Why on earth would you go state if you could afford private?

[Schmedz]

This thread is for Maisie and happygardening . I like dares!

Re the Beckhams, a head DID say no to them saying that it would be too much of a security risk to have his children there. Money and celebrity don't open all doors.

Jnaice turner link www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article3670659.ece

Wow...mention of the Beckhams really seems to have put this thread to bed! Probably for the best

It really is a good article. I am still surprised when i realise friends I have now were ushered from famous public schools into the richest Oxbridge Colleges with A Level results lower than mine from an ex sec mod comp where we were the first to take A Level. The top stream did have a few teachers drafted in from the old grammar though which was helpful.
I wonder where the writer took her A Levels and whether that was the springboard for her.

It's a pity we can't read the article, being stuck as it is behind the Times's paywall.

I am still surprised when i realise friends I have now were ushered from famous public schools into the richest Oxbridge Colleges with A Level results lower than mine from an ex sec mod comp where we were the first to take A Level.

I suspect that wouldn't happen now. Prince Charles went to Trinity, Cambridge with pretty mediocre A levels as far as I recall, which wouldn't get the likes of ordinary mortals within sniffing distance of the place.

I can remember when the first league tables came out, quite a few independent schools that I knew of, from knowing people who had attended them, didn't have especially good A level results. (I would say that they tended to be the naice refined girls schools, rather than the academic ones.) Since then they almost invariable seem to have bucked their ideas up concentrated on getting good grades so that they can advertise how many As/A*s they get. They need to, I suppose, if you want parents to stump up £10 p.a. plus, you don't want to turn out children with an average of a B and a C at A level - (unless you happen to specialise in certain areas and don't regard A levels as the be all and end all of education).

That should be £10K p.a. plus. I think we would all go private if it only cost £10!

I don't think you make Oxbridge without the grades nowadays. The difference is that generally the public schools know how to prepare candidates for interview. Also, candidates from public schools are more likely to know someone already who has been to Oxbridge, so it's perceived as an obtainable goal. It's much harder to be the first.

LaVolcan - don't worry, it's a terrible article full of horror stories of a 'terrible state education' in the north 30 years ago which the author then uses as an excuse for paying top dollar for her child to go to exclusive private school in the south 30 years later. It would have been just as easy to conclude from the article that being northern was horrendous and if only everyone could be from the south everything would be great.

It's not a 'terrible article'...

It's a well written, thoughful article which certainly chimed with my education and that of DH.

And let's be fair, Turner sent her son to state primary. She had no intention of sending him to a private secondary.

I can't bear that hermetic white-London, private school, bubble, where kids from estates are seen as chavs and muggers

She most definitely cannot be categorised as someone who had just made up her mind about state education based on past experiences. Ot who was fearful of it. Or who was ignorant of it...and all the other things regularly spouted about private school parents.

Dismissing it because it doesn't conclude how you want it to, is a bit pathetic.

It was an effective reflection about the experience of many children at that time and not limited to certain counties. A shame the title 'is it possible to succeed from a comp' is a bit nauseating.

In the paper it was entitled Are You A Local Comp Kid.

I think what the article sums up is that a poor school can have a lasting impact on someone, and that we all have to make imperfect decisions as adults.

ROTS, there are plenty of people who make generalisations about state / private schools near them (or all over the country/everywhere, because that is what stereotypes and generalisations tend to do by definition) based on their own personal experience of school.

Most of us sensible folk examine the options available to us and decide from there, but I don't think anyone can escape the feelings or emotions a bad (or positive) experience at school engenders, nor be completely unaffected by them when making what should be a completely logical and rational choice.

That is, if you actually have a choice of school. For many reasons expressed on this thread, there are plenty in both state and private education who feel 'forced' into one or the other.

Can't read it, unless there's some clever way round the paywall?

Always wary of people who base their decisions for their children on what their own education was like 30 years ago though, so I hope that isn't her argument.

Word, it is a terrible article and saying how wonderful it is because you agree with it's conclusions is a bit pathetic really. In the article, she made a load of specific claims about her schooldays at a comp in the north. She then used that evidence to claim that therefore comps are shit. She could just as easily have used exactly the same evidence to claim the north is shit. There was no nuance and no balance in the article at all.

Nit - that was basically her argument.

Ironic that you have to pay to read it!

Could somebody cut and paste- iron isn't that allowed?

Just finished reading the article. Very interesting. The following paragraphs show that the "setting" at comps isn't the be all and end all of equality either. I'd actually prefer a GS / Comp divide - at least, no matter which one you attend, it's out of sight, out of mind:

The abolition of the 11-plus was supposed to end the academic sorting of sheep and goats, the branding of 80 per cent of children as failures. Yet my first memory of Ridgewood was far more exquisitely divisive. A teacher read out a list of who?d go into the first class: B1, the top set. My name was called and I joined 30 other children, with whom I would share a class for the next five years.

The teacher recited the second list: B1A, they called it, as if to limit the numerical stigma further down. Not B10 then, just B5A. I wonder now what it must have been like to stay in that hall, the crowd thinning, knowing you were in the bottom set, the dumbest of the dumb. That everyone knew it. But I did not wonder then. I?d fretted all summer about getting into the top class and now I was triumphant.

And what happened 30 years ago is relevant to education now exactly how?

Wouldn't the structure not be the same still, seeker?

With setting, people would attend different classes though they are being taught the same subject - just at different levels. Whether that be in different buildings (GS / Comp) or different classrooms, there would still be a divisive structure... nowadays, you can live right next to someone for years without knowing them. I assume that a lot of kids in different sets would not associate with one another either...

But there wouldn't be the humiliating reading out of class lists, and also sets are generally not rigid- there can be movement.

And if you are all in the same building, you can be set 1 for one subject, set 6 for another.

Maybe I should have posted the paragraph that came much later, too:

Indeed, our education did not turn out to be very comprehensive. The progressive ideal of mixed-ability teaching was too trendy to reach Seventies Yorkshire. Instead, our cadre of clever kids passed through the school like an elite bubble, until we dispersed to do different O levels. But not once in five years, apart from my occasional undistinguished appearances for the hockey team, did I mix with anyone below B1A. Even though many had been friends at primary school.

Once again- that was 30 years ago, and she is remembering what happened from her own point of view. There may, for all we know, have been lots of movement she didn't notice. Or movement in the sets below hers- it is likely that the very top set is going to stay pretty static, to be honest, it does in grammar schools too. Or there may have been no movement at all. The point is, this is anecdote, 30 years old, and doesn't reflect what happens now.

"Indeed, our education did not turn out to be very comprehensive. The progressive ideal of mixed-ability teaching was too trendy to reach Seventies Yorkshire. Instead, our cadre of clever kids passed through the school like an elite bubble, until we dispersed to do different O levels. But not once in five years, apart from my occasional undistinguished appearances for the hockey team, did I mix with anyone below B1A. Even though many had been friends at primary school."
Cant help thinking this women is guilty if too much navel gazing. This didn't occur yesterday or even last year move on get a life.