Education superclass?

[Amber2]

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100245274/it-is-much-worse-than-sir-john-major-says-a-new-superclass-is-being-created-in-london/

This is interesting coming from John Major ...sounds like more lobbying along the lines of the Sutton Trust but do people really think it's much worse than it ever has been..? and this is do with with the inexorable rise of London...and the global money flowing in there...and so to creating an elite superclass of private schools also ...not just any old private school but a small handful of elite ones, applications to which have reached record numbers, presumably more and more from London and from overseas with over inflation rises in fees pricing out the traditional middle classes that used to be able to afford these schools.

In addition I can't think of a single one of these schools that doesn't aim to provide bright children from less well off families with the opportunity to go there and consequently are proactively seeking to expand their bursary schemes.

I'm another who thinks an income of 250 000 puts you in the lower half of income bracket for a very selective London Day school, though I agree this shouldn't stop someone. It seems to me that many people with this kind of income receive help from grandparents or employers or are relying on future inheritance for their own pensions/mortgage payment, or have expectations of a far larger salary in the near future.

Well, of course all these schools used to be affordable to male professionals whose wives gave up work when they had children, or seriously downgraded their careers. That single income probably also covered domestic help. Now any professional who wants to make absolutely certain their children have the same financial and educational experiences he or she had as a child has to make sure they marry another person with a similar and growing income and inherit some wealth from parents who benefited from the property boom so as to help afford somewhere to live on top of paying the school fees. Otherwise, said professional is on shaky ground.

I think as property ownership expanded in the early/middle part of the last century, far more people have been beneficiaries of inheritance. Not a fortune, but enough to mean the mortgage is manageable or to allow school fees to be paid.

rabbit yes I would agree that having two working parents is more common than it would have been in the past, and indeed having older parents who like us built up our careers and worked our way up the property ladder before we even contemplated children, I was 39 when my second DD was born but I am far from the oldest parent in her year, probably more or less average. But it's quite a long way from the hedge fund manager / trophy wife stereotype. I will however concede the preponderance of Mulberry handbags..........

Though that probably proves my point since I am sure the über cool global elite wouldn't be seen dead with a mere Mulberry and have to have something that costs the same as a house and you have to go on a ten year waiting list unless you can parade it in Femail

I'm with shooting on this one. The top performing schools academically in London are within the means of people with a much lower income than £250k and lots of parents I know fall into that bracket. DC are at one of these schools. We are clearly in the lower income end of parents (but not low enough to qualify for any bursary) - we can't afford to send them on absolutely every single school trip abroad or zip off for winter sun every half term and Christmas, but there are many parents in similar situations, similar houses, our DC don't exactly feel outclassed.

My experience chimes with Shooting and notagiraffe. The global uber-rich are a very small minority in super-selective day schools in London.

TBH the global super rich were not what Major had in mind when he was speaking about the educational 'superclass'.

He was speaking about the next group down, many of whom will be very wealthy, some simply wealthy (these things being relative). But what they have in common is a conscious aim to provide the very best opportuities for their DC including high perfroming private schools.
And as Major pointed out, their stated aim generally reaches its natural conclusion.

And that's not good for a country.

One of the problems is that the definition of rich or über rich is a moveable feast. The truly wealthy are not income reliant at all. However it is fairly easy for someone with no mortgage and few kids, and perhaps some inherited dish too to provide savings, and a household income of about 100K split fairly evenly between two earners, to look at someone like Dot, who might be earning the pre tax income suggested on her own, with a massive mortgage no inheritance no savings and possibly more children, and not realise that she (the first person) is probably better off in real terms.

But that's by the by, this thread was originally about a superclass which became super because of educational opportunities not because of wealth. It's clear that there are kids in some state schools who have the opportunity to join this superclass too, as a result of the opportunities which are made available to all kids (competitive opportunities usually). But not many of them, granted.

Caldicott prep then Westminster and a background like this probably qualifies to call oneself one of the "educational elite".

"Clegg was born in 1967 in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, the third of four children of Nicholas Peter Clegg, CBE, chairman of United Trust Bank and a former trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation . On his father's side of the family Clegg is related to Kira von Engelhardt, daughter of a Russian baron of German, Polish and Ukrainian origin, to Ignaty Zakrevsky, an attorney-general of the Imperial Russian senate. His English grandfather was Hugh Anthony Clegg, editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.
Clegg is multilingual: he speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish"

charley I've got boys so am not overly knowledgable about girls schools but as far as I'm able to remember lots of London's wealthy elite (not the celebrity wealthy elite) at my DS's prep sent their daughters there.

Shooting....Fees at Westminster (day only) would be £50 k (more in sixth form) after tax income for 2 children ...(without all the extras which will be considerable) ...is it really the majority of "normal" middle class income folk that send their kids there as you say? Doctors perhaps as you say (if consultants or two GPs - unless they are one of the super-earning GPs)...but teachers who are parents must surely be helped out with inheritance, other sourced income (or property boom) or grandparents. Assume prep schools like WUC that are Westminster feeders will be full of those aiming for Westminster (or Eton) so prepared and able to pay these sorts of fees and more if boarding going forward for many years.

i meant Westminster Under School (prep feeder) not WUC!

Indy or are helped out by a bursary? or their parents are staff? I cannot comment on the detailed financial arrangements of my DDs' peers parents, just that not only are there next to no uber rich global elite at these schools but the offspring of wealthy city lawyers, bankers etc are also far from in the majority, there alongside the children of professionals, some from poorer backgrounds presumably benefiting from bursaries and a fairly healthy representation of immigrant communities from Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Asia. You clearly do not need to be earning £250k

What they do have in common though is that they are very clever and I think that is where this story originates. Without a doubt you have to be cleverer to get into these schools than ever before, because there are more pupils chasing places, a combination of the aspirations that were encouraged in the children of Thatcher's Britain, and are strong in immigrant communities, and the shortage of good state school places. I also think the schools have got better at identifying potential, certainly what split the less selective school exams from the most selective was that they really aimed to test ability with some very stiff testing of reasoning and lateral thinking, you can't buy a place in these schools with tutoring etc.

When my older daughter sat these tests overseas from the equivalent of a state primary, I naively helped her cover the bits of the curriculum she hadn't studied and thought that if she was bright enough she would get in and if not there were plenty of other less selective good private schools around here that would enable her to achieve her potential (at a rough count ten easily accessible from here that enable their brightest pupils to get strings of A*s and to the best universities). Except I wasn't naïve and she did get in, even to the most selective. Four years later when my DD2 sat the exams I developed the skills of a SAS hostage rescuer so quickly did I get her out of her non selective prep playground and the miasma of competitive and anxious parenting, Chinese whispers of what you have to do to get in, secret tutoring that bordered on abuse and putting pressure on the school to do whatever they considered, on the flimsiest of evidence, was needed to get their DDs into the best schools (determined according to a subjective league table that makes yawning gaps of the tiniest difference in results etc. ) Then when the pupils (along with their state school peers) got into the schools that were right for them, but not necessarily in line with parental aspirations, there was all manner of handwringing and justification , all designed to deny that the reason their DDs did not get in was simply because they were not clever enough. They will love this article.

I do seem to remember the implication that Abromovitch bought a place for his DD by purchasing the church opposite and making it into an arts centre

It is this level of competitive parenting that has made it more and more difficult to get into these schools and of course clever pupils equal stellar results, but then clever pupils get good results whether they go to elite private schools, less elite private schools, grammar schools or are in the top sets at outstanding comps.

"Fees for Westminster are 50k"
Bit puzzled day fees per child in the senior school are just over 7k a year 14k pa for two outside the reach of a could of teacher unless they were senior teachers but well within the reach of two normal GP's I would have thought.
It's boarding fees that are well outside of the reach of the middle classes but I suspect they always have been.

happy I assumed he was quoting what you would have to earn before tax.

Couple of teachers not "could of teachers" I hate auto correct!

he or she, and you are right that is not what he says, but I suppose for 2 it would be £42k a year .

I've had a rare glass of wine with my Sunday lunch so I'm a bit befuddled but I still don't get it. You would need a prep tax income of more than 50 k to pay Westminster's et al fees but not £250k. All GPs will earn more than 50k pa.

By the way I should add that the competitive parents in the non selective prep school were not all bankers and lawyers either, in fact somewhat bizarrely they included the 70 year old leader of the local fruit and veg market mafia, a bent accountant who was in prison, an allegedly even more bent estate agent / rackman type who was having an affair with the wife of another parent who ran a Mailing House, they had a fight outside the school when I was doing reading practise with the bent estate agent's daughter. Surely a fairly representative sample of any private prep in the country?

Happy Westminster is 7k a term so 21k per year which if you have two DCs is 42k a year so pre tax you would need in excess of 50k, and presumably if you feel you have to have the house, car etc to keep up with a Central London smart set lifestyle you would feel poor with £250k.

However if you are content with a suburban semi that you may have built up most of the equity in through long time climbing on the property ladder and don't feel the need for any expensive status symbols then a GP must be able to afford it, because there are two amongst my younger DDs friends, and only in one case does the wife work, and then as a pharmacist.

I am politically neutral, in that I do not vote.

But this is the single biggest issue facing the UK. I am privileged. I earn shedloads. My children are privileged, because I earn shedloads. They go to the sort of schools that enable support. They are ordinarily bright. They will succeed because they are programmed to and because they have all the education and support and because their peers are the same. They don't know any different.

There is no way that this gap can be bridged. An ordinarily bright kid from a poor family cannot bridge the divide. Inequality is becoming so huge and so entrenched. Any political party that offered a viable way of bridging this gap would get me voting. And it is easy, so so easy to fix. But no political party wants to engage with fixing the issue.

Shooting this is what it's all about; the requirement for expensive status symbols. Yes I accept that if you need a 2 million pound house a couple of expensive brand new cars, a skiing holiday every winter an exclusive summer holiday, regular tickets to the ROH and designer clothes etc etc and you want to pay school fees you going to need a 250k pa income at the very least. But some like myself have decided that if a simple relatively inexpensive life means school fees can be paid then it's fine. I personally don't believe these luxuries always bring you happiness.