Please be frank: is paying for prep/junior school worth it?

[IHideVegInRice]

Hello, continuation from my previous thread but with a more specific question! We have mixed sex twins - while private is an option at this stage, the local faith school is pretty good.
What can a prep or private junior school offer my DC that could not be matched by state + extra curricular activities?
Looking further ahead, would they be disadvantaged when applying for highly ranked public schools (if we/they feel this is right) later on if they did not attend private school at primary level?
Thanks!

sieg -It took you 15 years to realize that you have been getting a sub par product??? You obviously spent 15 years not paying any attention to your children's education.

I'm on the fence in this one. Crap school or uninvolved parent? Not sure who to blame for the underperforming children.

I don't necessarily think that a parent who does not realise that the educaion their child is getting is not as good - or is roughly on a par with - another school down the road (whether that be a private - state or a state - privae comparison) is an uninvolved parent.

It is just, as someone said above, that there is no way of conducting a double-blind trial - and schools (of either colour) do not exactly go around saying 'no, honestly, you'd get much the same down the road': it is in their interests to sell their own establishment.

So IME highly involved parents of children at private primaries / preps have been genuinely surprised when having (for economic reasons or through moving) to move their child to a state school to find that, despite oft-repeated 'they're 2 years ahead of state school pupils' claims, their children have slotted in most cases pretty much into the middle of a state school part [or in one spectacularly egregious case in my own class, straight into the SEN group]. Equally, parents of pupils at 'nice little village primaries' have had a shock at the gaps in their child's education when transferring to local privates at 7 or 11.

Unless, as a parent, you go out of your way to visit a cross-section of schools on a very regular basis, and make in-depth comparisons between work done at different ages (and dig below the surface. Me, in a chat with private school educated dance friend of DD's 'Oooh, that work on the Great Fire of London looks interesting. That bit there on sources mnust have been fun'. Reply 'Oh, we just copied all the writing off the board. It's what we normally do in history. Then we learn it off by heart for the end of year exams.') then it can be genuinely difficult to establish a basis of comparison for your individual child at different schools.

sieglinde thanks for the spelling assistance as soon as I saw the correct version it all came back to me. I wasn't attributing any of my comments to you.
I accept that you've had an unfortunate experience at a boarding school (still curious to know which one) but I've had three very unfortunate experiences in state ed. My DC's have not benefited from it. In fact the longer my DS1 spends in it the more disillusioned I become and the more I thank my lucky stars that DS2 is not at a state school.
My experience of bully policies at boarding schools has been that of complete zero tolerance even those with an impeccable record are dealt with very fast and hard all were at the very least suspended for a significant length of time some were expelled.

teacher well I moved DS1 from a prep to a state school at yr 9 and I'm far from genuinely surprised. I moved him really believing it to be a good school but over time I've found it to be far from that. Just the same old crap that I've found everywhere else.

Happy, I am not suggesting that it is universally true. I am merely saying that comparison between schools without moving a child from one to another, is very difficult - so sending a child to a private school for many years, transferring them to an excellent state school and finding that the difference was not as great as one had been led to believe seems to me not a sign of an uninvolved parent (as MTS claims) just an indication of the difficulty of comparison.

Equally, I moved DS from 1 state school to another. I am sure that, had I moved him to private instead of state, I would have said that the new school being private was the basis for the totally miraculous difference both in the school and in DS. As it happens, it was just that 1 state school was poor, and the other was great (Ofsteds were the same, though...just goes to show).

Teacher - I regularly chat to my DCs about school. What they did today. What homework they have. What questions came up during their end of term exam etc etc. I also ask about their friends. DD's friend is an academic scholar. If DD's test scores are close to hers then I know she is doing well. If her other friend who isn't very academic gets 90% and DD gets 92% then I would want to know why DD didn't get 98%.

I have no idea how they compare to other schools but I do have an idea as to have challenged they are and whether they are coasting.

sieglinde he's garlanded though. Obviously I realise there's a vast amount more to education than As (this is the elusive quality that happy*claims and is confident that she's buying). But your/ his experience sounds so downbeat, and miserable really. What was it that was so bad? And how did he come about his garland, if he hated his time? Was that down to your input, with nothing or not much added by the school?

MTS, but that is a 'within school' comparison - which is exactly why comparisons BETWEEN schools is so difficult. The child who transferred to my class, into the SEN group, was near the top of her class at the tiny local private. Her parents had (internal to the school) no cause for concern. Given a different vbasis for comparison - the peer group at the local primary - her performance seemed very different.

Internal comparison CAN be fine, especially if it is in a large secondary , with external exam results to look at. But this thread is about prep / primary, and there the comparisons can be less easy to make, especially within the 'local education market' outside big conurbations.

[I've not yet produced a teenager who talks much about school. How do you squeeze the information out of them?]

teacher - I don't understand why I need to compare my DCs to kids in another school in order to decide whether their current school is failing them. I mean if your DC is still reading a Kipper book in Year 6 then do the alarm bells only go off when you realise that kids in the next school are reading Dickens?

I know that it's a silly example but I don't know how else to make my point.

Xenia - we always eat dinner together. No gadgets allowed at the table and we cancelled Sky years ago

teacher - just to be clear, my comments are in response to sieg's about how she spent 15 years of fees before realising that her school had failed her DCs and nothing else.

Sieg, I don't think that she said it was failing them- just that on transfer to state she found that the umpteen k of money spent had not conferred significant benefit because the state school was just as good. Egregious failure is, I agree, relatively easy to spot. The 'only doing as well in school A as they would in school B, whereas doing better might be expected / might be what is 'sold' by the school' is harder to distinguish.

I mean, would DD - bright, able, school-friendly, level 5s in Year 5 - be doing better at a local private? I don't know. I observe what her peers from other schools are doing informally, but without actually moving her I cannot make a meaningful comparison. Sp she stays where she is, because she is doing very well indeed. If she were in a private, I might assume that she was doing so well because she was in private, and not realise that she could do equally well in a state school with no fees to tell. It is those more subtle comparisons that are harder to make.

teacher - if you read sieg's 9:43am post you will see all the negative things she had to say about her private school.

She isn't saying that she finally saw the light and realised that the free state school was just as good as her good private school and if only she realised this 15 years ago then she could have saved herself a lot of money.

Xeina I find the way to get my kids to talk to me is to spend time with them ergo I work pt.

yellow how can a school provide a "vast amount more to education that A" " that elusive quality"? How do you* know that your DC's get it free yet imply that my DS is either not getting it or is not getting it any more than your DC's?
Talkin I happen to know that my DS can't do equally well in the state sector or for that matter in many independent schools because I asked them exactly what they offer gifted mathematician (according to the report which I can't find thus can't give you the exact figures but it was at least 1 in 10 000 if not higher general IQ 1 in 500). The bottom line is that they don't offer anything to the level of provision he's currently getting. As I've said before I don't want to pay, I struggle to pay I would love nothing more than to send him to the local school which he can walk to across the field and still receive the same level of education and the same opportunities.

happy my comment was addressed to sieglinde and was not about either your school or mine, nor did I make a comparison.

That said, since I'm in the fairly unusual position of having had seven DC going through a single secondary school (four having recently left Y13, two in the Sixth Form and one lower down), I have a very good grasp of exactly what it is that that school provides. The fact that it's a day school probably means I'm that much more in touch too.

I love how private schools manage to be both a waste of money and an unfair advanatage. Quite a trick that!

I love how parents who are against elitist schools are so proud that their non elitist secondary school DCs got into the even more elitist beast that is Oxbridge.

.... apparently elitism is bad if you can't afford to be part of the elite. However elitism is good if you can 'buy' it with a student loan.

word Yes I like that trick too. I've got no problem with those who feel aggrieved that independent ed offers an fair advantage because in many cases it does and it for me an answerable ethical dilemma. It's the people who categorically state that there is no difference that baffled me. yellow you rightly claim knowledge of state ed having put 7 through recently but where does your knowledge of independent ed come from? How many of your 7 children spent 5 years at Westminster Eton St Paul's Girls/Boys Winchester et al to enable you to speak with such certainty about the quality and breadth of the education provided?

MTS if that comment is directed at me I don't know where it's come from, and it's silly. I've made no anti private school comments on this thread, or anywhere. I'm in favour of good education however it's delivered so I'm not in the least against good private schools. I'm a bit more dubious about the value of the second raters though, and do have a strong antipathy towards the arrogance which is sometimes bred purely from having attended a second rate fee paying school. Other than that, I'm absolutely fine with independent schools. I really don't have an issue with Oxford and Cambridge either; it's not like I had to grease anyone's palm.

happy I'm not going to engage on this one again, since it's entirely whipped up by you. I haven't dissed any of those schools you mention, nor would I: they're extremely good schools. I think you're imagining I've said something here that I haven't.

Ultimately though it is all down to affordability and how much of a sacrifice it is to send them private.

I mean if you were a millionaire, you would just send them private because even if the advantage was 1%, you might as well "buy" it for your children.

If it means a degree of personal and family sacrifice - from the no holiday/no new clothes/no car brigade to the more extreme cases of working all hours and re-mortgaging your home - then my answer is a resounding NO.

Not so much because of the merits of the individual school or sector, but because I think that puts too much pressure on the family but most importantly on that child. Any child in any school could fail, not do too well for so many reasons, and if you've sacrificed so much you won't help but resent that child in a terrible way.

I have personal experience of families whose children have done ok but who have put themselves under huge financial pressure and they have served me a very sound lesson in this respect. To a certain degree you ought to always be a little selfish and not sacrifice everything for someone, even your own children.

As I final point, I think we do focus too much on Oxbridge and Russell Group, life doesn't grind to a halt even if your child doesn't get all As or a First from Oxbridge. In the UK there are so many opportunities (still) to do well, yes maybe they won't be off to do Medicine or Law, but there are a huge multitude of other avenues open, even in today's difficult economic climate.

PS just as an example I had a friend of the family hosted with me a few years ago from my home country who did a degree in Politics at an ex-Poly and since then she has done extremely well in various commercial positions and is now on the higher tax band although she is still only in her 20s. Hard work and ambition can take you very far!!