It is a bit of a Polly Filla article of course, and doesn't actually ring true. I rather think it is at least partly made up.
Most private schools are over subscribed, such that if you left, I wouldn't assume you could go straight back.
Also the pickup seems to be nearly all at-home mothers, so I rather think the journo is "polishing" the story here as well. It doesn't work.
How can you tell just by looking whether someone is an au-pair, nanny, friend of the parent or parent ? She couldn't have known that, so it's probably fabricated. Maybe she spoke to a couple, and generalised, or just made it up.
As for the dumb bint's statement on "Where we live, there’s a strong sense that if you’ve got any money you scrape to afford private education."
Again how can she know ?
Next door to us is a state teacher, we don't know her views, to my knowledge we've never spoken to the people two doors away, like most people we couldn't name more than a dozen people in our street after 10 years. We don't know their views on education, and neither can she. This is made up as well.
The stuff about the house does ring true, because it shows her and husband to be selfish vacant tarts.
I'd go hungry rather than send my kids to the nearest state school, and would see selling the house as a relief that I had the resources to use that way. Educating my kids from 3 to 25 is going to cost me more than the house. I don't like that one little bit, but no one said parenting is easy or cheap.
As for "boaters" where did that come from ?
Very few private schools have these, and our kids wear uniform much like those used by local state schools.