Private grief

Two or three mornings a week I walk our four-year-old down to his Catholic primary school in Camden Town. As we pass an expensive though rather bad private school, we have to squeeze our way through the mayhem of north Londoners decanting their pampered progeny from their double-parked 4x4s.

I can’t say I like the look of the boys that much. If I were teaching them, I would tell them to do up their ties and get their ruddy hair cut. But it is the parents I find seriously disturbing, for they have absolutely no sense of the impact their cars, children and dogs have on our neighbourhood.

I am ashamed to admit that as I peer in through the tinted windows of their Porsche Cayennes at the vacant, entitled mothers texting their pedicurists, I feel the red mist descending. I would like to claim my chippiness is due to some late-onset sense of social justice and a belief in the virtues of state education. But in truth I am mostly resentful that I feel excluded from this gilded world, and worry that our children, though well taught, are currently billeted in prefabricated classrooms in their state primary schools.

Like many of my expensively educated friends, I find I spend a humiliating amount of my day pondering my family’s educational downward mobility. Neil Kinnock famously made much of the fact that he was the first Kinnock in history to have gone to university. I am haunted by the fear that our little darlings will be the first Robinsons since the repeal of the Corn Laws to go to a bog-standard secondary school, where they won’t be taught about Magna Carta, but will learn how to put a condom on a banana.

Andrew Gimson — a fellow freelance writer dependent on a fast-declining newspaper industry — recently wrote in these pages that private schools are unnecessary because parental influence is the dominant factor in a child’s development.