The feverishness of the private prep-school market in London has reached such a pitch that children in the nursery class at Eaton House Belgravia are being prepared for the seven-plus from the age of two.
‘Some of them are still in nappies, and some of them still need a nap,’ the headmaster Ross Montague tells me. ‘We have folding camp beds, and our lovely nursery team of six teachers deal with that.’
While seeming to be kind to each other, these parents are in fierce competition
Montague, an ex-professional footballer who used to play for Brentford before he was injured and then retrained to become an educationalist and school superhead, accepts that the highly demanding assessment processes for Westminster Under School, St Paul’s Juniors and King’s College School Wimbledon are both fair and here to stay, so it’s the school’s job to prepare children for them from as early an age as possible, ‘in a responsible manner’.
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