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're not seriously going to try to claim to be a Cabot or something are you?

This thread gets funnier by the minute.

I refuse to believe she is for real- it gets more bizarre each time we get new information!
I really don't see how you can map out an 8 yr old's life- they change so much and he may not fit it- he may utterly refuse to fit it.
Many a child goes off the rails, especially with pushy, controlling parents!

I think it should be a MN classic thread.

Why couldn't the OP have old money figs. Not like it indicates class, intelligence or anything similar.

Baffled if she does though, as upthread talking about not wanting to waste £30k unless worth it

Will you make him a badge to wear for the rest of his life 'I'm Westminster and Harvard'. That's all you expect people to care about.

I am with the theory a Westminster sixth former who has nothing better to do is posing as statesmom and not very successfully.

Old money/ new money makes it sound like a thread from Victorian times!

TamerB - these comparisons are still made at the expensive private schools...usually by old money parents or parents who are merely middle class judging other parents as "new money" in a pejorative way.,,,meaning I assume they have money (not inherited) but not class.

I have no doubt they do but they really are outdated in 21st century and should have been left in 19 th century! They will catch up eventually. OP is very outdated, if for real.

Have been watching this thread with interest for days. We only have one friend with a DD at Westminster and I have to say she'd be fine wherever she went - wonderful girl, very clever, great personality. But that's by the by.

But I wanted to defend the OP against Taz's recent comments - how do you know where their money comes from, Taz? She might be DAR for all you know. She might be a Cabot. And it would still be irrelevant.

The OP has put her view very clearly on all aspects of this conversation and surely the reason it is still running at 37 pages is because there is some recognisable truth in what she says. Even if just a teensy weeny bit.

Think it has been running for so long, and will no doubt get to 1000 posts, because it gives a lot of amusement and there is just a teensy weeny chance she is for real!

BeckndCall It's relevant because she is claiming to have college "covered" because she and her husband have Ivy pedigrees. No one can claim to have any Ivy "covered" purely because of legacy status unless they are from one of a tiny handful of families with a certain amount of pull (and even then I'd argue they aren't completely covered, just have a massive advantage over other legacies). She is claiming to be from one of these families and I am calling her on it. There's no way someone in that position is making such bizarre and random statements on a UK forum about getting their child into Westminster. If she were for real she'd have the RL contacts to figure all this out.

Maybe she has money, maybe she doesn't, I don't really care, but I do hope that everyone else here doesn't think she's a typical American!

"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."

^^

She's NOT real. Or if she is, her ds had better not have inherited the sort of mind which displays this utterly warped 'logic'.

I understand your point now, taz.

But don't worry, with 250 million people in your country there's no way any one of you is typical or will be thought of as so! And I hope the same would go for us too :)

All this old money/new money posturing is really unpleasant.

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

sad sad sad...no ....pitiful and delusional. ...I am sure he is nice, but if he exists ...poor boy to be brought up thinking that's all that counts and judging other people that way.

Indeed, Ballylee. And "Once he's there, I'm fine."

But only if she's real...she can't be! can she?

The last time someone asked me what school I went to was when I was 21. She was 18 and my colleague who was 25 just said, "oh you can tell she's green; she still asks where people went to school". People might very occasionally ask about university but more usually people ask what you do for a living. That's my experience as a parent at these London Indies anyway. I have very little idea of where my dc's friends parents went to uni or to school.

I'm sure Westminster have their eyes on this thread and the admissions team will probably scan potential applicants and look closely at American mothers looking for entry in 2019 I reckon if the lad's 8 now. The feeder will probably have been tipped off too.

As a cynical thought; I wonder if Westminster might have set this up themselves in the context of getting a bit of free market research, setting straight a few myths, etc.

I'm surprise to her thinking too, if only the name that count, she should be aiming for Eton and not Westminster. That name has a much higher status globally and certainly all the money too.

Check this out:

"Originally the state dining hall of the Abbot Litlyngton, who built it between 1369-76, the room known since the Reformation as College Hall still serves as a canteen for the Queen's Scholars and boys of the Westminster School."

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1846818.stm

That is SOME CANTEEN!! What a special place to eat lunch and dinner every day for high school.

Let me ask a stupid question: Why do people find my original question so outlandish? This place surely is among the dozen or so schools that can make claim to being the best school in the world.

Just because it is antique?

The original question isn't outlandish.

But you ignored the posters at the top of the thread who attempted to help you with it.

And the rest of the thread is bizarre.

Yes but there are lots of places like this in the UK. So yes it is special but not unique and not necessarily the BEST. Some people live in houses as old as this.

There was nothing wrong with your original question which several people answered honestly, but there was plenty wrong with your subsequent responses.