Factors on deciding between private and state

[MaybeNeverSoon]

We are considering private secondary school for our daughter currently in year four. She has one younger sister who would follow three years later.

They are both currently at a lovely state primary.

Having always assumed we would send them private for secondary, we are now having to consider the decision carefully as costs are higher than we anticipated and our salaries perhaps not quite as high as we’d have hoped.

Please could I ask if there are any other factors you’d add to the below pros and cons list? I didn’t go to private school so some of my thoughts may be misguided.

We live in Wimbledon park and would look at day schools as close as possible, so we are looking at c£30k a year fees plus extras, rising each year. Our local state school options are fine but not brilliant.

State
PROS
More grounded view on life.
Will be able to walk / travel easily to school.
No cost!
Shorter school holidays.

CONS
Larger class sizes.
Potentially more disruption to learning.
Teachers potentially less able to focus on the individual due to other pressures.
Fundamentally - that my girls might not achieve their absolute best possible academic outcome.

Private
PROS
Hopefully / presumably a higher quality and more individualised education.
Potentially higher grades achieved at gcse and a level.
More opportunities for clubs and activities.
A “network” or cohort which may be beneficial to them throughout their lives / careers.

CONS
Placing us under financial pressure for ten years.
Longer school holidays (we both work full time).
Likely to have to travel further for school. Friends may also live further away.
Potentially giving my girls the impression that privilege is normal / to be taken for granted.
I would presume we’d be amongst the least wealthy families, and therefore our daughters might feel like they can’t “keep up with the Joneses” in terms of holidays / size of house etc.
Potential impact of positive discrimination in the future for both university and jobs.

@TheaBrandt1 You surely don’t think all state schools are great though do you? Plenty in Inadequate category. Of thats your only local school then parents are right to criticise it. I would also run a mile from strict schools who dish out numerous detentions. I’m sure parents in London have options, but many others don’t. It’s not a case that all state schools are great and of course parents want to avoid them.

Just I have numerous personal experiences of people demonising state schools to justify going private. 🙄 Dh
and I ended up on a path where we were often the only state educated people there so people would assume they were “amongst friends” and would come out with some pretty awful comments.

Sorry, don’t know the details but worth trying to find out directly and the 100k limit is the same for LU and some other selective day schools. I heard that in Emanuel that 35 pupils have completely free throughout the secondary years. Not a huge number but again worth checking.

DS is in an excellent grammar school but is musically gifted across the board. He would love to go to music specialist school or a public school on a music scholarship. Sadly, we are probably too poor to afford it and too rich to qualify for any assistance. He is happy where he is, but would do amazingly well somewhere that would know how to nurture his talent more than we do. Neither of us is musical. A lot of his friends who are as musical have parents who are professional musicians.

Also people make up a lot of rumours about schools like Tiffin but the reality is that for the right child the experience is usually very good. Yes getting in is a pain, but so are the West London selective independent schools.
I would have thought surviving at some of the top private schools is more pressure as just being academic vs being academic/pretty/popular/good at sports or something else is even more a thing. At least at grammar school, if you get good grades, your teachers like you and you have friends that tends to be most of the boxes ticked.

The thing about pressure is interesting. I think I came to the conclusion during SATs preparation at primary that the single worst thing that had ever happened to education was the need to try to show progress that is above average. It was just a terrible experience for DD despite consistently getting very high marks in all the papers and tests they were doing. It was obvious by the first half term that the whole rest of Y6 was going to be SATs obsessed and highly pressured and it was at this point that I hastily went to look around some non-state options - before that I hadn't really considered private. It wasn't even a particularly high-attaining or academic primary school.

But the ridiculous pressure that was being applied made me feel really strongly that I didn't want DD to be a data point for her secondary years. I was a bit worried that Tiffin Girls would also be desperate to demonstrate progress and this was a factor in turning it down in the end.

DD has not found her very academic secondary to be pressured at all so it turned out well for her. It's been how you decribed your son's school really: if you get good grades, your teachers like you and you have friends that tends to be most of the boxes ticked

I actually slightly suspect that a good 80% of the talk about pressure in most schools comes from people who have no direct knowledge of the schools they are talking about.

Specialist schools can be a rather peculiar place to be in, I wasn't very keen on them but we were forced by VAT. They have to drop quite a few GCSE too as the music workload is huge, it really is on a different level. Most of them are not doing separate sciences for example as there is simply not enough time in the day. For an academic child who may want to go to uni not conservatoire, it's a very tricky choice.

Thank you for the guidance @Ubertomusic - my DS is definitely also very academic.

@TheaBrandt1Plenty of people do that to justify their decisions and on MN you find parents rubbishing private schools too because of the perceived type of dc that goes there! We’ve probably heard it hundreds of times over. People seek to explain their points of view by rubbishing the alternatives. Who really listens if it’s ill-informed? Cannot say I do but I would consider some schools unsuitable for dc and many parents are right to think this. Unfortunately loads of parents in the uk have the “choice” of one school. At times that can be worrying if you don’t believe there’s going to be sustained improvement.

We had this situation a few years back.

Sensitive, anxious, bright DD who had a lot of confidence bullied out of her at her state primary. We couldn’t risk her going to a local state (not many good ones near us) with any of the kids who’d been part of the problem at primary.

She’s been at Woldingham School (her favourite of all we looked at due to the grounds, theatre, and lack of boys) a few years now and is a different child. She is ND and in her time there has made friends like her and lost the shame she used to carry about being different.

Classes are small, very few behaviour problems in her classes so it’s easy for her to pay attention or to get help if needed.

She’s had opportunities we couldn’t have imagined and new interests and hobbies she wouldn’t have if she went to a state school. I was pretty anti private until we were looking at the reality around us. (She passed 11+ but the pressure at the grammar, along with the commute, would’ve really affected her.)

I totally respect the view of anyone that’s had personal experience of a school and found it negative. Absolutely.

But it’s aggravating when people that know nothing have never even visited or set foot in the school or even gone to an open day yet still pontificate loudly about how crap it is <looking at you annoying neighbour> Gets my goat!

£30k per year per child for two children for secondary schooling is the best part of £500k before you add in inflation.

Uni fees / living costs are coming out at around £60k per student currently for a 3 yr course.

Worth thinking about that if your local state schools are good enough, are you better off either getting them through uni debt free and/or helping with a deposit for a property?

@TheaBrandt1 We purposefully said absolutely nothing about our state options. DD got a place in an outstanding grammar but it wasn’t really what we were looking for. I’d never rubbish it though! Had I only had the option of a few schools not far away, I would have run a mile and one has been dreadful for 50 years!

DC1's friend is working as a science teacher in a famous private school. She has a science degree but no teaching qualifications. That would not happen in a state school.

I have no personal experience of private schools. However, I have noticed that people who went to private school are normally incredibly confident, which I think is good. I think the other main advantage of going to a private school is networking- you have to think about in many governments of the past, half the cabinet knew each at Eton.

@dizzydizzydizzy Networking for employment is largely not a thing. You cannot say a few politicians proves the point. Most employment processes are far more nuanced. However I’ve seen very confident state educated dc and very timid privately educated dc. Who you are matters too.

I didn’t mean quite that.

i was thinking far wider than employment. I have serveral friends and family members who went to well known private schools. They all have powerful friends/contacts from school who are rich and/or very influential it has helped them in all aspects of their lives. For example, a friend of mine has a school friend with a holiday home in the Caribbean which they are allowed to stay in regularly.

My DDs were privately educated and have seen friends abroad but nothing that special. It’s just luck who’s got what really. Many aren’t offering perks to mates.

In fact, all academies are able to employ unqualified teachers. Most secondary schools in the UK are academies (more than 80%).

The not qualified teacher thing wouldn’t bother me if they were intelligent and experts in their field. Friend of dhs went from being a solicitor at top firm in the City to teaching maths at a public school. She went to Cambridge and worked in corporate law I’m sure she could manage teaching 15 year old privileged boys maths

My State school educated DC is on a degree course with someone who went to an 80k a year private school (not the poor man’s 30k a year private schools 😂 as stated by the person themselves).

If you can afford it do it.

If you can’t don’t.

Those schools are incredible. Dd2 went to visit her friend who is at one and came back blown away. They are in a different league to average local private schools - which I’m sure they massively look down on!

One thing to consider is the pressure your child(ren) may feel if you are sacrificing to send them private.

£30k buys an awful lot of extra curriculars / tutors / music lessons / activity holidays.

For us it was simply which schools fitted our children. DS1 couldn’t be educated in state due to multiple complex disabilities. DS2 is at a school which provided everything he needed at a time when I was so overwhelmed with DS1’s medical appointments and multiple needs, plus working full time (as was DH) that we needed him to be in a school with everything on-tap. By chance that particular school encouraged and nurtured him in a hobby which will now hopefully become his career. I don’t think he would have got involved in this hobby to the same level without that particular school because it’s something that just wasn’t on our radar previously.

If DS1 hadn’t been disabled we would never have considered going down the private route. My mum has helped hugely with the fees. It wasn’t about getting an advantage or networks or anything like that, it was just about meeting two brothers’ very different needs.

Why would you want your DC to do a second shift after school with tutors?

Have you actually tried the logistics of "an awful lot of extra curriculars"?

I don't get this point people are making on such threads. Are their DC robots that need no rest after school?

@Ubertomusic I think you find some dc have a totally curated existence. Tutoring is rife to get the best results! I tend to find many boarding school parents leave it up to the school and don’t need to tutor or go without holidays. I would have hated dc to have to do even more school work! Extras at school were varied and optional! They chose what they liked. No getting the car out for me or scheduling their busy lives - bliss.