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...)

Yes Swedes that's about the size of it.

This thread reminds me of this story in the DM - shocking!

this DM story

Sorry, I don't click on DM links. I clicked on a DM link a few days ago and felt sullied afterwards.

Well, its about a father who killed himself, because his daughter didn't get into their preferred school.

Its a Brighton school BTW, where they operate the lottery system.

I did click on it Swedes and wished I hadn't. It adds nothing whatsoever to the debate at hand.

Wow, how rude!

The thread title reminds me of the article, so thought there was some relevance.

Haven't read the whole thread, so pardon me!!!

Creole - Poor family. It shows what pressure some people put themselves under with respect to schools - very relevant to this debate.

Didn't mean to be flippant about the DM - though I do think it's a shite paper.

I'm not being rude. We can't know why someone would act in such an extreme manner.

Wow, this is still going on! How many days now?

Apparently his wife told him 2 hours before he killed himself that she had got a place anyway but he didn't believe her and killed himself. Obviously you can't blame the school thing for that as it's mental illness and pretty cowardly if he wasn't mentally ill but it shows what a state people get into over schools and school places. I remember when our second daughter aged 4 didn't get into her big sister's school and we were upset but the reality was that having them at separate schools to 18 (Haberdashers adn North London Collegiate - both equally academic schools for equally bright daughters) was quite fun and neither was in the shadow of the other and in the end it hasn't mattered at all yet seemed to matter at the time.