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.

You can't get him to "work" with you. He might be able to support your DS if your DS is what Westminster are looking for. This is about your son, not you.

I don't know of anyone buying their dc in, in the UK. The best you might get is a sibling place if there's a hair's breath between two boys - one unknown by the school - especially when the dc already there is a credit to the school.

Why don't you stretch his reading level a bit and give him some math/logic puzzles. If he's truly Westminster material he will enjoy this and not need a tutor.

How to get a tutor to work for you? Not difficult. Ring up. Find availability. Sign up. Pay him.

I'd be surprised if there were many tutors in central London who didn't have Challenge papers tbh.

I don't think anybody argued that Eton was common.

look the fact that you are on here OP asking inane questions about donations and the like on an anonymous board, shows you are not for real....if you were serious and have serious money ...you would have already been using the services of one of those specialist consultancy agencies that charge like bulls and would hook you up with a supertutor and claim to help countless other American. Chinese, Russian and others get their children into the "elite" schools.

And I should add the sibling pace comes because the school knows the older boy and his family - not because of donations.

This must be a wind up- it gets sillier and sillier.

It does. All water under the bridge though

OP, even you have money and connection to buy your way into the school, you still need to consider whether your DC has real abilities to keep up academically with his peers. If you need to spend all these money on tutoring, that mean he is not naturally talented.
In school like Westminster and other superselective, many subjects are set. How will he feel if he ends up in the bottom set? Will that affect his confidence? How able is he? If he is top one or two in his class now, he may have a chance. You need to answer that yourself.
And also if they don't get good enough grade in GCSE (minimum 6A), you will be asked to leave, they recruit many straight A /A* students in lower 6.
Good luck, as I said before you need to have a Plan B.

He's bright enough. All I care about is getting him in, once he's there I'm fine.

I'd rather he's struggling at Westminster than being first in his class in some inner city state school.

Plenty of famous people graduated from schools at the bottom of their classes, Churchill among them.

For the rest of his life he can tell people he went to Westminster, and that's all that counts.

Oh come on statesmom - merely going to Westminster will not set him up for life and it is incredibly foolish to give him that message.

I'm not saying that it will, but it is one pretty large step up!

Look, you go to Harvard and graduate in the bottom of your class, you are Harvard for the rest of your life.

No one asks you where you came out.

And yet, when you tell someone, an employer, a girlfriend, a competitor, that you went to Harvard, they posit all sort of things about you, for the better.

Same with Westminster.

It will only give him that sort of step up if he has the personality and desire to make the effort to become part of the circle that cares about that sort of thing. I'm guessing you are not part of that circle just now, otherwise you wouldn't be posting here. . It's a very very small circle, and in fact, if you are not part of it, going to Westminster would definitely not be something to crow about to people!

Oh, and if you think you'll end up back in the States at any point, try for Eton or Harrow instead seeing as you are just going for bragging rights. not that I think you are real

No it's not. Harvard is not a place your parents send you. Higher education has a lot more life-long personal value than where you went to school.

I have two first cousins who went to Eton. They are the lowest performing poorest adults of my generation. The highest performing richest adults of my generation went to state schools (plus Oxbridge and several stages of HE).

If your son goes to Westminster & struggles he will lose confidence & no amount of tutoring will help him pass the exams to get into Harvard. An under achiever at Westminster will spend his whole life answering questions such as 'So I see you went to Westminster, what happened? I thought most people went to Oxbridge.' Another point relating to US university entrants, how many of the students who get into top ranked colleges are legacies? The US colleges are private & you probably have more chance of donating your way in (but more that £10K).

Bonsoir says: "I have two first cousins who went to Eton. They are the lowest performing poorest adults of my generation. The highest performing richest adults of my generation went to state schools (plus Oxbridge and several stages of HE)."

Sorry are these 4 data points in a country of 63 million meant to prove anything?! LOL

Why don't you compare the average state school graduate with the average Eton graduate?

Eastpoint: good points but not valid in our case. My son will be legacies at three Ivy League schools through me and my husband.

My husband is on the international board of one and my son and he have had dinner at the president's house!

So we've got college in the US covered.

Eastpoint, being an Ivy/little Ivy legacy gives you a bit of a leg up, but legacies don't dominate admissions. For example, at my alma matter you have roughly a 14% chance of getting in as a non legacy but a 30% chance as a legacy. So, it's a bit more than double the chance but still pretty hard and that's a fairly typical stat.

All I am saying is that, contrary to your claims, there are no guarantees.

Bonsoir, a teeny tiny minority of students are effectively sent to Harvard, Yale etc by their parents. These are very old money families though and I can guarantee statesmom is not one of these.

Funnily enough: we are.

But I guess it depends upon how you define your terms.

But my point is a fair number of the pupils from Westminster etc who go to Yale & Harvard are.

Good oh Statesmom.

Your attitude is horrible. If you truly think that the school you went to defines you to such an extent then you live in a very strange world. No one of any substance cares.

No, you aren't old money. You really, really, aren't.

Oh, and there's no defining the terms of being old money, it's a very clear cut line and you would know this if you actually were