Do you feel you are *entitled* to the "best" school for your children?

[UnquietDad]

If so, why?

and just a few other questions/points.

Define "best"

and

Does this apply also to people up the road?

and

Does this apply also to people in different social classes?

i.e if you're entitled to the "best" school why isn't everyone else?

Is there a middle-class sense of "entitlement" to the "best schools" in this country?
Is the problem that we have such a variation in standards of schools across a supposedly comprehensive system?
Is it people playing the system, moving out of catchment, "getting faith" etc, and making themselves part of the problem and not part of the solution?
Or is the issue simply one of being too obsessed by the schools that do well in the league tables and/or have a nice uniform?

(It's a quiet Saturday... Walks away whistling, hands in pockets... Gas Mark 6, set to simmer. I'll be back...)

"its a well known sociological fact that most people are well below the average wage."

No it isn't. It depends how you measure the average -

If you take the mean (wages divided by the number of people) that could give rise to the effects you suggest but it doesn't simply because there are so few bankers and fat cats and so very many people working in call centres and distribution centres.

If you take the median (the mid-point worker - ie an individual) as a more accurate measure of central tendency, then the results are very similar to the mean.

I think the average wage for full-time workers whichever measure you use is now around £25k, I saw this quite recently. I'll try to find the link.

www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285

Here you will see that the average (median) salary for a full-time employee is £457 a week or £23,764 a year - this is measured to April 07.

I imagine that by April 08 (assuming payrises of 3%) the number will have increased to £24,500.

Except that most public sector salaries have been capped at below inflation for some time now (my husband is getting 2% a year, and has been for 5 yrs), in accordance with gvt policy. I think that lower earners than him have a higher inflationary rise though.

My dh works in the public sector and is getting 2.6% plus extra for the 'x' factor this pay round.

Loshad, whilst obviously not knowing the ins and outs of your DH's education from what you have written I think your DH was failed by the grammer school system but then was still able to do A-levels at an FE, which is part of the state system, and in my experience is usually the next step from a comprehensive school. (Or a private school if you are a bit more cool than your peers).

50% (I think?) of Oxbridge undergrads are private school educated. If private schools were closed tomorrow, would Oxbridge just close down half of their colleges? Would they think oh dear, we can't teach unless we have a percentage of pupils from Eton, or would the system have to adapt?

I have sympathy with parents who are just trying to deal with the system as it is, but I am bemused by people who think it works.

"think it works" for society rather than just their children.

I don't honestly know why anyone would think it preferable or desirable for a young person to effectively waste five of their teenage years, at a time when their brain and abilities and are in full expansion, and to have to return to basic qualifications later when they may already have responsibilities, than to achieve their academic potential in good time, because a school/ academic system is unable to get organised enough to keep the same staff for at least one year in a row, nor engineer adequate discipline.

And there are still too many state schools that do not INSIST that their pupils achieve rather than leaving it up to parents or the individual pupil to decide how much they are to achieve. The only result is that pupils with unsupportive parents in a poorly disciplined school do badly unless they are superhuman.

And I absolutely do not agree that maybe it is fine for someone to, say, drift into pest control rather than choose the Bar or sculpting or civil engineering or whatever their goal was, and achieve their ambitions, just because their school system was too weak and ineffective to aim high and expect highly of its pupils. That to my mind is failing, and is emphatically not a good thing.

Madame Platypus- "Oxbridge" would continue to do just what it does at present, which is to take people fit and qualified enough to follow its courses, from all the people presenting themselves. I can guarantee the two universities will not drop their selection criteria to take bland people no aspirations and Bs at some grim modern modular A level in meedja studies. They may as well shut down as centres of excellence in the many fields in which they lead, if that is the case.

In fact, they are already taking many very bright and well-qualified students from all over the world, who are simply the best who present themselves. If we insist on continuing to run down our state education system to be the all-inclusive thing of PC mediocrity it is becoming, in which excelling in anything except competitive box-ticking is frowned upon, with no chances to truly shine academically, on the sporting field, musically, then pretty soon all our centres of excellence will (rightly to my mind) will be filled with bright and well educated young people from other countries.

end rant

I don't know why I answer these threads

I think it would be a great improvement if the state education system was an "all-inclusive thing of PC mediocrity". But it isn't. It is a patchwork of very good, OK, and then some truly awful schools. So long as schools are producing large amounts of children who are functionaly illiterate and unemployable then the system is failing, and we as individuals and society suffer. Finding opportunities outside of school for childen to excel at sports, drama, music etc is quite possible for many parents. Finding opportunities for children to learn to read, write, gain self esteem or learn how to interect with others outside of school is much more difficult.

I think I have a little more faith that pupils and teachers currently in the private system would be able to cope in the state system, and able students would still go to university. Oxford and Cambridge (if you prefer) would still have plenty of intelligent pupils to choose from, and if they didn't have the ability to choose pupils from Eton, they would just have to pick the most intelligent children, rather than a mix of the most intelligent and the most privileged children.

Having been to a private secondary school, but knowing many people from state schools, I am not convinced that private schools are the centres of excellence that many people think - they just pick their pupils. Plenty of private school children drop out. Plenty of private schools don't insist that children achieve. The difference is that there is somebody in the back ground to send them to a crammer/provide housing while they do retakes/send them to Africa to build a well when they fail.

Also, duchesse, as few other countries have a private school system to match the UK, presumably these foreign students will have been to their local state school?

Engineers and several other professions are now effectively priced out of independent education. I know, DH is one and I work in a notoriously poorly paid profession.

Interesting article, but do they mean that somebody earning £40,000 would be able to afford school fees without help from a partner? Don't really understand that. To be honest £40,000, while being more than alot of people earn, doesn't leave you alot of change if you are a one income family.

Maybe its 40,000 after tax?

Yes I know Lilymaid - hence total bemusement at engineers being cited as being highly paid - it is incredible considering the level of technical skill of an engineer too.

That link is interesting but inaccurate because the salaries are quoted gross yet you have to pay school fees out of net income.

Back to the two hypothetical children at private school. If your gross income to pay for it is £33k, then using the metric on your link of school fees being no more than a quarter of household income, then in order to afford two sets of school fees, the household income needs to be £132k a year.

That's ridiculous

Loshad, your dh's story is an example of someone failed by the grammar school system and NOT the comprehensive system.

And really that confirms my point that any 2 tier system which has a best and a rest is going to create hundreds of similar stories while the minority who go to the best say how well they've done out of it.

As for private school fees, one thing that makes a difference is where you live in the country and whether you have a dual income family. Don't want to start a different debate but if you can afford to have one of you at home then you can afford private school fees. We live in the north which means smaller mortgage and lower school fees. Also, I've always worked albeit part time. School fees take up vast majority of my salary but we still have dp's.

duchesse and others, your picture of state school sameness and mediocrity is frankly a load of b***s as nooka says. There are state schools which produce truly excellent results and some which produce truly awful ones (which are always in deprived areas by the way a fact which is annoyingly almost alwys overlooked) but most are in between. And even a school with dead on average results (50% A-C) contains a diverse set of pupils some of whom will get 9 As and some no GCSEs at all. I have taught all of the above and allowed each to achieve their potential as much as possible.

I have taught students for whom achieving a c at gcse is a massive, massive result and I'm currently teaching a student who is going to Cambrige, has got full marks on his latest A Level exam and full marks on his coursework. Both of these students came from same comprhensive school BTW.

"knowing many people from state schools"

shall I shoot myself now?

Anyway.... what have engineers to do with it. What about people on really low-paid jobs. If you earn less than 20k a year and have more than once child, how do you even begin to pay school fees. 'Entitlement' is not just for the middle-class and well-paid.

Loshad's husband was failed by state schooling but pulled through later. Most people don't manage that if they are failed like that by a bad school which is one reason I am happy to pay fees.

Any couple where the wife gives up work for 5 years to be at home with the children can then afford school fees because when she returns to work full time on £30k a year (unless she is low paid) that is usualyl about the cost of 2 sets of school fees. Of if she worked and they paid a nanny for the under 5s then when they stop needing that they can use that money for school fees. Obviously if you made bad career choices (and yes lots of my 3 student children's friends know engineering is badly paid and avoid it in consequence by the way) then you won't have that choice but many women do earn £30k a year.

In fact Duchesse I do find your blanket generalisations about state education incredibly offensive.

I don't know which state schools you have in mind but I think you'll find that the vast majority of schools which are underperforming in terms of GCSE grades are doing so because they are in incredibly deprived areas with a high percentage of recent immigrants for example including refugees. Yet I have been into some schools which get poor results but have some of the most amazingly inspirational teaching, pastoraly systems and management. You make a lot of incredibly crass assumptions about schools being badly organised etc etc which shows you have very little awareness of what actually goes on in state education.

And by the way as well as the student I have who is going to Cambridge I teach another student who is going to Oxford and has an entirely a grade profile including her A grade in Media Studies. And she's just won a young journalism prize from the BBC!!!!

Fortunately her interviewers at Oxford are not as ignorant and snobby as you obviously are about media studies and state education!

"'Entitlement' is not just for the middle-class and well-paid."

Ormy, I think the point the OP was making is that it is. And of course he is right and he is right that it is wrong.

There is no real choice unless you are (a) wealthy or (b) you fancy adopting religion.

It's worth saying the obvious that private schools also fail their students. Last year I taught a student who came in with a Grade E at GCSE English from a private school which usually gets exceptional results. They'd failed to diagnose his dyslexia. He was full of contempt for the school.

They might earn that in London Xenia, but they don't in Cornwall! We only had to pay one set of fees as ds is an only and we managed it fairly comfortably on 2 public sector employees salaries, plus our mortgage and dh being in Brussels for work, hence two lots of food bills and travel home etc. My dh is an engineer btw.

The point that is being missed here is that the government is not ensuring that the education pot is fairly distributed between schools, thereby creating inequality in a system that is one size fits all. It doesn't, if the funding isn't equal. The government knows that the system doesn't work, but doesn't do anything about it. Therefore, the government isn't providing the best education for our children, which is why people pay.

Obviously you can't pay full school fees on £20k a year but at one of the local private schools, on an income of £20k pa you would pay about £200pa in fees if your child got a bursary.

well yes it is shocking that funding can differ by hundreds of pounds per child per year in different boroughs. we are in worcestershire, about 50 metres from the border with dudley- dudley get £300 per child per year more to spend on education than worcestershire do. hence the schools have smalller classes, better facilities and free music lessons.

this of course is all thanks to margaret bloody thatcher who was the one to cap county council's spending on education. she capped it at whatever their average spending was. so that councils who spent a lot on education, like dudley had a much higher cap than the frugal councils like worcestershire.