Please could we have a heated debate on the best girls' school in the land? Or does mn education board only really deal with boys' education?

[malefridgeblindness]

I've just read the latest eton-wincoll fight thread. It puzzles me why so many of the threads here are about boys' education. So much care seems to be taken to ensure our sons' have the perfect balance of academia and sports, music and drama, but I haven't seen the same debate about what's best for our daughters. I've never seen the sort of evangelism about girls' schools you see about eton and wincoll.

What's happening?

Poisonwood - to be fair, I think most people who have done history would know about NLCS...Miss Beale and Miss Buss being about 50% of the women mentioned in history O level back in my day...

Abraid2

You are of course right. There are many complex factors. Sorry if my posting upset you. There may be some that identify with it though.

Shurely greycoat hospital school - all the advantages of a private single sex school walking distance from your home in an affluent neighbourhood offering:

• cost all paid by the taxpayer
• the opportunity to feel endlessly smug
• the chance to bleat away on national radio about how you know just how it must feel for every parent, opening that envelope blah blah....

What's not to like?

I've just finished Dick Swarb's best seller - "we are our brains - from the womb to Alzheimer's". It's a fascinating if quite controversial romp through what some dismiss as "pop science" - hardly anything is referenced but swarb did set up the Netherlands brain bank, and his book is easy to read and certainly makes you think. He believes anorexia has a strong genetic component.

But who cares? Who honestly gives a fuck about which is the very best school in the land? Surely only someone who is mentally ill with competitiveness.

Luffs Mintyy

Mintyy

"mentally ill with competitiveness"

Do you think you could have phrased that less sensitively, given some of the issues discussed here? Probably not.

That said, I agree that it's should not be about the best school, but the best school for each student. Discussions of "the best" despite best intentions can whiff of elitism, snobbery and Oxbridge obsession.

Unless one can afford boarding on a worldwide basis and is happy not seeing your kids for weeks on end
there is no such thing as Best
there is just
best in the area

NLCS may be fab, but its a bit of an ask for all of those of us who do not live in the NW postcodes

Benenden / Wycombe Abbey / CLC / Roedean / Swithuns are great for the less than 1% who can afford more than the median wage in fees alone

but its all pretty irrelevant to most of the world.

The more interesting feminist point is why there are so few successful women such that what schools they might have gone to become almost an irrelevance. That is the cancer on the face of England we need to eradicate.

Jilly
there are several very well known alumni of my school, two of whom are on the record slagging the place off

Jilly

The feminist point is a very good one. However education of both boys and girls is at the root. For example, demonstrating to boys that there are female role models and pioneers in all fields. Or that women can conquer all, especially the sciences.

I've been to plenty of schools and check with the librarian how many female authors or stories with female role models are on the reading lists. As a crude indicator, Co-ed schools generally fail on this score, Girls schools do very well, and Boys schools are awful.

Abraid I hope my post was not one that you took exception to. I made it very clear that I did not believe that Anorexia occurs only in families where parenting is a factor, and that I was referring to anorexia and other mental health issues such as depression and addiction. What I am referring to is an issue that occurs in the cohorts of particular schools where there are extremes of parenting amongst some, actually a very small minority, of parents. I am fully aware of the various theories about anorexia, including the existence of identifiable physiological brain difference. I know these issue can happen in any family. As others have said it is complex. But where a child has had to deal with parents who have set them very narrow targets for success that appears to be conditional love and / or family breakdown and / or parents with little time to give them and / or few limits of their behaviour, or all or a mix of all these and they develop some form of mental illness then it seems reasonable to see those challenges as having a part to play in their problems. As a Head of Year said in thirty years teaching she had not encountered some of the horror stories, they made her weep at night. It is why these schools are laying on parenting classes and going public www.telegraph.co.uk/education/11262228/Top-head-attacks-pushy-snowplough-parents.html

Talkin One private boys' school has addressed the issue http://www.clsb.org.uk/Introduction-to-our-school

www.clsb.org.uk/Introduction-to-our-school

Gently Well yes I had heard of Miss Beale and Miss Buzz, it's just I had no idea of the name of the girls' school they founded......

Talkin Our school boasted having educated one of the first fiery women politicians, she hated the place almost as much as I did. Didn't stop her coming back for the opening of the swimming pool and forcing me to swim up and down with a bit of cardboard covered in silver foil to Moon River. I expect she felt it was her revenge on the bourgeoisie because it certainly wasn't inspiring young women to emulate her example......

poison. Are we talking about 'Barbara Castle' ?....

Jilly - you make an interesting point. It's something I have thought about as all my siblings and cousins went to boarding school. All the girls went single sex with all the boys going coed.

My brother is a captain in the army and considering he left school and it was their connections that got him into a red brick. He proceeded to leave with a pass. My father had wanted to pull him out at 16 but a court order prevented that. My cousin who went to a top boys school was coed in sixth form. He is just made his first half million in business. Hey it helps when you start with a quarter million.

My sister is a finance director at a top technology company. She was at big 4 and rose rapidly through the ranks. She decided she didn't want to be partner and left to private equity. Found that environment to be sexist as heck and left for America. I was transferred with work to America. Found the environment here far better for women and have no plans to return to the UK until I have finished having babies. My cousins are an estate agent in London and the other is a party planner. The party planner has a law degree and all the required training completed to be a barrister.

The difference is that my father pushed my sister and I in a way my aunt and uncle never did. I have called my dad and told him I want to bake cakes. He laughed and told me to get back to work or stay home to raise his grandchildren.

Poison - the fact that they had founded the schools was the tick box item on the history syllabus! Perhaps some schools/teachers glossed over that though. Mine, being a girls' school with mainly female teachers obviously thought that was a point worth stressing, I suppose. When I met some NLCS girls at cambridge I was quite excited, actually. It was a bit like meeting someone out of Poldark! (Poldark obviously wasn't on the history O level syllabus but actually the books contained quite a few excellent nuggets of information about steam and mining so I used the chalk uo my obsessive re-reading of them in my teen years as 'revision'. I wasn't fooling anyone keast of all myself, but still...the fact that I knew who Richard Trevithick was and where he ended up was useful in my actual o level exam so it all turned out well in the end.)

Oh and the reason I didn't go to my brothers school at 16 was because my brother was caught having sex with a girl in the bathroom. He was 14 and she was 13. My dad thought both should have been expelled. Instead the school suspended the girl and gave my brother a detention plus confined him to school property for a week. My father lost it with my brother and called him out on his slutty behaviour.

Gently since some of Miss Beale and Miss Buzz's peers were founding my school about the same time we were taught about them in the context of Victorian Society and the discourse on the "woman question", though of course they were the only ones to make it into rhyme It wouldn't have been O level though since my school beat Winchester to concluding the History O level syllabus was far too restrictive and undemanding and doing their own thing before moving us swiftly to A level. That is the thing though, that actually quite a few good girls' schools came into being at that time, some go back earlier, LEH actually dates back to the start of the 18th century, and a lot of those girls' schools did educate women who became prominent enough politicians, journalists etc to become household names but their schools never became household names because they were not feeding the establishment to anywhere near the same extent, or for so long as Eton and Winchester.

smokepole it might be....

Poison - I'm aware you went to a very good posh school. You've mentioned it before. My point was you claimed NLCS wasn't a household name in manner of Eton and Winchester, for anyone outside northl London, but for those of us poor thickos who went to comps and thus were forced to do history O level before we were allowed to do history A level (because we just weren't as sophisticated as you or people who went to Winchester) it was a household name. Unlike Winchester, which wasn't. There was that episode of colditz which had a plot point requiring the knowkedge that people who went there were called wykemhists but people my age were too young to have seen it in the 70s and had to wait till the repeats in the 90s.

thread obviously too cryptic for me

If you want the big name girls schools that have a reputation beyond London, then my shot at the list would be SPGS, Wycombe Abbey, Roedean, Benenden and Cheltenham Ladies.

That's not a list of those schools which get the highest results, which for single sex girls schools would probably be headed by SPGS and JAGS every year.

Malory Towers

Who is the "reputation" with? Universities will focus on results, application forms and interviews. Employers will focus on the same.

Does reputation matter more than quality? I think not (other than in minds of some parents).

Henrietta Barnet....