Eleven Plus Exam

Ana These days I would say that, generally speaking, private schools are only affordable for the relatively rich or, increasingly, the mega rich.

Private day school fees cost between £11,000 and £30,000+ per year (not including additional expenses for uniform, sports equipment, extra curricular activity charges, and even books in some schools). At the lower end, the fees alone come to around £920 a month - and that is for just one child.

The average salary is £26,500 and a significant number of people are paid well below that amount. Average rents are £649 per month and £1,400 a month in London. It is inconceivable that an average family could afford private education and this is borne out by the recent reports that professional people are struggling to pay school fees.

I feel, in any case, that even if a significantly larger proportion of parents could afford to pay for private education it is unjust to provide tax relief to very profitable institutions that ultimately only provide extra privileges to those who are already privileged.

We have many children in this country who are going short of food and decent clothing so I can't see why private pupils should be subsidised by the state.

Ana, in the 1950's my county (Essex) sent a number of 11+ passers to private schools in the county because there were not enough grammar school places available. I ended up at one of the many schools founded in the sixteenth century to replace the monastic schools abolished with the monasteries. So, yes, it was a charity as well. Only a few weeks ago I discovered that one of my school friends was another 11 plusser, but no mention was made of it at school at the time.

Yes, durhamjen, I can imagine. At such a vulnerable age, that sort of careless peer dismissal must have been awful.

No - S.

As I said before, the girls school was not called the grammar, but the high school. That was the one I was supposed to go to, but the head at the primary school said that none of us would get to the private school so we had to tell our parents not to put it down. Red rag to a bull to my mother.
I had to catch two buses to get to the school, and it was embarrassing when my dad was driving the school bus. You can imagine what the Rolls brigade said.

It wasnt the same school was it Ana? Mine began with a T.

Mine was all girls too. Definitely a social mix. Very interesting. And they came from a large geographical distance.

You would probably have been better off at the local Grammar then. There seemed to be quite a good mix of backgrounds at mine, although it was an all-girls school.

Because I saw the way people of my class were treated by those who thought it was their right to have a privileged education. I'm talking about the staff as well as the pupils. Like I said, four scholarships a year to this school.
No, I did not get a better education, because I was put in my place too much, and this is not chip on the shoulder stuff. It's realism.
I left at 17 without taking A levels. I took O level maths and physics with chemistry in the fourth year, and wanted to study science A levels but was not allowed to because I had not studied maths in the fifth year.
I ended up studying languages with girls who went to France and Germany for most of their holidays. Nobody even suggested I went to the tech to take sciences and in those days you thought what your teachers and parents said was best.

I passed my 11+ too but went to the local Grammar School - never heard of anyone being allocated a place at a private school before. I wonder if you got a better education there?

And I wonder why you're so against them now.

I can understand that, granjura, but my grandson gets his socialisation by playing and training in a football team with his mates from the high school. The high schools got bigger and bigger here, and he could not take the problem of getting through the scrum to get to his nurture group every day.
Because we live in a village, all the people he comes into contact with in the shops etc. know who he is and why he's not at school. They treat him as an equal and have long conversations with him, even when there's a queue. He's a lot more socially aware than most kids his age.
If there had been a middle school system he possibly would have coped.

Didn't like to brag. Passed my 11+. Four places a year to the private school.

Yet you went to a private school?

My dad was a bus driver and my mother a nurse, Ana, so no, not rich.

The reason home-schooling is not allowed here- is that it is felt that children who are isolated from contact with others, sharing, coping, etc- will suffer from lack of socialisation and not be able to continue into further ed.

Were your parents rich, durhamjen?

Was it not because of the war- men went off to war and women had to 'man' the factories and do the jobs- so the State took over child-care- including lunch provision.

Are the parents of all children who are sent to private schools rich?

And they still have their charity status from goodness knows when back in time? wow.

I admire you for teaching your grandson like that durhamjen.

I home school my grandson, soontobe, as he has ASD, and the local high school is not suitable. Not breaking the law. He asks me that every day.
Public schools were built for poor pupils to give them the schooling that tutored rich kids got. Then the rich kids parents saw them as a way of getting rid of their kids during the school term.
Have you never wondered why all the public schools are on railway lines?
That's why public schools got their charity status in the first place.

agreed Durhamjen. Just as it is here where I live. A bit different in Geneva and Zurich- as expats on vast salaries often send their kids to private international schools, for all sorts of reasons. Home teaching is not allowed where I live either.

Then pupils would go abroad I would assume. People always find ways round things.

Or set up their own schools.
Or home school. That would rocket. Tutors would be used big time.

I am opposed to both. I think that if those parents who chose to send their children to private or grammar schools had to send them to the local comprehensive, those comprehensives would improve for all pupils.
Free schools should be made local comprehensives or primaries and should have the same entry as other school. No favouritism.

Eloethan, you've done it again in expressing my feelings about selection so much more clearly than I may have one.

I'm opposed to grammar schools but feel less strongly about private schools, though they shouldn't get charitable status.

The loss of technical colleges for those over 16, who'd already done O levels, gcse's was not a positive move. Introducing poor replacements for apprenticeships was a very negative move. It's possible to right these wrongs, without the re-introduction of grammar schools, with the result that the majority of children don't get the opportunity to go on to A levels.

Because of the influx of pupils from overseas, private school fees are soaring. Several heads of these schools have said that their usual "client base" of doctors, solicitors, accountants, etc., are no longer as likely to be able to afford quality private schooling. Their numbers are certainly diminishing.

I don't understand this obsession with selection. Finland, which is renowned for its good education, educates all children in comprehensive schools, and it is illegal to charge school fees. I believe there are a tiny number of "private" schools which are financed by government grants. I think we might do better adopting this type of educational model than harking back to that mythical "golden age" of education which, in reality, worked well for a small minority of children but failed miserably in harnessing the talents of the majority.