As I watch my 10-year-old daughter take a bow while the audience applauds, I feel a mixture of pride – and guilt. Her confidence has improved enormously since she started at a new private school in September, whereas I can’t even get her 14-year-old brother, who is taking drama GCSE, to even audition for the school plays, despite trying to bribe him to take a minor part.
This, in a nutshell, is one of the major differences between state and private – the confidence it gives your child. Our daughter, who was often overlooked in her state primary school in a class of 32 children of very mixed abilities, has come into her own at the local prep school.
That’s down to the smaller class sizes (a maximum of 14 in each class), the huge array of extracurricular activities and the fact we are paying for her to be nurtured in a way that simply wasn’t possible in an overstretched, underfunded state school. In an ideal world, every school would provide the same sort of care but, in reality, that’s just not the case.
My husband and I both benefited from a private education and we would have loved for both the children to have had the same, but fees have gone up considerably and we are doing the best we can.
They both went to the same state primary. Our son was offered a place at a private school and, had he not passed the 11-plus and thus got into a grammar school, he would probably have gone there. We would have had to remortgage to pay for two lots of school fees, though.
By the time our son was his sister’s age, we were having him tutored, but she hasn’t shown the same level of academic promise (largely thanks to inheriting my hopeless maths skills). So we decided that, if we weren’t going to put her forward for the 11-plus, we would move her sooner rather than later.
We have no regrets. She is a much more outgoing, happier and chattier child as a result. It’s not that her brother isn’t thriving at his co-ed grammar, but we know he’s not being given the same opportunities.
The focus at his school is all on academic achievement. The only extra-curricular activity he does is football at lunch time. No musical instruments, no extra language lessons and he pretty much gets away with doing the absolute bare minimum.
Then there is the awful food in the school canteen – Danish pastries for breakfast and nuggets and a fizzy drink at lunch time, whereas my daughter sits down to muesli or freshly-made chicken curry and salad.
Since starting at the new school, she has started drama lessons at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, piano lesssons and joined the netball team and now has a busier social life than me. I think that’s another thing the private system really nails – encouraging kids to join in.
When I used to ask our daughter about her day at the last school, I would get fairly monosyllabic responses. I now get a detailed account of her day from the facts she learned in her history class to what she had for lunch and who she sat next to. The school has engaged her in a way the previous one never did.
I have suggested to our son that when it comes to Sixth Form, he could look at one of the local private boys’ schools (if we can afford it, that is) but he’s developed a real aversion for ‘posh’ schools. I daren’t take him along to his sister’s sports day because I’m sure he will be horrified when he sees how incredible are the grounds. It’s set in a glorious 50 acres, whereas his school is just off a main road and they have to get the bus to a nearby playing field.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a huge sacrifice paying one set of school fees, especially with the impending increase if Labour gets in – but it’s a sacrifice we are willing to make for our daughter’s future.
The fact is our state system, much like the NHS, is really struggling and the lack of provision for any child who is above or below average is woeful.
At our son’s school, for example, they only have a number of places available on any school trip because of the limited budget so it’s (allegedly) a case of drawing names out of a hat but it means at least half the children miss out.
Some of the other more adventurous school trips – like the one to the Northern Lights last year – are so expensive (£2,000) that most children can’t afford to go on them anyway.
Perhaps we’re actually doing our son a favour in some ways too, or so I like to tell myself, as I think there is still a certain cachet in grammar school (it didn’t do Hugh Grant any harm, did it?). I suppose our son is living in the real world whereas our daughter is now in something of a gilded cage and will no doubt be branded as privileged in the years to come.
There’s a chance they will both resent us in future for the choices we’ve made. But I hope they will come to appreciate that we did the best we could and that each path will have its own benefits.