State Educated to the Top School in the Country: Reflections.
Disclosure: These are modal observations. They are generalisations. They are not true for everyone. Don’t bite my head off.
I attended two very different schools.
The first was a standard, run of the mill grammar. This school is better than many others — 4 people in my year attend Oxford, and only 2.6% of students are on a pupil premium. On the ‘Privileged School Scale’, these comments can only reflect the top 10%.
However, my sixth form ranked first in the country for GCSEs one year. I attended on a half scholarship, reducing the fees from the stratospheric £7000 to the merely exborinant £3500. A term. Independent living has made real, solidified the scale of the sum from the abstract (alongside a new-found appreciation of my parents sacrifices, and the gratitude I owe them).
Very few people cross the bridge from state to private. Fewer go from state to ‘Bubble Schools’ (the ‘technical’ term for the cabal of elite London private schools). Fewer still do this in Sixth Form. Moving gave me an insight most people lack. Maintaining friends from both silos allows an understanding of the preconceptions each ‘side’ holds against the other. I am limited to compare the privileged with hyper-privileged. However, the exponential nature of change money wroughts on schooling means that the differences between the 10% and the 0.01% make the experience of one almost unimaginable for the other. The result? Lazy heuristics and stereotypes dominate discourse on both sides.
The most significant preconception I have found of state school students against private is reducing them to a single dimension. Private schools are not filled with Malory Towers characters. Money insulates, but is not Kevlar. Bubble Students may return from lacrosse training to a home of divorce, abuse and instability. Depression, anxiety, self-harm, anorexia was significantly more prevalent at the school I attended for sixth form than my previous school, and at a comparable level to a nearby girls grammar. I stood in a yawning atrium, on the most expensive street in Bucks, and in the early hours of the morning listened to a seemingly eternal tirade of beratings of ‘you useless rat’, ‘piece of shit’, ‘pathetic, pointless scum’ from an unimaginably vile guardian I have ever come across (I refuse to call her a mother).
In my first year, I was particularly guilty of this reductive trivialisation. Previously, Bubble Schools had been the Other. ‘Grounds’ not fields; ‘Dining Halls’ not canteens; ‘Games’ not PE. Odd rituals — Founders Days; Drill; Procession. I was being introduced to a pretty alien environment, and it seemed natural that these aggrandising terms extended to the inhabitants of the places they demarcated.
I had a friend with Gucci trainers, Prada jeans and multiple homes, who could spend thousands on a night out. When she was upset, I shut my ears, thinking “You’re simply not allowed to be sad when there is the option of some Chanel to cheer you up”. Not proud of it, but true. A little sign of how insidious capitalist messaging is. Advertisements constantly promise we are simply one purchase from happiness, so, the logic appeared, if you can purchase anything, you cannot be unhappy. My mistake dawned on me over the year. Family dynamics, grandparent health scares, distant or unavailable parents — these are the lot of humanity as a whole. It’s a febrile trap, to see a direct correlation between money and happiness, with the oligarchs on cloud nine, but nonetheless, an illusion.
Whisper it. Private school kids have feelings too.
The flipside of this was some of the breath-taking ignorance I experienced in the Bubble. As far as I’m aware, only two of us in the year came from state schools. I study PPE at Oxford, at the college with the highest applicants: place ratio. The other girl studies Economics at Cambridge, ranking 7th in her year. I’m aware how vainglorious the previous two sentences look. I include them to provide an objective indicator to show how ridiculous some of the treatment I received was. We are, indisputably, smart.
Yet some of the condescension, doubt, and awe-inspiring ignorance beggared belief. Comments such as ‘Oxford need to uptake their state school intake’ snidely insinuated I hadn’t received my offer on merit. Teachers attributed my work ethic, essay style, and presentation to the school I had come from, not taking me at face value. Even the well-intentioned — the girl who made it out that I was an Inspiration who had Risen out of Adversity to join the Promised Land — made me feel like a civilised barbarian, brought in from the cold.
It also reveals a lack of appreciation of a simple fact.
People do not pay £20,000 of after-tax income a year for nothing. Some girls attend for 14 years. £280,000. A 5 bedroom house in Leicester. To justify this vast expense, there needs to be a sense that you are paying for something. How is this done? By constant reiterations that you are special, that this is a world-class education, and to make the value shine all the brighter, that the world of State Schools is one you are privileged not to be in.
Brutal honesty? In terms of the quality of teaching between the two schools (admittedly, a rather small, ad hoc sample of 2 schools, 6 subjects), two subjects were comparable (English and Politics), two were better than at my previous school (Physics and Maths), and two significantly better at sixth form (Philosophy and Spanish). Comparing between these two private schools, I would say that your £20,000 does buy an advantage, but far less than the academic benefits spending that sum on, say, tutoring would confer. Private school students, I’m sorry, what you say does not differ much in terms of the quality of its content to those at state schools.*
What it does give you is the confidence to say it. This is not an unmitigated advantage. A lot of stories circulate of “rags”-to-riches rises of people from underprivileged schools and areas. Partly, this is due to the audience— a manifestation of our love of a Cinderella tale. But I think there is a grain of truth. I believe when bright people from state schools put themselves forward they will do disproportionately well. Here’s why. Attending Chesham gave humility. I went into my interviews with a willingness to say my opinion but also an awareness that I was a 17 year old. I wasn’t about to beat Kant. Humility is an underappreciated virtue.
This is something I think a lot of the reams of North Londoners who went to interview lacked. When you are constantly told that you are special (the aforementioned necessity), it permeates — in some cases rather too much. A lot of this confidence is unfounded. Take sport — there are exclusive Independent School Leagues meaning every student seemed to have reached a national final. (Unpleasant disclosure: when a league only permits entrants from 7% of schools, victory is hardly ‘National’). Or the fact that lacrosse, rowing, shooting and the like aren’t played by most people — so it’s far easier to advance rapidly upward through the ranks.**
This is all a (rather convoluted) way of saying that the biggest illusion that private school kids have is a (often not consciously acknowledged) belief that they are more competent than those from state schools. It’s just not true. A large amount of what £280,000 buys is social capital. This is valuable, and is responsible for a significant amount of the disparity in outcomes between state and private schools. But social capital doesn’t make you better. It gives opportunities, but if not received on merit do not confer superiority. Happening to know someone who has an uncle at a major bank/ lets you know about an application round/ navigates you through the upper echelons of society are arbitrary twists of fortune, quirks of fate. They do not reflect on you as a person.
Contrary to what is, in myriad different ways, subtly communicated in the school, a very small percentage of who you are as a person is a consequence of the school you attend. The sheer heterogeneity, diversity of opinions, thought, personalities and more in any year of any school should attest to that.
Whisper it. The main thing the fees bought is a network.
*Of course, there is the difference with exam results. I struggle with answering this without an inconsistency in my argument of the following form:
1: People from Private Schools tend to do better
2: Teaching is of a comparable standard
3: Private school students are not inherently better.
So where does the difference come from? I think my best explanation is from ‘no value add’ teaching. So possible things like knowing quirks of examination papers, or greater time spent (so value per minute is constant) are what allows this difference. But I don’t think that fact contributes to (3). Savvy exam board choices does not a better individual make.
**I appreciate the irony that I too play a pretty private school dominated sport.
