Eton, Winchester etc. planning for the future

[WelshParent]

Dear All,

I am new to MN and this is my first post. So please be gentle with me if I do something wrong. I don't have one specific question but a bunch of related questions which I hope I can get some answers to.

OK, so we live in South Wales and DS is in yr3 at the moment at a local indie in Cardiff. It is a very good school but it is a full 3-18 type and produces very good A level results. DS is a bright kid and does lots of extra curricular activities including piano, tennis, swimming and ofcourse football. Teacher thinks that he is very good and is working at a level higher than expected.

Like many other parents we aspire for DS to be able to move to somewhere really good like Eton or Winchester. I have spent months and months reading about the admission procedures of each of those schools and some others like Harrow, Radley, Abingdon etc.

My first question is that if DS takes the pretest at Eton or Harrow and is offered a conditional place when time comes, I imagine they will want him to take CE. Now being in a 3-18 school he will not have been expressly prepared for CE. We do not have any good Prep school in S Wales, so that is not an option for us. Where would that leave us? Both of us spend a lot of time to guide him with his academics and would not have a problem preparing him for CE purely from a syllabus perspective but we do not have CE preparation experience. Would some private tutoring be enough over the normal school work (which is at quite a good level). What about subjects like Latin which may not be part of DS's school curriculum. Is dreaming of KS or Election a dream without being in a very good prep?

Secondly we are managing to afford school fees + other activities + uniform + childcare etc. of about 12k per annum as of now. We might be able to afford another 4-5k by really pushing ourselves. Now our total yearly take home is about 52k (gross of 79k) both working f/t. We do have some other commitments like financially supporting DH's mother, who lives abroad. So even though the 52k looks alright. We don't live too luxuriously at all, we do have a biggish house and pay a mortgage of about 1200. We don't have a huge lot of equity in it though. I know it is a speculative question but based on this are we likely to get a bursary if DS gets an offer or will our income work against us.

I will be ever so grateful for any replies.

Other Men's Flowers is notoriously inaccurate-Wavell said so himself. It is an anthology of poems he knew by heart and wrote down from memory-the errors are part of it's considerable charm.

That is very interesting Hakluyt. I didn't know it was inaccurate. As a matter of interest can you give any examples? Only if you happen to have some off the top of your head.

I can't think of any off the top of my head. Next time I'm upstairs I'll get my copy and copy out the bit in the introduction where he talks about it.

Not if it will take you a long time, Hakluyt - copying things can be boring. I'm in London for a couple of days, so I'll read the intro when I get home. Annoyingly the anthology isn't available on kindle.

Good Lord.

Well it taught us about homosexuality very early, didnt it.

Taller ran a tribute to Sarah a couple of years ago.

I recall Sarah coaching the English / UK dressage team, my sister recalls being taught use of colour by eg Auerbach, at any rate one of Rose's friends before her accident. I was taught by 2, possibly 3, headmasters. And after doing picture Latin and jumping up and down to motion towards takes the acusative all romance languages are easy. I the.k we met Sandroyd once...

Sorry to hijack, but it's this sort of spontaneous thing that excellent schools provide, WP.

Back on uniform, it has its uses. My most entrepreneurial cousin made a fortune selling wrecked strats to unsuspecting tourists, selling them as aged traditional objects. He was finally stopped by authority when his peers' parents complained how many they had to buy new...

On bursaries, Ds's school has clear rules. Bit like Harvard. They do expect both parents to work unless there are younger children, they don't expect you to mortgage your house, but they do take second property into.account. ditto savings, which they don't expect you to use up in one fell swoop but do expect to be used over the school life they accept that some parents are asset rich and cash poor, do they try not to make unreasonable demands, but they try not to end up with one parent clinging onto investments leaving another with similar level of income but no assets having to pay more.

Ask what the rules are. Though at Ds's school, the principles are clear but the actual deal will vary parent to parent.

Fgs, f...ING phone. Have you never heard of Tatler?

This is a very, very, very, very funny thread. What a lot of money so many of you have wasted, and what a lot of emotional energy too. So unrelaxed it's not true. Not one of the schools mentioned can trump the best states, although they can equal them of course, but they do remove the child from home in an entirely unnatural way for the modern world. Also, a DC's university peers are those who remain friends for life, far more so than their friends from school. So the quibbling is fairly pointless tbh. OP has of course been completely forgotten in this jostling for position.... Not that any of you are obvious winners, though some are clearly losers :)

Haggis, I had forgotten those pyramids of horror. Omg they were awful.

I blessed Margaret Thatcher for stopping cruelty to children when school milk stopped ( yes yes I know, but I hated it as a child).

Oh dear - and it's all been such a lark ...

How unutterably stupid I have been. Over decades too. Will now have to ditch the friends who shared my dorm. And remove the teenager from "the best school ever" (his words) as all that fun is clearly deeply unnatural. (He may cry - but now I've finally been shown the error of my ways ...)

Well obviously it's deeply unnatural to live away from parents for months at a time, ZFD. It's only done in England but our education isn't currently exactly the envy of the world. But I guess the reality is that some parents with money find their own life way easier if they send their kids off. But perhaps be honest about it rather than pretending you need to spend £35k on providing your DC with 'fun', and accepting that you aren't capable of providing 'fun' at home.

obviously it's deeply unnatural to live away from parents for months at a time

Oh Molio What a relief - I thought you were serious!

Just in case you areyou may like to know that even when I was a girl (in a completely different century) full boarding meant going home at least every three and a half weeks. At the prep I know best now it's pretty impossible to be in school for more than two and a half weeks at most without a long weekend at home. And parents drop in at the drop of a hat, ball, musical note ...

Seriously - have you spent all this time curling your lip on boarding school threads while knowing absolutely nothing about it? Seriously seriously?

And furthermore for anyone very, very ignorant who might be reading or even commenting on this thread there are boarding schools providing enviable educations as far away as West Africa, North America, etc, etc and as near as Scotland. (Which is not in "England")

Actually always annoys me when people class worries about school choice as a "first world problem". It bloody isn't you know.

Could I just point out mildly that it is perfectly possible to think that boarding, particularly for younger children, is a bad idea without being ignorant or stupid? And that some parents are so invested in boarding, and the schools where attendance means boarding that any suggestion that there is a downside has to be very quickly shot down in flames, because otherwise doubts might get under the carapace. Please note the use of the word "some".

ZeroFun I don't read the boarding school threads or barely at all, because I'm not interested really, but this one caught my eye and proved funny, as I said, with all the extreme posturing for position. The London day school mums don't get wrapped around the axle like this - it's ridiculous to an outsider, but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy it or join in.

I know masses of boarders ZeroFun, both of my own generation (including husband and his sibs, whose mother has always claimed loudly and proudly how un-maternal she is), and also the current generation, though admittedly more Etonians than anywhere else. My kids' godparents (we have rather a lot of them....) are overwhelmingly boarding school too, including two Wykehamists, because most became friends at uni and our uni was that sort of uni, back then. And now my kids are friends with a fair number, because their uni has quite a few too. So quite triangulated really :)

Anyhow, please carry on .

Hakluyt - of course it is possible to think that, but there are ways of putting it without sounding bitter and spiteful.

Molio Unless your friends and family with boarding experience all live on the other side of the world - they're doing it wrong if they don't see their children for months at a time!

Also, a DC's university peers are those who remain friends for life, far more so than their friends from school. Surely, surely it is patently ridiculous for you to tell me where and when I have made my friends?

But it's nice that the thread provides you with entertainment.

Molio TBF the posturing is one poster in particular and there's a fair amount on day school threads.
University friends have certainly been much more longlasting than my day school friends.

OP do you want a debate on the disadvantages and advantages of boarding? Like selective versus non selective or private versus state it is a well trod path on mumsnet.

Well I, for one, really appreciate Molio spending her precious time, ploughing through 10 pages of a thread, on a subject she is not even interested in, just to give us the benefit of her opinion.

Not everyone lives in London, you know, Molio your posts are far more out of touch and patronising than any other post on here IMO.

I think this has been a great thread. OP has had some advice and along the way there have been entertaining mini debates and discussions about all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

indrid, Molio does n't live in London either but she does happen to live near an enough to an excellent state school with very bright DCs who can benefit from it.

Also, a DC's university peers are those who remain friends for life, far more so than their friends from school

I see. So the ones met a primary and senior school are just dropped in favour of the new university friends? What a ridiculous and pompous statement. Who knows exactly where they're going to meet friends for life?

Grovel your diplomatic skills and eclectic fount of knowledge (latter also applying to Hakluyt and Zero) must be a real bonus to real life

No my friends do and did see their kids more frequently than parents used to (my mother in law didn't see her children during term when they were at prep, she put them on a train to the other end of the country and they spent most half terms with their grandmother, who was handier for the school). But that doesn't replicate home life, or seeing them every day, does it?

Incidentally I forgot to mention that my father also went to a well known English boarding school, although as a charity case, and was surrounded by boarding school colleagues in the City. In fact as a child I had a stuffed toy fox dressed in full hunting gear who was named after quite an eminent one, whose family ran a bank :) Our neighbour in those days was also an Etonian, who had a string of affairs and whose wife (my friend's mum)committed suicide in her kitchen when I was five. The village I now live in has several families of Etonians across three generations. It's a little arrogant to assume those who don't board their own kids are immune from knowledge of these schools.

Of course you may keep school friends as well as uni friends too ZFD, but overwhelmingly people in my experience tend to move on.

Yes summerends, maybe the thread is dominated a bit.

summer oh right, one of those! I think the point still worth making - especially as the OP doesn't live in London either .

I didn't say anyone was patronising Indrid, just posturing. And where did I ever say my time was precious? :) I'm also hugely in touch, not out of it, as it happens.