out of the box. Take a risk, basically. Sometimes, due to tragic circumstances. Somehow that gave them a quality no one else had... and they make freakingly good people to work with!

Yellow That's relative. In other countries, that's not expected from teachers (their responsibilities stop with teaching the subject). And there, it would be seen as mollycoddling.

Agree re: resourcefulness.

What I've found is that it's the parents that lead those not at the top public schools to Oxbridge. It's been said on this thread and before but it's so key. Those parents that do prime numbers and times tables on the route into school each day with their children...It's those children I see applying for Oxbridge years later. The children do the legwork but the parents have given them the indirect steer.

I agree, Tasmania. Not all countries, by far, expect teachers/school to have any kind of pastoral role. Teachers teach their subject to children and then go home.

I agree, NorhamGardens. A parental culture of high expectation and constant learning is very powerful.

....ALL walks of life...whether it be from a council estate, raised by single mom background who somehow got thru to RG uni...to 'posho' from Oxbridge

Lovely distinctions. Brilliant.

And of course teachers are there to inspire.

Very easy job, being a teacher elsewhere, then - any effort to inspire and encourage could be seen as mollycoddling... you either like the subject your you don't, you either work or you don't, it's got nothing much to do with your teachers.

It's not pastoral care for a Ho6 to say: look, you're seriously bright, don't underestimate yourself, give it a go. It's in his job description. It's also not pastoral care for a subject teacher to identify and encourage a student with the ability to go onto Oxford or Cambridge to read that subject. It's part and parcel of the job. It's particularly key where students come from a background where that sort of aspiration is unusual.

Norham I've never, ever done tables on the way to school.

Mind you, the Germans do have a reputation for having a lack of imagination and the French for intellectual snobbery. Maybe that is all the fault of their teachers .

Yes, rabbitstew, that pretty much sums it up! In France, nothing is the teacher's fault and if a child doesn't achieve the expected level, the school makes him/her repeat the year.

Well, Bonsoir, occasionally we talk about Doctor Who.

Listen to KissFM Talk about life the Universe and everything.

So it's OK for kids at St Custard's to helped through the application process, to be coached for interview, and given lots of advice and guidance all the way- but that would be mollycoddling and hand holding and cocooning at Bash St Comprehensive? How does that work??????!

It's a bit like rich people have to be paid lots because otherwise they won't work hqrd, but poor people have to be paid not very much as an incentive to make them work harder!

Well, seeker, we shouldn't seek to be treated like the mollycoddled privileged classes. We should be proud to be independent-minded and unaided. In fact, we shouldn't need school at all - anyone with an ounce of nouse should be able to teach themselves to read and then pop into the local library.

Bonsoir France and Germany seem to have a LOT in common then. Maybe education on the continent is just treated differently? This is what I meant with kids around 17/18 normally being more independent over there. Due to our globalised world, when it comes to the top graduate jobs, British students are increasingly competing with candidates from Europe. That's just another score on the board for them because they already one on the board anyway - they are often good in English, but will also be naturally fluent in their native language.

Yellow Those are actual descriptions! Those people exist!

Well, seeker... ideally... no one would get coached, and the ones who get to the top are the ones who do so out of their own accord. If kids from abroad (Bonsoir has experience of France, I do of Germany) can do it, why not the Brits???

Over there, it is NOT a teacher's job to motivate you to apply to uni! That's if they even know that you want to go to uni... most of them don't give a damn about what you want to do after school. You'd be lucky if they asked! They'd think you'd be mad if you told them it's their job to get people to apply to Oxbridge. Much more likely though, if you did tell them that, they'd probably think you don't belong there - NOT because of your social class, but because you show little drive to make it on your own.

Tasmania - that is such a Germanic response. "Those people exist!" Either your first language is not English or you spent too much time in Germanic countries and have lost sensitivity to the subtleties of the English language. "Posho" is generally considered a deliberately rude way of describing someone. English people do not say in black and white what they mean (which was pretty useful in the days of running an Empire...) and they do not lay out to the world how much effort they have had to put into something. If you are not sensitive to that fact when you interview people, then you have a cultural bias towards employing Germans.