The curious social backlash that comes with private education

‘If this is the top of the class, I would hate to see the rest of them.’ That was the withering verdict of the woman I had just handed over hundreds of pounds to on a hunch that my child wasn’t doing as well as I was being told. Gloria (name changed) is what misogynists would call a battle-axe.

Officially, though, she was a formidable retired head of a highly selective pre-prep. She shared her townhouse with a pet chihuahua that was as terrifying. My then seven-year-old had just undergone a battalion of tests in her pristine kitchen. His ‘only’ potential, apparently, was that he had a reading age three years above his chronological one and that his non-verbal reasoning score was ‘relatively high — but we are not talking Mensa levels’. This score can apparently only ever be ‘tutored up’ by ten points.

What a difference a few years had made. Three years earlier, I had leapt for joy when my son had won a place at our closest state primary. It had just the kind of ethos that metropolitan London types love: a forest school, no uniform and teachers addressed by their first names. Yet — after two fantastic years where parents were subjected to management-consultant level workshops about growth mindset and phonics — contact between parents and the school began to taper off.

The school always assured me that my child was ‘a joy to teach’ (did that mean he was just compliant?), doing well (yes, but where is the data?) and that I had ‘nothing to worry about’ (if I didn’t want him ever to go anywhere selective).

To placate my nosey instincts, I put myself forward as a parent governor. The competition was fierce, but I managed to write a campaign leaflet touting my credentials as a fearless political journalist who could hold the prime minister of the day to account so would not cower when grilling the senior leadership team of a local primary school. I managed to get elected.

Then I proceeded to break every manifesto promise I had made. Seeing under the bonnet of a local authority school gives you real perspective. No amount of middle-class entitled moaning that a child needs more stretching in maths or more challenging books to read was going to trump the needs of kids who were on the verge of being taken into care or whose families were facing homelessness.

Every governors’ meeting was a white-knuckle ride, disguised by tedious acronyms and bureaucracy, where we discovered that the roof was literally falling in, or the air quality was at ‘illegal’ levels, or precarious funding positions could mean redundancies next year. During the pandemic, staff were embroiled in the logistics of getting food parcels to struggling families. There was little room to argue about which version of Times Table Rock Stars the school should use or whether there was a gifted and talented programme in place.

We made the decision to let our son (still only seven then) sit a three-hour exam for a selective independent school which we figured would at least build resilience as he would probably fail to get in.

He got in. Nobody was more shocked than Gloria. And two and a half years on, he has thrived.

We still have a younger child at a state school and the difference in provision between state and private became glaringly obvious during the pandemic. While the state primary opened its doors to up to 40 per cent of the intake, including the children of anyone who was deemed a key worker or vulnerable, there was little provision for the rest of the kids. Links were sent out to various educational apps. There were weekly phone calls to ensure children were being kept alive, and prerecorded lessons.

There were no live online lessons because — I was told — ‘teachers did not sign up to be judged by parents’. What the teachers failed to realise was that at no other point in history would parents feel so inadequate and humbled by anyone who could make their kid write a sentence without a screaming match.

Meanwhile, at the independent school, enough live lessons were laid on to quell the chorus of protests from parents who were offered a modest discount on that term’s fees. More importantly, the live lessons meant that pupils were answerable to someone other than their parents.

This disparity in provision is not just ‘anecdata’: a recent survey of nearly 5,000 teachers for the Bett show by Teacher Tapp showed teachers feared that pupils had, on average, fallen behind by 18 months or more. A majority of private secondary school teachers, though, thought that the gap would be closed within six months. Just 3 per cent of teachers in state schools did not think there was a learning gap created by the pandemic, compared with 19 per cent of private school teachers who thought there was no gap.

When you choose private education for your child in London, you must anticipate some social backlash. It will likely come from those who could more than afford to send their children to independent schools, if they sold their holiday homes, did not buy the latest Tesla or did not insist on five-star holidays every half-term. Others — who benefited from a private education themselves and therefore have acquired the nuanced cultural capital that outsiders like us have not — feel they do not need to do this for their own children. It is those without the financial means who will say: ‘Wow, lucky you. I would do the same if I could.’

One successful actor friend (Oxbridge) had such an appalling time at boarding school that he has rejected private school for his own children. Instead, he moved his family to a leafy north London enclave where houses in the catchment for the top state secondary go for hundreds of thousands of pounds more than those a street away.

The property price difference alone would pay for a decade of private schooling — but it would not give you the warm glow that comes from the belief that you have managed to avoid perpetuating class privilege. Except you haven’t: you will more than get your money back once you sell your premium property, whereas ‘investment’ in private school for parents is merely ‘spending’.

You could argue it is more morally dubious to use your financial advantage to move house for schools because you are elbowing out poorer kids whose families do not have the means to move. There is something blunt, perhaps crass, about signing the direct debit form for school fees. But at least it is honest — and you haven’t trampled a poor family via postcode to get there.

So what would help state schools keep aspirational families like ours? Many teachers I have encountered in the state sector are some of the best and could hold their own. Class sizes in some inner London schools are on par with those at independent schools thanks to urban flight during the pandemic.

More rigorous academic focus? Independent schools already concentrate more on off-curriculum learning and offer more music and sports. Meanwhile state schools are burdened with new phonics and maths tests almost annually.

A Jeremy Corbyn-style raid on the independent sector, forcing the independent schools into the state system? This will just exacerbate the postcode divisions, making good state schools ever more out of reach of the poor. The same impact would be felt by scrapping private schools’ charitable status or slapping VAT on fees — as Scotland is about to find out.

One solution would be to trust parents more: increase their access to lessons and assemblies. Another would be to change Ofsted’s obsession with the attainment gap between ‘pupil premium’ children — disadvantaged pupils for whom schools receive extra funding — and others, as this creates a perverse incentive for schools to suppress the top achievers rather than actually lifting the bottom up. Many schools have jettisoned their programmes for more advanced learners as resources will only stretch so far and the priority is to get those who have fallen behind up to expected levels.

The biggest change that state schools could make to revolutionise everyone’s life chances is to ‘teach to the top’. Until that is the norm, the unprecedented demand for independent schools will continue — and we will continue to put our children through appalling levels of testing, even dodging vicious chihuahuas in the pursuit of a coveted school place.