Is Westminster School the best school on Earth?

[statesmom]

Just looking at their website and they have 97 places for their students at Oxford and Cambridge this year?!

We have an 8 year old son and want to focus on getting him into this place, just next to the Palace of Westminster. It looks amazing! Any thought on parents with children at the school very welcome indeed, especially any thoughts on the application process. Thank you for someone new to London.

I feel you have to choose a school by what fits your child, there are schools with amazing results but they are mostly highly selective so you do not get a fair comparison with a non selective school.

My daughters school is in the top 100 times list, however that was also highly selective and although we are very happy there have been plenty of parents pull children out whist we have been there because it didn't suit their child.

A good school is one that suits your child, you just have to go with your gut feeling.
Take notice of the results but don't let your choice be based on that alone.

dromedary Really? So we shall conclude then that anyone who goes to a top public school comes from a family of snobs, and if its one of the singly sex boy schools, they likely believe in legalising rape......because they sooo do not understand the 'real world' being closeted and all. Do you know how ridiculous you sound?

Dromedary, your attempt to generalize the rape thing is pretty vile. You have a sample size of one.

It was meant to be the teenist bit ironic. In the UK it's called a sense of humour :)

LMAO at the suggestion that no-one from public school, Oxford or Cambridge will ever have eaten in an "ordinary canteen."

Why do people peddle this nonsense?

What happens to the children whose parents have such high academic aspirations and then fail to live up to those heady heights?

How do the parents make them feel they haven't failed?
8 years old seems young to start setting them up for being a failure. Unless the parents don't tell the child.
The percentage of children who get in must be small next to the numbers who apply?

Nearthewindmill Are you referring to dromedary's post or something else?

Of course it's a sample size of one - what I said was an anecdote, not research. I wasn't generalising, I was mentioning how one young man came out at the end of a highly privileged and largely single sex education. I don't think that a person who had been through comprehensive school and gone on to Bangor University or wherever would have been, as he was, essentially allergic to eating in a college canteen (having to help yourself to food and knife and fork, and the worst thing, clear away your uneaten food afterwards and empty it into a bin). I would to be honest worry a bit about a school which had managed to produce a young man who believed that rape was fine because that's what women are designed for. At the same college I met another (nicer) young man who had also been educated at a boys' public school. He told me that the boys were taught, in class, that it was almost impossible for a woman to become pregnant if she had genuinely been raped (I won't go into the nasty details of how that was "explained" to them, but I believe that they were misinformed). Would that have happened at a mixed sex school I wonder.

It was meant to be the teensiest bit ironic

No it wasn't. But I can see that you are a bit embarrassed by it now, so it's all fine.

I think Nearthewindmill is referring to her post from last night:

Some of us need to take it less seriously folks! Do you know, I love going to parties, and having my very ordinary self there and striking up a conversation and being asked a few questions and avoiding them as much as possible. And when pressed saying "em, yes I do know xxx, oh how, oh he's my husband, oh she's my dd's godmother, em yes, that one, em yes, I am xx's mum, em yes, he was captain of the first xv, em yes now tell me are you looking forward to a lovely holiday this summer". And sometimes at that point the head or housemaster or a cabinet minister comes along and gives me a hug and rescues me from a right little prat.

FGS not all of us need to talk about it at parties

Not dromedary's

Zero - where did I say that no-one who went to any public school or to Oxford or Cambridge would ever have eaten in an ordinary canteen? Where precisely? What I said was that one young man who had been to Christ's Hospital and St John's Oxford had never eaten in an ordinary canteen and found doing so very difficult.
I went to Oxbridge myself, and a number of the colleges even in those days had canteens, including the one I went to.
if you want to insult a poster, at least have the courtesy to read their post first.

Dromedary, children at public school clear away their own dishes you know. They do other grubby stuff too. They do not have white gloved waiters following them around.

Dromedary when you make a generalization and then back it up with an anecdote, isn't it implied that you think that anecdote is not just an anecdote?

I can see you have not spent any time at St John's, Oxford. If you had you would know your supposition is ridiculous.

I couldn't care less about all this competitive parenting bollocks but OP I would like to point out that the word "POOF" which you used a while back is actually a pejorative word for a gay man in this country. And BTW 'fag' means cigarette over here, not gay man. OK? So , as they say 'across the pond' , you need to get with the programME (UK spelling).

As you were, competitive wimmin.

I think that the UK's obesity problem might be less acute were people not brought up to think that eating in a canteen is "normal".

Civilised eating behaviours go a long way towards healthy eating behaviours.

I didn't make any generalisation, other than suggesting that some families that send their children to public school are likely to be snobby.
I have been to St John's college, and at that time (the relevant time for the anecdote) they had daily served and gowned dinner.

Is being served a meal in a large dining hall by waiting staff healthier than collecting one's plate of food from a serving hatch in a canteen and then clearing ones' plate away at the end of the meal? Nor sure why?

They still do dromedary, and that is a luxury for them, but the majority of the College is not joining nightly but is cooking in the small kitchens, eating at the bar or buttery or cafe tucking into kebabs from the van outside. And they clear their own stuff at breakfast and lunch.

You seem to be making several implied generalisations Drom, some of them decidedly odd.

I am just watching for my education .
So there is two or three tier Oxbridge too, the ones being served and the ones with the kebabs? How interesting.

So at parties, to really make things clear you need to name drop about the deteriorating manners of the servants at St John...

I'm not making any generalisations. Based on a tiny sample of 2 men from boys' public schools with whom I have had relatively intimate discussions I would wonder about sex education at all boys' schools. Boys being taught by men, with no female input at all. And some public schools serve their children in the dining hall, which is probably unknown at state comprehensives (correct me if I'm wrong). That is all.
This particular young man came out of his education as a very, let's say unusual, person. There may well have been relevant family factors too.

There is plenty of snobbery within Oxbridge, based on what college you go to (and for all I know what course you're on, some being more prestigious than others). Some colleges are very heavily public school, and others very heavily state as not seen as prestigious enough by the public schools.

It is not three tiered. Students choose where they will eat at night. They do not choose to eat formally each night. They are not very different in their habits to you, me or anyone else in that situation.

I'm not wild about the impact of single-sex education on DCs' ability to relate to the opposite sex. When I was at university - admittedly a generation ago - I found the ex-single sex school boys very odd and unlike the boys I had been to school with.