Are all private school parents petty minded snobs?

[ReallyTired]

I had someone at church telling me that she thought I ought to pull my son out of his state primary and send him to a private school that helps children with learning difficulties like dyslexia.

My son is mildly deaf, but does not have any learning difficulties. He is doing well at his state school. Even though the class is big he has a good teacher. He is in middle ablity groups for everything at the moment.

He is in year 1 and can add and subtract numbers below 100 nicely. His reading is developing well as well. His spelling is very strangem but don't most six year olds have odd spelling? I can't believe that private school kids are two years ahead already at the age of 6?

This person made it clear that she thought that if my son went to a normal private school he would be in the bottom group for everything. Apparently her daughter is bright and she attends selective girl's school so she isn't held back children with SEN.

Don't tempt me ReallyTired. Really don't tempt me ...

Plenty of parents can afford private schools an to help their children. If women pick decent careers and aren't side tracked into low paid jobs that sexist men like to see them in then they can earn their own money to pay fees etc.

Also I would rather the children had the information and education in their heads, not cash in the bank.

If say my elder daughter's salary on qualification will be £65,000 (it will be) and then she will earn up to £1m a year in due course if she sticks with that career choice, which will be entirely up to her and I genuinely don't mind what they end up doing, then I think what I spent on school fees was well spent. I am not saying people who go to state schools don't get jobs in the City (plenty do, I meet them all the time. I was in a meeting with some on Friday. But I do feel she's been eased into that. I don't think her mild dyslexia would have been handled as well in the state system.

In other words it's like planting corn. You could hide your corn seeds for 10 years and there you are 10 years time with the original corn or you can give the child an education which will enable it to get a job which will allow it to trade in corn futures or whatever.

Let's go back to the 1960s when my state grammar school educated parents sent us three to private schools. Part of how "well" we did was obviously their help at home but part was also the schools. I'm sure of that. I didn't even go to a very academic school. My sister was the first ever in the school's history to go to Oxbridge from it but it was good teaching, small classes, chance to develop yourself academically and I am not sure that comps in Newcastle then were any good (and there have been no grammar schools there since before my time - they abolished the 11+ when I was about 9 in that very labour area).

""Funding 5 children from age 3 to leaving university and in fact my daughters have 2 years after that so 18 - 20 years each at say £10k a year is about £1m. Could have bought a pretty smart car or boat for that and a lot of dresses from netaporter. "

Would your children be better off if you had invested 10K per child in property/ shares and sent them to a reasonable state school? Is 10K a year the best use of money on education.

Just think your children would have no problem getting on the housing ladder, even if they went in to something low paid that you look down on like teaching."

A word of warning: I would be very wary of viewing private education as a financial investment in the way that Xenia describes. I was privately educated from the age of 9 to 18, and now at 36 am utterly penniless .

People who have a real love of money tend to be good at making a lot of it - it has very little to do with education beyond a basic level of literacy/numeracy.

xenia some people male and female chose decent vocational careers that are poorly paid esp public sector eg nurse,sw,ot, teacher and despite having graduate qualifications and expertise they are VBadly paid. But to attribute this as their fault (they chose it) is really victim blaming and detracts from the issue of poor pay

i am eternally grateful for the nursery nurses who watch my lo, which enables me to work. despitemany of them having BA(hons) early education and NVQ they are poorly paid. but hell i value them

i value teachers, SW,OT and thankfully they have asenese of professionalism and want to do the job

I just can't get my head around the fact that if your fortunes change, your child gets kicked out of school; that money matters first and foremost, not education or care. It makes me cringe.

I do understand why some parents send their children to private school, though. Parents will do anything for their kids. It's human nature. Doesn't make it right that some people are able to buy an education for their children, while others can't, though.

A world where the rich have private education and healthcare and the poor don't...that stinks. Pretty simple, really.

Some parents home educate their children and ignore schools all together.

However there is no reason why you can't supplement the state education as many parents do. My child gains knowledge of the world from me as much as he gains from school. Being state educated gives the money to do interesting things as a family.

It's a realy topical issue at the moment. At present if you buy expensive extra cancer drugs you have to buy all the other care privately and yet if you go to a state school and also buy in private tutor services so far you are not kicked out of the state school. There is no consistency between the two positions. Both are a two tier system.

MrsMattie you don't get "kicked out", you leave for a cheaper private school (they vary tremendously in price) or you place your child in a state school or you home educate.

Children can get kicked out of state schools for bad behaviour no?

I'm OK too but there are plenty who aren't too

Xenia, I don't think there is any way that you could stop parents privately tutoring state school children. Many parents tutor their own children, you can't make your own cancer drugs.

I teach my own son. We go to the library and borrow extra reading books. He is watching caterpillers turn into butterflies in his bed room. I am trying to teach him how to cook.

My son also has French, swimming and recorder lessons. Unless we became a communist state I think it would be impossible to stop parents giving their state schooled children such things.

The fundermental unfairness is that not all parents are capable of educating their children. But that is another thread.

Mrs Mattie there was a thread on this the other day about a family whose fortunes had changed and the daughter was leaving her school. Was sad I thought. But actually I suppose that this sort of "adversity" could be very good for the character.

It's the same with the NHS then. I don't have moral problems with two tier things. We aer born some of us as thick as a plank and as ugly as sin and some very clever and very pretty. Life is unfair. There are thousands of tiers and unfairnesses.

Parents buy in tutoring just as cancer patients buy in drugs that will prolong their lives which the NHS can't afford. You could control both. You could engage in surveillance. You could grill children at school using lie detector tests. You could infiltrate private tutoring services and find out who was going for a two tier system that way.

lol.. Xenia ... but I bet that your spies would infiltrate my kitchen ... or know that the fact that Tommy has learnt the difference between "b"s and "d"s is down to mum. Intelligent mums give their children a huge advantage more than private education.

Is it more work to tutor your own children or to send to private school for someone else to tutor?

My husband never does DIY because he feels that he could earn more doing overtime on a saturday morning than it would cost to pay someone to do a day's work.

However I think its cheaper for me to listen to my son read than pay for someone else to listen to him read.

I think the idea is that you tutor your own children as a supplement to schooling - whatever type of school it is.

Surely if you are paying 10K to a private school then it shouldn't be necessary to tutor your own children or pay for a private tutor. Unless you want them to learn something really unusual.

For example one of my son's little friends is attending Hindi classes at his temple.

Some children at private schools have 1-to-1's (paid for an an extra) to help them if they need that level of tuition to bring them up to stratch in literacy or numeracy skills.

Well there seems to be an entirely regrettable amount of parental involvement expected at my DCs schools. It's not just a case of posting them through the door at 3 and collecting them at 18 with 4 A* grades at A level, school colours for everything and grade 8 in two instruments

Oh no. They expect you to listen to them reading, check their homework, ferry them to countless matches, make them practise their piano, help with costumes for the plays ... It's neverending. I keep fending the DCs off with their homework and telling them to do it themselves, but oh no. Project on Greek theatre last week. I pointed DD at the collected works of Sophocles and Euripides and thought that was plenty enough of a parental contribution but DD seemed to expect me to do extensive writing proofreading.

Quite, Quattro. Almost total parental involvement is the norm in my dd's school. It's hard work.

But do you do work on top of what the school provides? My son is set very little homework and only gets one reading book a week. Admitally he is only six years old.

It has advantages not being expected to do much by the school.

I have plenty of time to choose what he does. I pick activites that will moviate him and I know where his weak areas are. For example I am using Ruth Misken Superphonics to teach him how to spell. My son is hard of hearing and finds spelling quite hard.

We have plenty of time to read books from the public library.

Reallytired- at 6 my children were in a state infant school at which they were expected to read a book a day from the graded reading boxes, and complete a sheet of spellings every week. This school was extremely successful, far better than any of the local fee-paying schools. They also achieved level 3 at KS1 pretty much across the board. I guess the clue to producing, as they did, leavers at the end of year 2 who could all read fluently and write joined up was harnessing heavy parental involvement. The children flourished, despite a fair few not having English as their first language.

Sorry - have to butt into this thread to recommend 'May Contain Nuts' by John O Farrell. It's absolutely hilarious on the topic of state versus private education. One of the funniest books I've read for ages...... Anyone else read it?

Synopsis:

Book Description
A satire about competitive, over-protective parents driving their children to tutors, to ballet, to insanity ...

Synopsis
Alice and David are worried parents. Are their children falling behind with their schoolwork, their music lessons and the number of sleepover invitations received this month? Or are all these extra lessons causing them to miss out on physical exercise? Maybe they could find a maths tutor who'd be prepared to swim alongside them and explain binary numbers while the children practiced their breast-stroke? This permanent sense of crisis is coming to a climax as their eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the hallowed school on which they have pinned all their hopes. Many mothers can't help wanting to do everything for their children, but Alice takes this controlling maternal obsession one step further. She takes the test in place of her daughter. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, she shuffles into a hall of a two hundred kids and faces her first examination for twenty years. But it is only once she puts herself in the place of one her children that she starts to realise the sort of exhausting pressures that her kids have been under...

Yes, I read it - and really disliked it. Well, I thought it was okay until he started banging on in a sledgehammer-y way about how state education was preferable in every possible way to private education. Then I started to feel tired of life...

Re May contain Nuts - I loved being patronised by a millionaire living in one of the swankiest parts of London

Litchick - yes, I loved that too.

I suspect as many state school parents as private school ones are helicopter parents. In some senses if you pay you leave things more up to the school. If you don't pay you have to get more involved and buy extras.

And the proof in the pudding is in the eating - state school pupils do massively better on just about any scale.