Children at private and grammar schools criticising comprehensive schools

[redpicturelamp]

My DD attends the local 'good' comprehensive school, which has a great reputation and gets good results, but is a big, diverse and scruffy school. She's now in year 8, and over the past 2-3 years a few of her friends have gone the grammar and private school route.

DD knows there are many reasons why people opt for different schools, and that it's not her place to pass comment on other people's school choices, but she seems to be regularly on the receiving end of critical and nasty comments about the school she goes to e.g 'all the kids take drugs' / 'are badly behaved' / 'the teaching is terrible' (they don't, and it's not!) and even 'my parents wouldn't send me there over their dead bodies'.

DD is happy at school and is doing well academically, but at times these comments have really upset her, and on one occasion she tearfully asked me why we'd chosen to send her to such a bad school. A couple of times these comments were made in front of the parents (on lifts home from outings at the weekends), and they said nothing. 😟

I've explained to DD that her friends are likely just expressing adults' views, and to try not to take it personally, but I find it depressing that DDs friends can't see how upsetting these comments might be for DD. Speaking to some of my other friends, their children at local comps have had similar experiences.

I wonder if this is the beginning of a lifelong 'them and us' attitude for these quite privileged kids. Maybe it happens the other way around too ('why are your parents paying for private school when the local school is so good?') but it feels like even if it does, the connotations are different.

Is this all to be expected, and a case of DD just needing to 'toughen' up to the real world? Perhaps naively, I expected a bit better of 12 and 13-year-olds 🙄

I was also called a pleb by my privately educated cousin. Dickhead that he was. I did love gettinguch better GCSEs and A-level rests than him.

A lot of Comps aren't like that though nowadays. The kids want to be in the higher sets. Mine have never been picked on for being bright or wanting to learn. In counties like Surrey or Hampshire Comps have many kids who would have been at grammars if they existed in their county.

At primary they are stuck with the same 30 kids, but at secondary they have a much bigger pool to find like minded friends and the cool kids don't bother the geeky ones (like mine) If you criticise Comps a lot to your kids do you not think they'll look down on comp kids at their uni?

At our city comp it's a bit of a status thing to be in top sets. The kids who are engaged and do loads clubs, music, sport etc all hang out together.
The kids who end up drop out material sadly stick together which is so hard to see. So much depends on what's going on at home. They are the ones always late, often absent, in detentions for no homework. School tries its best to keep them on track.

@TulipsLilacs - I sincerely hope not and would be amazed if they did. We are a very unsnobby family, very low interest in material wealth -ancient uncool car, very outdated kitchen, happy to live on the edge of a small (imo very nice) council estate though I know people in our village who wouldn't go near our location because of it. DC would never look down on anyone because of where they went to school, but they might assume, because I was so anti my own school's ethos, that they had been to a school where behaviour issues were rife.

If I ever caught my Dc making assumptions about people from state schools, we'd have a good chat about it. After all, the people at local state schools are the ones they went to primary with. But I honestly can't imagine it happening.

Op you need to look at the reality of the school and what your dd gets from it?

Then give her solid grounds for taking some pride in her school.
Something to cling too...

Unfortunately I would not be surprised if the other schools are better.
She needs to focus on herself and what she thinks not what others think

It doesn't matter what they say it could be a reverse and your dd is called stuck up and posh because she's at the private school.
The bottom line is her own voice and to learn to let what others say wash over her and deal with it

Indeed!

@redpicturelamp - tell your dd that she is an ambassador for her wonderful school. She should tell her friends that she does not recognise the school she goes to from the extraordinary comments they are making about it and that she is very happy there. She should ask them why they are making such unfounded comments on the basis of ignorance - she would expect better from people who claim to be well educated.