Gerri Peev

The curious social backlash that comes with private education

  • From Spectator Life
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‘If this is the top of the class, I would hate to see the rest of them.’ That was the withering verdict of the woman I had just handed over hundreds of pounds to on a hunch that my child wasn’t doing as well as I was being told. Gloria (name changed) is what misogynists would call a battle-axe.

Officially, though, she was a formidable retired head of a highly selective pre-prep. She shared her townhouse with a pet chihuahua that was as terrifying. My then seven-year-old had just undergone a battalion of tests in her pristine kitchen. His ‘only’ potential, apparently, was that he had a reading age three years above his chronological one and that his non-verbal reasoning score was ‘relatively high — but we are not talking Mensa levels’. This score can apparently only ever be ‘tutored up’ by ten points.

What a difference a few years had made. Three years earlier, I had leapt for joy when my son had won a place at our closest state primary. It had just the kind of ethos that metropolitan London types love: a forest school, no uniform and teachers addressed by their first names. Yet — after two fantastic years where parents were subjected to management-consultant level workshops about growth mindset and phonics — contact between parents and the school began to taper off.

The school always assured me that my child was ‘a joy to teach’ (did that mean he was just compliant?), doing well (yes, but where is the data?) and that I had ‘nothing to worry about’ (if I didn’t want him ever to go anywhere selective).

To placate my nosey instincts, I put myself forward as a parent governor. The competition was fierce, but I managed to write a campaign leaflet touting my credentials as a fearless political journalist who could hold the prime minister of the day to account so would not cower when grilling the senior leadership team of a local primary school.

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