Do you think you can be a socialist and

[Swedes]

1. Pay for your child to be independently educated?
2. Buy a house in right catchment for the right school?
3. Feign religion to get your child into a faith school?
4. Object to a lottery system for school places with urban areas (ignoring all convenient environmental issues)?
5. Vote Tory? (because some people seem particularly confused)

Interesting--- I'm sensing a sharp divide between those with older primary children, and those with babies and toddlers. When my children were 2,3, 4, and even 5 and 6, NO WAY was I ever going to send them into the private sector.

When our school of catchment (also, incidentally a selective on house price school) turned out to be one doing exceedingly well in league tables and for Ofsted, but had no breaktimes beyond age 7 nor meaningful PE sessions, we had to rethink whether this was really the right school for our outward bound high-octane boy. We knew it wasn't right for him, apart from the academic standards, so we had to drop principles and do what we thought best for him.

Oh yes - having your children grow up is a great reality-check!

UQ- no child left behind, eh? Or is that the US mantra? I forget... I taught for two years in the "crap" school in our toffee-nosed town. The highly amusing thing is that it went in five years from 21% A*-C to 67%, thereby overtaking one of the snobby schools, and seriously biting at the ankles of the other. Simple change of management, introduction of aspirational, inspirational teaching, individual tutoring of kids struggling, positive discipline management, common sense routines, high expectations, and hey presto! Previously dull kids turn out to be flipping bright after all.

I think there a lot of hypocrisy in this country re poverty and educational aspirations, with schools themselves holding up their hands and refusing to believe that good teaching and firm discipline are key to teenagers' success.

I'd like to think that best for my child meant going to school with her mates from primary and the kids next door and all the local ruffians, with inherent compromises from an educational emphasis preferance viewpoint, but perhaps I am being naive.
Do you still get threadworms in private schools? I am feeling stirrings in my moral marrow....

From 21% A*-C to 67% is astonishing. There has been some improvement in one or two middling schools here and some "snapping at the heels", but the one thing that will never change is that the same top 6 (out of 30) are the only ones with sixth-forms. And they, quelle surprise, are all in the m-c areas with expensive houses.

Duchesse, I think it's fair to say that my instinctive reaction to independent schools based on woolly liberal principles is different to my reaction to a trad public school. Which is in itself an example of my woolly liberal thinking

No to all. But then some people love to jump on the ideology of fairness bandwagon unless it inconveniences them.

My dad was a socialist, well he thinks he still is but as he's an active member of the Labour party and defended Tony Blair I don't believe him. Anyway, we remained on a council estate because of this and went to local schools, my upper school got around 34% A-C's. My mum wanted us to try for the private girls grammar, which we would've got into.

Are you bitter, yetanother? And do you think it has made any difference to your life, positive or negative?

Topical update; my 10 yr old took the entrance test to the only grammar school in East Devon in November. I have just opened the letter to say that she did not make the grade, so she will instead to be going in September to the highly academic girls' selective independent at which she got the highest reasoning score they've seen in ten years. She must have got one hell of lot cleverer between the November 11+ and the January girls' school test...

ps: our local school,, which everyone around here thinks thinks is a beacon of a school, gets 51% A* to C if you include Maths and English. People come from far away to it because the nearby city schools into a cocked hat in terms of results (apart from the one you virtually have to have your grandparents' baptismal certificates to get into...)

" think there a lot of hypocrisy in this country re poverty and educational aspirations, with schools themselves holding up their hands and refusing to believe that good teaching and firm discipline are key to teenagers' success."

i think that you are spot on there duchesse

Would be interested in a definition of 'socialist'
(And also a definition of middle-class - a terms which gets bandied about but never defined)

I am a socialist - and I feel very uncomfortable about the fact that my dd goes to a grammar school. I know that I cannot justify it and I do not try because I find the twisting into knots that happens when people try distasteful in the extreme.

I believe wholeheartedly in comprehensive education - the trouble is that you don't get it in grammar schools because the high schools have to operate without the "top" 25% because they have been creamed off by the grammars. In reality, this means they are operating without the middle class parents, because, frankly,instead of the 11 plus, they might as well have asked the children "What do you call your evening meal?""Do you have riding lessons?" and "Have you every been to Butlins?" and give places to the ones who answer Dinner, Yes and No. It would have been the same 25%!

should have previewed - meant to say "you don't get it in grammar school areas because....

no but I am willing to do no 1 if needs be.

oh no!! we call it supper in our house....

haven't done the Butlins thing though. Mark Warner , yes.

Seeker that's what's wrong with grammar schools now

They don't do what it used to say on the tin

Mark Warner's fine - supper will get you in on appeal.

Actually, thinking about it, the proper answer is "Butlins? I'm not sure - is it like Mark Warner?"

Supper (as Dinner) is even posher.

Supper means a bit of cheese and a Jacobs cream cracker with a glass of milk where I come from

er, excuse me - water biscuits only in this house. Jacob's cream crackers are very sainsbury's IMO....!

"We all have a stake in the future of all our children, and surely it really isn't good enough just to buy your own kids an education and hang the rest of them?"

What a genuinely interesting debate. Well we fully paid up members of the Bodenatariat would argue that we are not saying that we should hang the rest of them. We WANT good free education for everyone, but the local schools are a bit ropey and it's an imperfect world.

Dinner is a proper meal - supper is soup and a boiled egg or scrambled eggs on toast. Either will get you into a grammar school!

I love Alan Coren's description of Sainsburys - "It keeps the riff-raff out of Waitrose"

Local schools a bit ropey - by that I mean the one near us which is just coming out of special measures