Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 5

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Starting a continuation thread in anticipation of the fourth one filling up…

www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5301690-whitehall-braced-for-private-schools-collapse-4?page=39

GCSEs were finished well BEFORE the 13th July...

@CurlewKate - really? Once your father has been PM you are true elite for life, including your children, grandchildren etc etc. And they live in a nice part of Central London so were privileged before that as well. Both parents went to private schools themselves. Come on!

What are you talking about?? 🤷‍♀️ The nearest school does eBacc and their results are worse. And don't you realise that if a school doesn't do eBacc that means many children are not doing some core subjects so effectively limited in their further choices? And this means the school is worse than the one Starmer's son went to?

Why do you even need arguing when all info is in public domain?

I don't know why I'm arguing with you, that's for sure. The "better" secondary in the area doesn't insist on two sciences plus one MFL for eBacc, the worse one does. Hence the worse one's eBacc results are better but the better one's actual results are better. It's not particularly complicated.

@tortoise18 much of the country can only dream of being able to access schools where the worst one performs substantially better than the national average. 28.5% of apparently the worst school pass the EBacc at 5 or above, compared with 18% average nationally. Our catchment school gets 6% at that level. The only state school with available places in our area achieves a figure of 0.9%. Both are rated OFSTED “good”. It’s all very well to lecture others when the worst school available to you is still massively outperforming the national average.

Of course. I think you might have missed where I agreed that they were very privileged indeed. (Starmer didn’t go to private school, by the way.) I think my point is-apart from not imposing VAT-what do you want Starmer to do about it?

I agree this is an indictment on 15 years of Tory underfunding in state education by a truly detached class of people with no stake in state education whatsoever.

Idk if you expected Starmer, as an MP, to send his children away from his own constituency for their state schooling though. I'm sure many MPs do that, but not for the reasons you want.

This. But they still pretend not to understand 🤷‍♀️

In what way is Labour funding state so it’s better @tortoise18?

This tangent is definitely one of the more absurd justifications for education tax. Aside from the ludicrous claim that the PMs children are not privileged, the logic seems to be if you choose to send your children to a lower performing school then it’s fine to attempt to force that other parents do likewise. It’s just nonsense, there’s no justification for this spite.

Not enough yet! They haven't had an entire generation to do it in though.

@FairMindedMaiden who said that the PM’s children are not privileged?

Starmer did go to a private school, just his parents didn’t pay for it. I’d be happy for my DCs to have the same deal.

Do you have an idea of what they will do and how?

The policies so far seem to damage more than help.

Well technically he did.

It was a grammar school when he started, that then became a private school and he stayed there on a bursary.

apart from not imposing VAT -what do you want Starmer to do about it?

Why are you excluding the obvious?

He's prime minister!! He chose to impose VAT. He chose to attack childrens' education, wherever it isn't socialist enough for his party die-hards.

He could absolutely choose NOT to impose VAT on education. It wouldn't exactly be going out on a limb - given that no other Western country does it, and it's not permitted in the EU.

I don't work for the government, so can't answer your question any more than you can.

Of course he wouldn't ruin his ascend to power by making wrong choices. They calculate very well here. My son was refused admission to an excellent state school even though we lived literally two houses away from it so the very top of catchment. In the same year, a child of one of the top lefty journo's got accepted even though they didn't even live in the borough! That's how privilege works in state comps of N London 😁

I don’t expect a Prime Minister to lecture others about gaining an apparently unfair advantage by paying for education, attempt to take the moral high ground, then penalise them financially, when he has the luxury of having access to some of the best schools in the country. When the worst school in his area massively outperforms the national average, it shows that the biggest educational inequality lies firmly in the state sector.

This is the problem. There are 2 possibilities here. Perhaps he is so deluded that he believes everyone has access to the quality of state education he does. Or perhaps he realises that there is inequality, but that only the likes of him should be able to benefit from that.

Bit of a cop out. Maybe they don’t have any policies that will help so even Labour supporters can’t cite them.

If you’re going to do the 14 years line at least show how Labour will be different.

Starmer did go to a private school. It may not have been private when he joined, but it became private during his time there. He was fortunate not to have to pay for his private education. He could, of course, have left to go elsewhere if he didn’t want a private education. Maybe he and his parents didn’t want the disruption of moving though? 🤨 Especially when he had a freebie?

Imagine not wanting to disrupt a free private education. It’s kind of set him up for his world of freebies and hypocrisy for disrupting other dc.

I'm sure the reaction of rabid message board warriors fifty years in the future was front and centre of teen Starmer's calculations when deciding whether to stay at his grammar school.

It’s not going well so far. So far, they’ve managed to cut funding for things like STEM and Latin, their “free” breakfast to all primary pupils idea is failing because so many schools are withdrawing from the scheme, and this week they’ve cut teacher recruitment targets (which apparently the school fee VAT was originally paying for; where is that funding now being spent instead)?

Are you including your posts?