Headmistress attacks parents in national press

[UpsetofWestLondon]

Done first ever name change for this as don't want to be identifiable!

I am really, really pissed off. The High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, where I am a parent, has been widely quoted in the national press this weekend criticising parents at SPGS. I fully realise she may have been quoted out of context, but the quotes seem to apply to all parents at her school and the one that cuts to the quick is where she accuses parents of "affluent neglect" by not paying enough attention to their daughters in the evening.

I should say my DD is very happy at the school, does lots of things well and lots of things not very well but enjoys them so that's great. I adore spending time with her and the only reason I don't spend as much as I would like in the evenings is because of the extraordinary volume of homework she gets set by the school (and obviously the time she needs to spend on Facebook etc!).

I am glad Ms Farr is pro-children, and this is not the first time she has criticised the parent body, but at some point, if you continuously publicly criticise your paying customers surely you have to understand you will upset them? I feel personally attacked and concerned I will be judged by others negatively for being part if this vile parent body she describes. I am cross.

I almost want to post this in AIBU...but am I?

Granola's post is funny - if this is all because the school got pushed to second.

sunset but the fever the parents get into leading up to 11+ has very little to do with the requirements of school entrance, and it is not confined to parents whose daughters have SPGS in their sights. It is based on chinese whispers and a mix of anxiety and competitiveness and has very little to do with the actual requirements of the exams. The Heads can and do, until they are blue in the face, say that they are looking for ability, not tutoring, but some parents don't want to hear that this is a process over which they have no control. I did get the impression that the SPGS exam was one that the right preparation could put you into a better position to pass (why else would one Prep, Bute, have such a high rate of success and overall SPGS have one of the lowest success rates amongst state school applicant) but girls who have not been extensively tutored do get offers based on ability, and the general frustration about the frenetic anxiety amongst parents would be shared by other London GSA Heads.

As would the concerns about affluent neglect. My DD was in a particularly dysfunctional year elsewhere and really in some cases parents not having the time to speak to their DDs in the evening is the least of it. One pastoral Head said she had not heard stories of parental self indulgence like it in thirty years of teaching, just because there is money (and indeed bitchy exclusive alpha behaviour, rampant sexuality, binge drinking ,drug taking and anorexia by attention seeking girls with little parental control, and self esteem issues) does not stop you wanting to weep for them when you know what goes on in their home lives. And it cuts across ALL West London schools, possibly more intense the further into the centre and the more selective they become.

St. Paul's was however the only West London indie that made pupils retake GCSE English Lang /Lit if they didn't get A* when the Govian sponsored grade deflation happened a couple of years ago. Wycombe went public in the Press about the impact, the rest of the West London indies, bar SPGS, pretended it hadn't happened

I thought they did IGCSE English. Or us that a switch in the last 2 years?

Just reading through the thread, poised to comment and now WordFactory, RootandBranch, Sunset and Granola have stolen my thunder.

CF is either disingenuous or deluded. She has more influence over her school community than any individual set of parents. She needs to look at her own hand in the matter.

My final question is, did she intentionally put this out there? Or, was she selectively quoted?

She posed for the photographs .....

and blabbing to the Times is clearly the done thing at the moment
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article4283593.ece

Head teachers clearly see themselves as the new celebrity.

Your man from Educating Yorkshire has been flashing his yellow gnashers in game shows of late!

CF is neither disingenuous nor deluded. She is a very savvy operator who knows exactly what she's doing - she hasn't got where she is now by being naive and a bit wet behind the ears. She has form for these kinds of statements going back years.

If I had to hypothesise about her motivation I would speculate that she knows SPGS has a reputation for attracting derangedly competitive parents, and that some families will be put off the school precisely because they are not that way inclined themselves and don't really want to engage in that particular bunfight. So my guess would be that parents who are perhaps put off SPGS might read that and feel encouraged to apply by the head so publicly critiqueing the more insane aspects of competitive W. London parenting.

It doesn't seem very "savvy" to me to allow the fees to rise by 38% in 5 years, the biggest increase of any school in the UK: www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Education/article1489981.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_11_30

If I was a parent at SPGS, I'd be pretty cross about that. It might make me quite impatient with the head. I'm not surprised she has some difficult conversations with parents.

I still think the snowplough story was a silly headline grab and sour grapes after SPGS came second to Wycombe Abbey in the Sunday Times league table.

The thing is, what exactly does she want in an ideal SPGS parent?

She chides the current parent body for being both over involved and under involved.

Well, I guess a derangedly competitive person might well think it was sour grapes after SPGS came second to Wycombe Abbey.

I'm sure the colossal fee increase is so as to ensure that children have the facilities in which to learn to fail successfully, and to learn that failure can be expensive, but also that you can recover from it if you have lots more cash where the last lot came from.

TheWordFactory - surely it is possible to be both over and under-involved? Over-involved in the wrong areas (ie the bits the parents should leave to the school) and under-involved in the right areas (ie the bits all parents should be doing)...

Sorry. I should have added at the end of my last post.

A message made in defensiveness is not the best way to go. Why so much £ and now we're second? Oh it's you the parents, you're doing it wrong.

Should have been some sort of buck up girls we can do it, yip yip.

I'm sure WA are happy though, I would have had no idea about it otherwise. - not that it's relevant, but still.

I think there is absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to get away from the notion that you are failing unless you are top of the league tables.

I don't think they are failing, I wouldn't even use the word.

Aww, no, but you would use the word "defensiveness."

If it is a result of tiresome parents asking why the school is not top of the league tables this year, it could be a message made in "exasperation."

True!

Actually, I think the school is going to the dogs. Did you know they came second to Wycombe Abbey this year? Wycombe Abbey?!!! I ask you!

Over-involved in the lunacy that accompanies getting into SPGS in the first place before assuming that the school will sort everything out for the future so being very under-involved in their daughters lives.

I know a very high powered lawyer who is taking a sabbatical from work to do the 8+ and 11+ with her children (inc SPGS). She has kept on the nanny and the housekeeper so that all she is doing is the academics, but there is someone else to do all the boring stuff like cooking and laundry.

I can see the logic in that in that a lot of the time that I spend with my children isn't particularly meaningful in that I'm doing all that domestic stuff rather than drilling them on commonly used verbal reasoning words. But at the same time, I think that being around but not in their face i.e. standing at cooker and occasionally chatting is an important part of spending time with children. This woman will go back to work when the exams are over that no doubt they will have successfully passed with this powerhouse of an on-hand very focussed educated parent to help. But I can see how this could be construed as both over-involvement and a sort of absence.

I'm not, by the way, criticising working parents, but possibly this sort of parent who is obsessed with an elite education and that all time spent with children should have an educational end.

I know a very high powered lawyer who is taking a sabbatical from work to do the 8+ and 11+ with her children (inc SPGS). She has kept on the nanny and the housekeeper so that all she is doing is the academics, but there is someone else to do all the boring stuff like cooking and laundry.

I think that's madness. It's a school/certain schools not the holy grail.

And what happens if they don't get in? It's all completely ridiculous.

A head of a very prestigious London prep told me recently that a good proportion of its parents were "mad".
Obviously, the remark wasn't made in public or intended for publication but there's clearly teachers are very irritated by the behaviour of SOME parents.
The old head of Latymer made some remark about (I paraphrase) being hard to completely stamp out drug taking when some parents took drugs and didn't keep an eye on their children. AFAIK, Latymer didn't see a mass exodus. SPGS won't either, in fact as GregorSamsa most astutely pointed out it may see some interest from the many parents who have decided such a pushy atmosphere is not for them or their child.