Education, Education, Education: a Highly Theoretical Deliberation

As the average spend on private education goes well beyond a £250,000 per child, its value is being contested. Why then, in the cost of living crisis, is it all I hear about at my school gate?

(Left: at my non-uniform state primary; middle: at my private secondary; left: one of my many extra-curricular activities)

This week’s lengthy discussion comes from a joke I made a couple of weeks ago, when I made a flip quip that I should do a piece on private schools instead of talking about my nether regions. After posting the piece, along with an almost overwhelming number of messages about vag-gate, I also got several DMs asking for my opinion and thoughts on schools. Mostly they were from women who weren’t British but now find themselves raising kids on this weird isle of ours, but there were also a couple from people who I sense, feeling a kindred spirit, wanted to know my thoughts.

Country-wide, only 6.4% of children are privately educated, but in London, depending on your borough, it can be a far higher proportion. Based on ONS figures, a whopping 58% of primary-aged kids in Kensington & Chelsea go to fee paying schools and it’s true that a quarter of all private school pupils live in London. So, it’s perhaps hardly surprising that it’s just a major topic at my school gate. And I mean that more broadly, as in it crops up amongst friends and acquaintances with young children in schools across the city, many of whom I would never have guessed would give the idea of going private a flicker of consideration (to note, Camden, Westminster and Croydon are all high percentage private too). Couples I had presumed were neither in the financial situation to afford it (renters, self-made people working in creative industries, here’s me stereotyping), and liberal, left-wing voters (again, here’s me stereotyping) have engaged with me on this topic.

Before I go any further, for my family this is an entirely academic conversation (pun intended). Aside from my conscience and political feelings, the cost of putting two kids into the private school system is not attached to reality for us right now. But if every part of our plan goes to plan, one day it could be a decision rather than a philosophical quandary. Secondly, I’m a long way from being an expert in education. I’ve spoken to lots of people for this piece to enrich my understanding, including both state and private school teachers, governors and tutors and have done a deep dive into recent research, but I’m no sage. Thirdly, I haven’t been able to come to any hard and fast conclusion, but I hope the following words might answer some questions while also asking more. What I do know is that ‘where did you go to school’ remains one of this country’s defining questions and while it’s become increasingly provocative to ask it over the years, it is no less important than it ever was.

However, unlike when I was growing up, our education system isn’t at the forefront of political discussion. In 2001, Tony Blair’s seminal ‘Education, education, education’ second term manifesto speech, supported by the biggest real terms capital investment in schooling for two decades meant that the system (and its inherent inequity) was constantly front-page news. Most recently, the most newsworthy announcement our government has made about education is that those who struggle with numbers should be made to feel that it’s not ‘culturally’ ok. As an aside, I have absolutely no issue with a level of core maths being taught up until 18, as Mr Sunak proposes. What I have an issue with is the demonisation of a lack of numeracy while real term investment in education slides and the government misses targets for recruitment of maths teachers for the past 10 years. But I digress.

Mostly, what I mean to say is that there is so much other shit going on. Interest rates, inflation, house prices, the NHS, Covid, Brexit, climate change, the internecine wrangling between men who went to the same school. In the midst of the mess, education has been subsumed into the abyss and in that vacuum, parents seem to be furtively flailing. Following large increases in investment per child through the 2000s, school spending, per pupil, fell in real terms from 2010 (when David Cameron was elected) for a decade by 8%, or £10billion. This marked the largest cut in education investment for over 40 years. Recent budgets have attempted to turn this squeeze around and by 2024 the funding should return in real terms to 2010 level, but the decade of underinvestment has ravaged our schools and that’s a huge factor in the current strike action. To put it in even broader perspective, in the late 70’s, education spend totalled 12% of government spend, while 2020-21 equalled a historic low at 10%. Over the same time, healthcare spending has increased from 9% to over 20% today. The Boomers don’t just own all the houses, they dominate fiscal priorities too.

I finished my A-levels in 2006. Back in that era, the fact that a front bench MP (Harriet Harman) sent her child to a grammar school (not even a private one) was the scandal of 1996 (aside from a well-covered royal divorce). Either way, the injustice of our education system was up for debate within the media and beyond. Today there is just apathy, even though it remains as stonkingly unfair as it ever was. For an average of £20,480 per year, you can send your child to a secondary day school which achieves higher academic grades, has better facilities and a greater choice of extra-curricular activities (for boarding increase that to £34,790). Of course, you also get so much more than that for your money. It’s the people your child meets in these loci of wealth, the confidence they build by rubbing shoulders with (often extreme) privilege and the relative isolation from the impacts of true scarcity during their formative years which really changes the game. Even with all of the contemporary energy focused on breaking down systemic privilege and nepo-baby culture, for some unfathomable reason, this unfairness remains an elephant in the room. Why isn’t it on the agenda? I ask this as a girl who went to private school.

Before I wind it all back to me (plus ça change), I want to offer a little precis of the current research-led data on the outcomes of private schooling. While it is true that a child that goes to private school is more than twice as likely to achieve an A* at A-level, there is some dissention about why this might be. Professor Robert Plomin, a professor in behavioural genetics at King’s College argues that selective schooling has a negligible impact on results. His research shows that the 7% difference in academic grades achieved by selective schools (private and grammar) and comprehensive schools can be accounted for by differences of ability and family income. Put basically, genetically clever children who pass entrance exams and do the best at school, end up doing well in their A-levels, making selective education a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wealthier children, no matter how they are educated, also do better in their A-levels due to a vast range of factors, including more books in the home, increased conversation with their parents with a broader vocabulary, better access to healthcare and enrichment activities and an absence of chronic stressors which poverty can generate. In Professor Plomin’s reading, it’s a fallacy that it’s private education which turns the dial.

But if you might be thinking, wonderful, I’ll be saving myself a quarter of a mil then, there is also significant research which counters this claim from the vantages of higher educational attainment, eventual professional status and financial position. When you break down the data of life outcomes, factoring the initial social and financial background of a child, countless papers prove there is zero question that you get what you pay for. A longitudinal study of the generation born in 1970 showed that those who were privately educated earned 21% more than those who went through state education by the time they all hit 30.  In the government’s Elitist Britain 2019 paper released by the Social Mobility Commission and the Sutton Trust, the power structures of our country were laid bare showing how insanely dominated they are by a narrow section of the population – the 7% privately educated and the roughly 1% who graduate from just two universities (Oxbridge). Seventy-four percent of our judges were privately educated, 57% percent of the members of the House of Lords, 39% of the cabinet (in comparison to 9% of the Labour shadow cabinet), the past four Conservative prime ministers, 57% of the rich list, 48% of the FTSE 350 CEOs, 44% of newspaper columnists (with 33% attending Oxbridge), 59% of civil service permanent secretaries, 44% of actors, 43% of the England cricket team…To suggest that this is all down simply to genetics and basic socio-economics is a stretch too far for most academics. Going to private schools also makes you twice as likely to vote Tory, which is perhaps why we hear so little about it these days.

In my little family, I have an unusual perspective on the powers and limitations of the British education system to mould a life. Because that is what education can do. It isn’t the same as holidays or the size of a kid’s bedroom or how many prezzies they get under the tree. Your schooling has the power to set your horizons and it can have huge, long-lasting generational impact, as I will explore below. My partner, who has special educational needs (dyslexia), went to Catholic schools through to 15, when he dropped out with no qualifications. Conversely, I started my education in state schools, then with the help of an education grant and then later academic scholarships, went to a private day school for my secondary education. I came out with straight A*s at GCSEs and As at A-level, gaining maximum marks in some subjects. That success led to a first-class degree and a MA. Where my partner has succeeded despite his education, I believe I’ve got to where I have in a large part because of mine.

So how did I come to go to private? It was certainly unlikely as both my parents left school at 16 and barely knew anyone who had done any different. My dad was a clerk in the civil service and then went on to work in patenting, while my mum was a secretary. All four of my grandparents were working at 14 (my paternal grandfather at 12) either in factories or on the land. In the Blairite context, I was exactly the kind of pupil the government wanted to infiltrate the higher echelons of education. At 10, I took two entrance exams, one for a place at a selective state girl’s school and another for the private school I ended up going to. I got places at both, but only after intensive tutoring. It wasn’t until year five, when a teacher at my state primary pulled my mum aside and told her that I should really consider taking these tests and it was time to start to prepare, that she even knew that was something people did. Mum always maintains that she wasn’t aware I had any particular academic aptitude, and she didn’t want to scar me by creating hopes to be dashed. To dip a toe into the water, she sent both my brother and I off to take an IQ test and we were both deemed ‘gifted’, or as Wikipedia labels it, of ‘very superior intelligence’. She says she was honestly shocked. After that, it was weeks of verbal and non-verbal reasoning, one-on-one classes and test papers leading up to the big day and yes, I was very anxious.

I left my state primary top of the year, but when I joined my private secondary, I was about 5th from the bottom. It took me about a year to catch up, burning the candle every weekend. That is one person’s story, and yes, it was also 28 years ago. But going from being top dog to underdog left a lasting impression. I could feel the disparity everywhere—the standards of everything were so much higher and that went far beyond simply moving to big school. Over my years in my private school, I was stretched in everything I touched. One of countless examples: I took my German GCSE early when I was 14 and hadn’t picked up another language. But six weeks before my main exams at 16, a teacher bumped into me in the library, said how sad she was that I hadn’t taken on French and on the spot offered me one-on-one after school tuition for an hour twice a week to coach me to top marks. That was just what everything was like—it was so individual, and your teachers had the time, energy and resources to invest so deeply into you. Classes were small, facilities were brand new and shiny, everyone cared. Whatever you were interested in or showed aptitude for, you could explore. For me, that was a dizzying timetable of additional stretch classes, extra curriculars and the pure joy of hours alone in the art studio. Even at the time, I couldn’t miss the injustice.

My private school was both relatively cheap and full of whip-smart girls born to bad boys done good, so there wasn’t really that hoity network which comes as standard with London day schools or major boarding schools (my school is included in the prestigious HMC -Headmaster’s & Headmistress’ Conference, but a long way from the créme of the Clarendon group). I didn’t experience any of that until I got to Uni. But my God, it was drilled into us to believe in ourselves; that we could be and do anything. Without that inner certainty, I would never have believed I could be a writer, I wouldn’t have carried on interning for two years or kept relentlessly pushing to be a journalist. While I still broke my back to get a foot in the door, it was my private education which led me to believe I deserved to be on the inside.

Living in West London, I now pick up a lot of information about schools via osmosis/being an inquisitive journo at the swings, in the post office, at the school fair. I’ve learnt about the ‘State ‘til 8’ tactic whereby parents save money by enrolling their kids in a state primary for key stage one, then get them into a private prep school for year three to give them time to get up to speed for secondary entrance exams. I’ve learnt that they can take ‘plus’ exams every year (as in 6+,7+, 8+ etc) to get into a private school, but if they are ‘through’ schools (taking children automatically through into a senior school), the tests are insanely tough as schools are looking to identify A* A-level pupils…. amongst 6-year-olds. I know that some prep schools are cheaper than nursery, while others cost double the amount for no real reason than they attract fancier families.

I can also say for certain that there is so much doom and fear being bounced around amongst parents right now. The big, sweeping story I hear in London, is that state primaries are ‘great’ but most secondaries aren’t. We can all see the state of all of our state services. Our teachers are on their knees and understandably engaged in industrial action. The message I’ve gleaned is this means there will be more disruption, less discipline, huge classes and a high chance that your kid will fall off the rails if they go to the local comp. It’s enough to give even the most confirmed egalitarian the jitters—especially if you’ve had the insane fortune to have experienced an education with all the trimmings. On the other hand, I also hear that London’s hot house private schools are riddled with class A drugs, resemble Euphoria-style dens of inequity with anorexia, sexual assault and depression rife. The sheer scale of the wealth is also said to be stunning. These assessments are almost cartoonish in their one dimensionality. Knowing teachers on both sides of the debate, the feedback is that there is a seed of truth to both, but every school, every year and every class is different, so these sweeping statements mask the mix of both good and bad in both sectors.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned my own political standpoint on the whole system, mostly because I really do try and keep an open mind. Do I believe that private schools are the root cause of all inequality in this country? No, it’s obviously far more complex than that. Do I believe they create an anachronistic power gap, offering a channel for the privileged to protect their privilege through the generations? Absolutely. But…Am I for authoritarian governments telling people how they can and cannot educate their children? Less confident on this one.

I personally want my children to live in the real world and there is no question that they are already so much more privileged than both their parents were. The biggest value of my education was that it broke a generational pattern and transformed my horizons. But for them? They’re already white, middle-class kids living in a nice house with a garden with both parents at home. One is an author, the other is a business owner. We know shit-tons of people in every line of work. If they need a tutor, they have me. If they need to know why some people wear red cords or what beating is, I have the answers. Their horizons will be broad because mine are. They have already won the lottery.

There is also the argument to be made that the world has turned, that people have different jobs and the way they get them has been transformed. When I say that my partner’s schooling failed him, I’m looking solely through a lens of the orthodox value of 5A-Cs. Education is not the only route to success and looking at the tech millionaires who honed their craft in their bedrooms outside of any kind of traditional education, a lot of this conversation seems anachronistic. Let AI eat up textbooks and we might start to wonder what school is for on an existential level. Obviously, I don’t know what the future holds and there is always the chance that my boys will need extra support, that we discover they have special or educational needs or some other variable that I’m not aware of today. I also only get to make 50% of the imaginary choice as I’m one of two parents.

What I will say with conviction is that if my kids were to go to private school it would make me a hypocrite, because I believe that every child deserves a fair tilt. It would undermine my values and belief system; it would mean I was betraying my compass in order to give my children an advantage. There are no linguistic gymnastics which could ever obscure that and having put this down in pen on the internet, I would have to hold my hands up and say that I’m not a woman of principle. If we care about all children and not just our own, there can be no moral justification for a system which allows a minority to thrive because of what their parents earn and I think that ultimately most people—even if they ultimately decide to send their children private—agree. I don’t judge my parents for their decision, because ultimately they had close to zero idea what private education actually entailed; I would judge myself very harshly. But whether you’re rich, poor or somewhere in between, we all do mad things for our kids. Come keep me honest circa 2029.