Private school pupils banned from work experience in hospitals

[beelegal]

“Pupils who want to be doctors 'barred' from vital work experience at NHS hospitals - because they go to private school”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15007121/amp/doctors-work-experience-NHS-hospitals-private-school.html

This will be extended to all civil service jobs.
Bridgitte Philipson is a nasty bully. What next, private school pupils to sit on certain sections on buses? I cannot wait until the next general election, this shower need a wipeout.

It's just that there is an awful lot of hatred about a lot of things on forums like these. Most of my family (including me) have been to or are currently at top private schools and I have genuinely not come across hatred in real life. DH went to the alleged most reviled of all and his experience is, apart from a few good natured jokes, he has never been singled out for it. He is very smart, humble and unassuming though (and I am probably very biased).

So if it's a thing in your family and circles then I can imagine why you don't.
DD is first person in either mine or DHs family to go to independent.
Ultimately it's their problem not ours but it serves as a reminder that there are some nasty people about.
Just read some of the comments in this thread....several deletions due to nasty personal attacks against children.

I think it’s to with how horribly class ridden the UK is.

Not class anymore really. It’s wealth disparity. Or, perceived wealth disparity.

Except it's not any more. It's wealth inequality now. Only Labour insist on trying to hash up 1970s class based divides. The world has moved on.
Wealth inequality, access to local services + local economy are now way more influential than what school you went to.
Hence why NE schools perform worse, year after year.

Returning to the issue of the North East issue, a pupil from an underperforming state school in London on FSM is far more likely to get higher grades and go to university than a pupil from an underperforming state school in the NE on FSM.

plus the disparity is far greater than the private vs state school.

Would anyone support "positive discrimination " based on where you live in the UK?

Exactly and I hazard a guess that no, they wouldn't support it!

It's just not as simple as that though. In some geographic areas you could make all the adjustments you like to grades required and the DC would still feel that university was not for people like us and would still not apply. Some parts of the UK can feel as far removed from London and Oxbridge as the moon. That's one of the biggest barriers. That's why targeted outreach programmes work much better at demystifying it and showing that it is not a closed club for young people from certain backgrounds and if they are clever enough with the right work ethic, they have as much right to be there as anyone else.

I used to work for a company in London that offered paid work experience weeks to disadvantaged children in London.

I raised the question of why don't we focus this initiative on poorer parts of the UK using our satellite offices in Newcastle, Birmingham and Cardiff and was told it was all too much hassle and easier to just use the London Head Office.

You are very naive if you think Labour is doing this to “help” disadvantaged kids. Their aim is to essentially make private schools undesirable because they don’t want another Tory gov elected.

If Labour was serious about education, they would done more than the token gesture breakfast club that they are so proud about.

Breakfast club will not improve teacher retention or the general declining behaviour of children, or support any SEND children.
Their idea of training 6500 teachers has evaporated into the unknown.
Secondary schools are on their knees in some areas with no permanent maths or physics teachers.

The VAT from private schools was used as a ploy to win votes in the elections. They never intended to feed it back into the state education and then top it up.

Schools are using their own budgets to give the teachers the pay rise the gov promised without having their budgets increased.

It is shambolic.
Education is the backbone of every single civilised society. It is a marker for a great economy in the future or the lack of it.

I hate this politics of envy.

The class war this country has descended to is despicable and we are all playing to their tune. Just look at the state of this thread.

Of course.. and a dumbed down angry / divided population is a lot easier to control / convince.

I believe we urgently need doctors, regardless of their social background. The country is in critical need, and we can't afford to exclude people based on the outdated idea of social background, especially when the concept of middle class is so unclear.

If this emphasis on social background continues, wouldn't it make more sense to bring in doctors from other countries and fill all the vacancies with foreign doctors? That way, outdated British concepts of social background wouldn't matter, and they might even outperform the ones we train ourselves.

As if Starmer and the entire Labour Party didn’t come from highly privileged backgrounds and prestigious schools, whether private or state, where houses cost over a million and grammar schools require paying tutors to pass entrance tests—clear signals of wealth and privilege. The life of a politician also requires solid financial backing, much like leveling up in a video game.

I find it exhausting when politicians from all sides and their supporters claim superiority. I’m rooting for AI to evolve enough to surpass humans entirely, so we won’t argue anymore about schools or universities attended, as AI will clearly be far superior.

The NHS already has a problem with the number of doctors brought into the UK on visas because there are far more British candidates with the A level subjects and grades required to study medicine but an insufficent number of places.

The real bottleneck isn’t at the A-level stage—there’s no shortage of bright, capable British students with the grades to apply for medicine. The issue lies in the training stage, where medical school places are capped. This creates a strange situation: rejecting qualified UK applicants while bringing in overseas doctors because the NHS is desperate for staff.

The real problem isn’t bringing in foreign doctors (we definitely need them); it’s that we’re under-training our own while demand keeps rising. If the country needs more doctors, we should logically expand medical training places and support international recruitment where needed, instead of obsessing over who got work experience through which type of school.

While the debate about social background in admissions is important for fairness, it shouldn’t overshadow the bigger issue: we need more doctors, plain and simple. Otherwise, we’ll keep rationing UK places and filling gaps with overseas recruitment—which doesn’t make sense in the long term.

And then there are those focused on excluding students from independent schools, as if they’re the problem, when they clearly aren’t. It's the politics of envy and ridiculous judgment based solely on outdated and incorrect concepts of social background.

I once ended up chatting to this man who happened to be a paediatric ENT at a major teaching hospital and he said the problem is not the lack of British trainees, it is the fact that this specific specialisation/department can only support 3-4 trainee students at once. I assume other specialisation have the same problem. We don’t have enough hospitals/teaching hospitals in this country compared to the size of the population, so therefore we can’t train highly specialised docs at once and fast enough, hence the foreign recruitment.

My post is unclear. I mean what you have said - British students who want to become doctors are not able to study medicine because the government caps training places. Thank-you for stepping in 😊

Most children who go to private schools will likely have extensive networks which children from state schools might not enjoy. It is work experience not training to be a doctor. This seems fair to me.

Please stop repeating this. We don’t. We have the same network of friends and family as everyone else. When would people, who most likely have both parents working full time, have time to be extensively networking with the bold and beautiful? We don’t even really see any other parents from the school as we are at work. Private school parents are not a different breed of people

Where is your evidence for this because frankly its bollocks!

I doubt very much that you do.

My 'network' when the kids were younger was very much the same as I had grown up around. It involved anything from drugs, stolen goods and cut and shuts to armed robbery. We might have had a tenuous link due to a neighbour who was supplying to whichever kid did most of the selling at the independent schools, or maybe I went to school with the guy who was the enforcer for minor dealers' debts - perhaps somebody you know pronounced him dead when he was shot five times or went to give his girlfriend and six kids the news.

Out of people working legally, there was a cleaner, few dinnerladies, somebody who did 15 hours at a local accountant's (but WEX was for the kids from his children's private school whilst his kids went to his brother in law's legal practice). And me in NHS admin. Mostly babysitting the consultants' kids when they came in for WEX immediately after the manager had said that there was absolutely no way that there would be work experience available for the school mine went to.

That's the difference - I could easily find somebody able to do something very illegal, get hold of a pit bull puppy, a quarter of weed and seed + some knock off Versace sunglasses for twenty quid or to get some cash in hand work sweeping floors in a fancy office that liked their cleaning costs as low as possible, but no, I wasn't going to have a mate or a friend of a friend who could get my children work experience in Neurology, chambers or at PWC.

But that has that got to do with this issue? The network in this context is the idea that private school parents have a roladex of contacts and so work experience, jobs etc are easy to come by for our kids and they have all the advantages of that. In reality we have no more people to call upon than the majority of state school parents.

And neither do I have a "friend of a friend who could get my children work experience in Neurology, chambers or at PWC" because we aren't all 1 homogenous group of people!

Approx 1 million parents in independent sector Vs 18 million in state sector. Not even 50% of those 18 million are from deprived households!
Even the data says the number is around 5 million households, so therefore 13 million of those parents aren't deprived!

Deluded. Most families that send their kids to private school scrimp and save to send their kids to Private school. Many are from average households, not rich ones. They go there often because private schools supply the support state schools just don't have the capacity to do.

I wonder if anyone has asked a DR which school he went too? Lol

I don’t think l ever said l’d refused a private school doctor. I suspect I’ve seen plenty. I’d never be rude or discourteous to any doctor.

I’m usually very grateful to them, and thank them all profusely.

You are twisting what l said. Your comment also makes me feel sick. I’d never behave in the way you are trying to project on me. I don’t even think like that.

I said we need more doctors from working class backgrounds. This didn’t mean getting rid of all existing private school doctors or behaving in an unpleasant manner towards them. The two are not the same.