Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The truth about private school admissions

Don’t worry if your child doesn’t ‘Get In’; there are many who won’t

In recent years I’ve started putting the verb ‘to get in’ (when it refers to the action of being offered a place at a sought-after school) into capital letters: ‘To Get In’. It seems to merit capitals, so much has it become the defining verb of one’s child’s success and therefore future happiness, as perceived by the desperate parent. ‘He Got In to Eton.’ ‘She Got In to Latymer.’ Or (whispered only to one’s most trusted friends), ‘He didn’t Get In to St Paul’s.’

I suppose it’s quite amusing that being able to Get your child In to the private school of your dreams is the one prized item that the fee-paying middle classes cannot simply buy. The Getting In system is a meritocracy. Fee-payers are up against bursary-receivers: private schools these days are proud of their bursary schemes, wishing to be seen to be socially inclusive. Good for them; but this keeps ever-growing numbers of paying parents awake at night for decades in an agony of anxiety about their children’s prospects in what the director of admissions at St Paul’s calls ‘the white-hot market’. It keeps tutorial firms and the publishers of the Bond Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning Assessment Papers in business. Because, of course, the schools of our dreams are vastly oversubscribed — especially the ones in London and the south-east.

When demand outstrips supply, both parties resort to playing games. Parents’ weapons are (a) to have the child heavily tutored, (b) to apply for six or seven schools and (c) to pay acceptance deposits for more than one. The schools’ weapons are (a) to devise exams which you can’t prepare for and which can tell whether a child has been overtutored and (b) to demand a dauntingly large deposit on acceptance of a conditional place. The parents’ agonised wait for the letter of acceptance or rejection is followed by the schools’ agonised wait for acceptance or rejection of the offer.

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