Is Westminster School the best school on Earth? STATESMOM returns

[statesmom]

I have a lot to say, don't know if anyone remembers the thread. Let me know if you want to hear from me.

I know because DS goes there! The results were sent out to parents. It's a 20 mnt train from London bridge so the commute is not that bad. They do IB and strongly set up for US admissions. Multiple offers from Harvard, Yale etc.

Sounds great, but getting to London Bridge adds even more time. Do most people live around the school or at London Bridge?

Life mapped out for you aged 2 or 4. A series of expectations to meet or you will be a 'failure'.

Poor children

Sevenoaks is a nice commuter town. Kent is a big grammar school area. Plenty of lovely places to live but madness moving for a school which may or may not suit your children as they get older.

haha yes, they will be failures

@confusedbrit If don’t want to move to sevenoaks town then forget this bonkers idea of sending a tiny child in the future to a school you know nothing about and is clearly not convenient for you. As others have explained Sevenoaks gears itself strongly to US admissions hence greatresults but all the posh boarding schools do similar because they have a lot of international pupils and - more pertinently - very rich pupils who can afford US fees.

OP actually said way upthread if she had her time again she’d go for Eton or Winchester but if you choose to be the only person on here who thinks OP is a good person to take advice from then good luck!

Thanks. I’m just looking for rationale not emotions on who’s a good/bad person. Sevenoaks seems great but definitely a tough location

You actually seem a bit dense.

But the bottom line is that any selective London private or elite public school should fit the bill, assuming your kids get in. As I've said before, their numbers today could well bear very little resemblance to their numbers a dozen years down the line. Heads come and go, reputations rise and fall, priorities change, university admissions landscapes change, children surprise you. Literally, the only thing you can do now to increase their odds of 'success' is play with them, love them, talk to them, listen to them, read to them, respect that they're their own people.

Not sure why you resort to name calling? I think everyone is agitated from @statesmom haha maybe this was a bad thread to ask these questions, will start another some other time. Of course you should care for your kids, not sure what your point is

Can't keep away from this thread!

Slightly intrigued about the huge number of US offers for Sevenoaks as seems only 37 went last year. So either some are getting multiple offers or they end up choosing UK universities despite having US offers. Unless the position changes a lot from last year?

Isn't it a bit like saying a UK student might have 5 offers despite only being able to firm and insure one.

I'd send him to a top boarding school: Eton, Harrow or Winchester. Westminster's facilities are ancient and faded. It is half in/half out on boarding and I don't think Saturday school there is at all worth the time. The sports hall was a great addition but Eton has I think over 50 tennis courts to put things in perspective.

The college coaching is very poor and many of the teachers I found to be lazy and just going through the motions. That is not to say that there aren't some excellent teachers there: there are, especially in history.

Overall the school simply takes the best and the brightest (especially the girls and native Asians at sixth form) and doesn't add much value.

We just didn't consider boarding because neither of us was from a boarding family. I grew up lower middle class and had no experience with boarding schools. This is unfortunate as I think he would have thrived at one of those schools, all the opportunities they have. But he got that in college I suppose.

I hardly think we care about which countries won prizes in the 1920s or 1930s. That would have little relevance to the research productivity of a country now I am sure you would agree.

Since 2010, the UK has been awarded 16 Nobels and the US won 77 of them.

OK?

I mean does anyone on Earth really question the relative research output, creative output, manufacturing output, just basically new ideas and ventures, top people of the UK versus the United States???????? If you do, I would LOVE to see a statistic or two supporting it.

Top US academics, film stars, authors, business people are not exactly banging down the doors trying to get to the UK. Give me a break!

Don't understand why people get their backs up so much when I said we hired a college counselor. So what?

It was our first time going through the process and we wanted to maximize our son's chances of admissions. These people do this all day; I think I'd be crazy not to hire one.

I look at it like our UK citizenship application (if anyone here has gone through that). I looked at the 20 page or whatever document, you have to fill out all of your travel history, put in your private medical insurance (for some reason) and so on. We could have done it ourselves, but I figured: why not hire an immigration lawyer and get him to make sure it's all correct? He does this ALL DAY LONG and I knew nothing about UK immigration.

It's the same with a hundred other things. Could I cook dinner for my family every night? Yes, but I have a chef who can do it much better than I and went to school for it.

You hire specialists for unique jobs. I am very happy I did it and the advice we got I am sure helped with his application. We got the result we wanted.

You got the results you wanted (what about your DS?). Some of our DC’s got the futures they wanted without relying on consultants.

I put 'failures' in quotes - no, they won't be failures, but you have such a rigid set of expectations for them that they will easily feel.like failures if they want something else for their lives

People with enough money can buy their way through life.

From my perspective it's a bit of a sad existence, 'knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing'. From what I have seen they tend to be more self-centred than fits with my values, and a bit needy because there are always people with more.

But obviously the OP and her DS are happy with the results, so I wish them all the best

I think the Winchester threads commented on by recent WinCol parents on this forum probably disagree with your recommendation here. And some bright WinCol boys join Westminster for sixth form. As do bright Eton boys. The less rigid boarding at Westminster offers flexibility that a lot of kids need at that age. At Sixth form not everyone admitted is ‘native Asian’ or whatever you mean by that phrase - there is a set number of pupils that can be accommodated and it is the only time overseas pupils are permitted entry - unlike other Boarding Schools. So yes, pupils from all round the world come from sixth form and are often from existing UK boarding schools but are sometimes from the UK and the ROTW. Yes the girls are very bright. They are all bright. And self-starting which is what makes it unique. The spoon-fed student does not do well at Westminster.

Now here’s when I’m not sure if you are who you claim to be as a parent (although you certainly exhibit some of the traits I have seen from the more ‘intense’ faction of the parent population) What you mean by ‘College coaching’? Application to US schools? The teaching is not ‘by College’ and yes, whilst the History faculty is notably superlative, so are most of the faculties.

For the benefit of everyone else reading the thread…. ‘College’ at Westminster is the House that has the brightest kids overall (who are also known the Kings Scholars) and Boarding is compulsory for all of them. Admission to college is by competitive entry at 13+ and 16+ (for all of them) and has the maximum capacity of 48 pupils (from memory). You cannot after age 13 apply to be in college as a boy and college students at 16 are for the female KS’s. The fees are reduced for these pupils…Which I guess by the OP does not include her DC given her own admission that she ‘didn’t consider boarding’… which rules out her DS. The successful non-legacy IL applicants in my DC year were notably from College. I’m not sure where they would’ve had the time to have to engage with specific US application coaches tbh… they boarded FT so literally had no time. So just like everyone else they had to deal with the same system that all the other pupils engaged with (the one that the OP has denigrated several times on this thread) and the same one that produces a significant number of successful Oxbridge, Imperial and other great worldwide university offers every year. Just saying 😉.

Your DC’s won’t be failures but they may not want to go to an Ivy League or even any university. There are plenty of alternative options - an apprenticeship or straight into employment.

For the poster asking about Sevenoaks School, I have a friend who lives in Sevenoaks. It isn’t that far out, it is a rich commuter town inside the M25 where a lot of British stockbrokers/lawyers live in big houses who commute into the City of London. The train is fast to London Bridge and Charing Cross. A lot of rich Americans in the US embrace suburban live too - it is strange that when they come here they think they need to live in eg Notting Hill or St John’s Wood. Lots of British posh rich people live in commuter towns including further out places like e.g Henley on Thames.

I understand that Sevenoaks School only does IB and has a very competitive Sixth Form and some of the best results in IB in the whole world. It is 70% day and 30% boarding overall, but higher percentages board at Sixth Form (these would be international, very bright kids coming in, specifically for the school). The head master is from the US originally and has an Ivy League education himself (Harvard). This school has clearly positioned itself optimally for IVY league entry. A lot of big private schools in UK are doing just that, because there were a few years where Oxford and Cambridge (latter in particular) did not give some of their highest achievers offers. Obviously the teachers know their brightest pupils. People on MN always dispute this - but I have a lot of friends who teach in private schools and they have all stated this to be a fact. Some schools have actively avoided Cambridge for this reason. I hope that is now a thing of the past. There seems to have been an ideological push from that uni in particular a few years ago under a particular chancellor.

Westminster School still seems to have a very large number of Oxbridge offers. Eton seems to increasingly do both Ivy and Oxford etc in similar measures. Westminster was traditionally for very bright nerdy boys who were not that sporty. Eton was for very sporty inherently bright all rounders. That is the traditional cliche.
At the moment, judging by what my work colleagues do, (we don’t do private ed) a lot still rate Eton very highly. It is the richest school in the UK with the biggest endowment and therefore, has the most money to spend on its pupils including bursaries. It follows that it invariably has good resources, because they can. Westminster has maybe “only” 100 million and Eton has more like “600” million.
Ivy’s are very rich with huge endowments. Once an endowment pot gets to a certain size and grows significant income it typically just keeps on growing.

What a great post.

I’d also add to this that the last head at Eton (the one before the current) said in interviews that he turned down every year ‘serious money’ from parents desperate to get a place at the school for their son. He said that the only sum he would consider to overlook a student who had not gained a place via the usual academic entry would be around £1bn - enough to secure a significant bursary system whereby he could admit every bright boy regardless of their economic status on merit alone. I think that speaks volumes about the ethos of donation acceptances in the UK system. Easy money to take, but at what cost?

It's interesting that the teachers at this top school are "lazy" and "going through the motions"
I don't think they'd get away with that at a state school!

They really aren’t. But pupils are expected to be self-starters and the school syllabus goes way beyond what a student needs to know ‘to pass’ either GCSE or A level exams. The breadth of knowledge in a subject that a student can show in an Oxbridge interview beyond the A level syllabus is one of the reasons there are so many offers made to the students.

Eton College educates nearly twice as many students as Westminster School and has a much larger campus to maintain. The difference in endowment spending per staff member and per student is not particularly significant.

Well bully for you!!!

And perhaps my DS would have gotten the future he wanted without consultants, but we're not going to spend time on the historical counterfactual are we?

THERE IS SO MUCH SANCTIMONY ON THIS THREAD!

Many posters here think they are holier, better, more moral.

Your deep seated insecurity does not detract from the fact that, well if you think a professional consultant helps, then paying a consultant to increase the odds is in no way immoral, deleterious, whatever.

I doubt that. Do you have any evidence of that? I would imagine that Eton spends tons more per student than Westminster but would be interested in the facts.