Alan Bennett on private education

[UrbanDad]

A great quote from AlanBennett, in the Guardian today taken from his talk last summer at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: “We all know that to educate not according to ability butaccording to the social situation of theparents is both wrong and a waste. Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who payfor it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, orshould. And if their education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been wasted.”

I cannot disagree with any of that.

That's another point that doesn't fit the cosy Scottish narrative:

I do know people whose kids were written off by the local (one size fits all and you ought to be grateful ) school. I am so glad for their sake that there are private schools that have been able to help them.

Education is discriminatory:

Schools, state and private, are allowed to have their intake segregated by the following:
Gender
Religion
Wealth
Ability (to do Maths and English at a certain age)

Those are the overt factors, if we start to factor in parental education, socio-economic bracket, gender stereotypes and ethnic/racial stereotypes then making anything equal is astoundingly hard.

Miggsie

Don't forget postcodes. Catchment area house prices price students out of the market for certain state schools too ....

What pushed me to private was the postcode and distance lottery. To be in the catchment for the excellent school just 1 mile away you need to find so much to buy/rent there. It was vastly cheaper to just pay fees.

I don't agree (except I do agree with the part that people should be grateful if they are lucky eg lucky enough to have a high IQ, nice parents who read to them, parents prepared to buy a house ni the area of a posh comp or find God etc).

It is no more unfair to pay school fees than buy a house near a posh comp.

On the Scotland issue I know loads of lawyers who went to private schools in Edinburgh. Not all those in Scotland use the state system and plenty use boarding schools too.

Loads of independent schools in Scotland. Edinburgh has one of the highest percentage of school age children in independent schools of any place in the UK, at between 20-25%. So I'm not sure exactly how egalitarian Scotland is versus the rest of the UK in this regard.

The problem is that there is always going to be self selection to some degree. It may be fee paying schools, it may be moving to a more expensive catchment area. The only way you can have truly egalitarian schools is to randomly assign all students to different schools via lottery, but imagine the disaster that would be for the school run!

It also comes down to that all kids have different academic abilities. There is no real solution nor will there ever be. There are only better or worse schemes, and the closing of the grammar schools was one of the worse decisions. The grammars weren't perfect and were dominated by the middle classes, but they served a real need and did provide real mobility for so many children from less affluent areas.

Unfortunately life isn't fair.
I'm lucky enough to be privately educated, as are my children.
If the private sector wasn't used then local schools would just be even more over crowded than they already are... Causing even more discipline problems in the classrooms for teachers to deal with.

"It also comes down to that all kids have different academic abilities"

It has nothing to do with children and everything to do with adults.

And there are non selective state schools in the uk which have excellent provision for high achieving children. Some have 'grammar streams' which kids can move in and out of.

There really isn't any need to separate children into different schools according to a single test at 11, or by religion or parental income and it's not good for society.

People who benefit from the inequality that goes with a school system that functions as a sort of social apartheid will always find practical reasons for its continuation. Not good enough. Governments need to look for solutions.

Sticking all the "Tarquins" into state school won't make a jot of difference to the social mobility of the rest of the class. That's a myth because social mobility is really to do with parents not teachers.

Politician need to get the state system to compete effectively with independents (which aren't all that great anyway).

We are all rushing for an education that will enable us to tell others what to do, without actually being able to do much, ourselves.

rabbitstew, you've just summed up the "nut" of all these education threads for me. Very astute.

The influence of education on young minds is a powerful thing. I frankly don't want the state to have an absolute monopoly on it.

It's not just to do with fairness. It may be unfair that some children are genetically more able than others. But it makes sense for those children to grow up to be the ones in charge of nuclear power stations, in politics, etc. Whether that's fair or not.
At the moment many genetically able people don't get the chance to get those jobs, because rich children, including thick and average rich children, get the best education. The private school system pushes forward thick rich kids. That is not in the best interests of society.
Plus, rich people tend to favour rich people - so the more of them there are in influential jobs, the more disadvantaged poor people become.

Totally disagree with the previous statement. Private education is not just about rich people and rich kids, that's rather judgemental.

Sitting in London, it doesn't look like "thick rich kids" are getting places at prestigious day schools. With up to 10 candidates vying for every place, the schools can pick and choose. So it's more of a case of well heeled, intelligent kids getting a place.

I am not sure that the over priced finishing schools that "thick rich kids" attend, convey much advantage.

As a Londoner, now living in Glasgow, I do notice some differences between education in Scotland and England.

When I was in london, I briefly worked at a law centre in a poor area. The law centre had an education department. The main work of that department was to run Judicial Reviews against LEA decisions.
This might be because the education provision offered was unsuitable , completely inaccessable (taking into account where the child lived, where siblings went to school where parents had to get to for work and the transport avilable) or quite often no school place was offered at all.
There were well behaved, normal kids who were inexplicably offered a place on a specialist course for young offenders because they lived in temporary accomodation and it was too much trouble to allocate a proper school place. There was a case where a court held that a family had to accept a school place miles and miles away even though the mother would have to give up work in order to make the journey to take her child there.
A lot of kids were let down.

When people in London say that they "had to" send their kids to private school because the state provision was so terrible I have some sympathy. Although I also wish that more people would acknowledge the fate of kids who's parents don't have that option.

In Glasgow- things like that simply don't happen. The local school may not be perfect but it is likely to be adequate for most of the intake and there is no great issue in getting hold of a place. I will send my DS to the closest school and expect him to come out able to read.

If you look at the history of education- right up until the start of the welfare state, it was very much an elite privilege with very patchy provision for the working class.
IMO- even once the state started providing universal education, they failed to provide a truely universal experiance due to a reluctance to abolish private schools and also the writing of class distinctions into the new system with the formation of seperate grammer and secondary modern schools.
However, there was at least an ideal of universal, fair provision for all which was later advanced further by the introduction of comprehensive schools.

If you look at England- that ideal has been deliberately eroded by the introduction of parent choice and league tables- which has created a sort of market for the "best" state schools and a corresponding decrease in the quality of the less well performing schools. It has really eaten away at the universal nature of education and created a dog eat dog competition amongst parents that only the best educated and connected can win. In a way even free education has been marketised, so that you now hear parents talking about "buying" a school place through moving house or hiring tutors.
In this atmosphere buying an elite education at private school doesn't seem so different to some parents.

The add in the situation I described in London which is to do with the population outstripping infrastructure and its a completely disfunctional situation.

I don't think the same proccess has happened in Scotland. There is really much less ducking and weaving and scrabbling around about school places. You more or less accept that your child will go to the local school and that the local school will be more or less adequate. Yes, educational attainment is still linked to class but the system of school provision doesn't reinforce it in quite the same brutal way. Its a relief. I'm glad I live here.

It may be that in London only bright rich kids can get into private schools, or decent private schools. But London is only a small part of the country. I've lived in a number of different cities outside of London and there have been plentiful private schools there. A nice private school near us has had to close down due to lack of pupils. Some of the private schools are academically selective, by which I mean that they take in most but not all applicants. The others are non-selective. One local public school is well known as being geared up for "thick rich kids", who can get scholarships on the basis of sporting ability, however un-academic they are. They come out with far better exam results and all the rest of it than if they went to the local comp.

Well, he's not inviting anyone to agree or disagree with him. He's just making a bald statement.

"Sticking all the "Tarquins" into state school won't make a jot of difference to the social mobility of the rest of the class"

Rubbish. Schools are communities. Poor children benefit by sharing a classroom and a school with aspirational and high achieving children. They

There are only so many thinking type / professional jobs to go round. They should ideally be going to bright and well educated people. Rather than to thick and well educated people. The thick and educated at good private schools people are keeping out the bright and educated at not so good state schools people. We need far more of these thick rich kids to "fail".

Where's the evidence that all the thinking type/professional jobs go to thick and rich people rather than bright and rich people? Perhaps you are thinking of politics - but other factors come into play there - rubbish baseline pay (compared to a job in the city) and apathy/lack of interest (only 1% of the adult population are members of a political party).

What a shame that so many bright people go for jobs in the City, which for years were reserved for bright but dim people who didn't actually appear to do any more harm to the world economy than all these bright people. Do we need bright people in these jobs if the end result isn't any better for anyone but the people themselves?... Wouldn't they be more helpfully employed elsewhere?

That should say wealthy but dim...

Indeed rabbitstew, but then I guess it depends on our definition of 'bright' - most of the people I know who went into the city had grade A maths at A level but then I was state educated.

Early on in adult life school exam results are important. A not bright child can do much better in those exams based on going to a private school geared towards that. Rather than a comp which puts them in a low stream and has little ambition for them. The private school not bright child then goes on to do more ambitious exams at 6th form level, and it is taken for granted that he/she will go to a decent university and then get a well paid job (with help from contacts, which doesn't hurt). The comp child is much more likely to end up at a v bad uni, or doing a manual job straight from school.
The not bright rich kid is essentially taking a job from a bright poor kid, who would do better at it in the long term.
Using contacts, a related issue, is also disastrous in terms of getting those with highest potential into important jobs.
It's not just a matter of we need bright poor kids to do better - we need them to take the place of rich not bright kids.
But who in power wants that?

The economy is not a "fixed" thing. There are not a certain number of "good" jobs that have to be rationed out. The more well educated our society is, the more good jobs there will be. Trying to engineer the failure of children from certain social classes that you are jealous of is immoral and self defeating.

I have two children in state primary school. It could be a LOT better.

The problem isn't money; the physical plant is beautiful and well maintained. There is fresh air and large fields.

The problem isn't teachers; they are intelligent and sensitive.

The problem isn't management; the head is sharp as a tack, experienced and hard working. We are extremely lucky to have him.

The problem is pandering to the lazy and massaging the egos of the mediocre. Basically, we misuse our precious resources (in that I include both our taxes and our children as resources) because we try to appease people who are jealous and want everything to be "fair." If this behaviour in state schools in Britain stopped, you would see demand for private schools to drop drastically.