In my incurably trivial way I divide British parents into three categories.2 Type A: the millions who genuinely can’t afford to send their kids to private school. Type B: those who are so stinking rich3 that they don’t have to think twice about it. And Type C: the lot in between. The ones with the interesting moral dilemmas involving sacrifice and principles. Middle-earning and middle-class, they could afford to pay school fees, but only by working all hours of the day and night, praying that they aren’t made redundant, and adopting the lifestyle of Trappist monks.4
It’s the Type Cs that fascinate me, not least because you see their dilemma at its most acute in my neck of the woods.5 Many London boroughs6 have bad state schools and a sizeable group of parents with above-average incomes. So you might expect vast numbers to go private. But those areas are often Labour strongholds7. The parents have social consciences. Should they not support their community’s schools? Do they want their kids to grow up toffee-nosed8? And couldn’t the total sum needed to send a child to London’s pricey private day-schools选?00,000, minimum better spent expanding the kid’s horizons in other ways?9
All those thoughts jostle10 in parents’ minds. But one factor usually outweighs all else. It’s the middle-class neurological disease of our age: exam twitchiness.11 How will the kids get decent jobs if they don’t get good degrees? How will they get good degrees if they don’t get good A-levels12? And how will they get good A-levels if they attend that comprehensive in special measures down the road?13 So it’s fear, not conviction, that drives parents to private schools. And the schools know they must deliver. Yes, they can tart up their educational "vision" with all manner of frills Olympic-sized swimming-pools, geography field-trips to Kathmandu, you name it.14 But if they don’t get pupils into top universities, they are dead.
Here, however, is a bit of new research to put the proverbial pussy among the pigeons.15 Warwick University academics recently studied the degree results of nearly 50,000 students across Britain. What they discovered, surprisingly, was that boys who attended private schools had a significantly worse chance of getting a good degree than state-school boys with the same A-level grades. In fact, the more expensive the school, the less well its boys did at university.
Heavens. They won’t be quoting that on open days at Eton16. What does it mean? Well, the fact that there was no similar correlation for girls, who are generally more self-motivated as students, suggests a likely explanation. Private schools are proficient at cajoling and coaching pupils through their A-levels. But when the boys reach university and suddenly have no one to prod them, they slacken off.17
Diehard lefties18 shouldn’t be too gleeful. The findings don’t imply that your local comprehensive gives boys a better chance of getting a good degree than a£20,000-a-year private school would. The average comprehensive would get far fewer pupils into university in the first place. But it does suggest a more heretical notion: that turning schools into cramming factories, where the pressure to excel in exams eclipses every other ambition, is not the best way to nurture independent-minded young adults.19
What private schools do is a matter for them and the parents who bankroll20 them. But when over-subscribed state schools adopt quasi-private doctrines and methods is increasingly happening that’s a public matter. Consider the top state school in my borough. Already rigorously selective, it now has so many parents hammering at its door that it has imposed a £600-a-year "voluntary" (ho ho) covenant on all parents.21 It also prevents any pupil who isn’t predicted to get excellent A-l |