Even though it was more than 15 years ago, I clearly remember looking round the primary school I had set my heart on for my firstborn son, Jacob. Despite being in North London, it was set amid green fields, with a huge playground and outdoor space for all the classrooms.
It was rated outstanding and the head told us many pupils went on to attend the most prestigious schools in the area. The classrooms were filled with colourful paintings and the children were well behaved and neat in their smart uniforms. I was sold.
But when I told one of my snootier friends, she reeled in horror. ‘You’re sending him to state school?’ she sneered incredulously. It was as if I had announced I was letting my five-year-old loose in a crack den.
This is a reaction I have encountered so many times over the years — and I know I am not alone.
I think I did my four boys — Jacob, 20, Max, 18, and twins Zach and Jonah, 15 — a huge favour by sending them to state schools, Ursula Hirschkorn writes
Another good friend told me about a dinner party with some rich guests who grilled her on why she would even consider sending her daughter to a state secondary school. It was tantamount to child neglect in their opinion.
As if by failing to cough up tens of thousands of pounds to push our children to the front of the queue in life, we are somehow failing as parents.
Well the shoe will soon be on the other foot if Labour’s plan to add VAT to school fees comes to fruition should they win the General Election.
It’s thought almost a quarter of a million children will have to leave their gilded private schools behind and brave the state sector. Imagine all those poor Tarquins and Arabellas having to rough it with the common folk!
Do I feel sorry for them? Not a bit. For years, their parents have looked down on families like mine who didn’t have the income to pay school fees. For most of their childhood, I supported mine with my writing and my husband Mike, 48, ran his own small business — we didn’t make enough to send one child to a fee-paying school, let alone four.
When my boys were little, I had a radio debate with Katie Hopkins and she made her views clear: her children would attend a state school over her dead body.
Although the conversation was good-natured, I was still left feeling as if I didn’t love my children as much as she loved hers, just because I couldn’t afford the fees (even with the 20 per cent discount afforded by dodging VAT).
In fact, I think I did my four boys — Jacob, 20, Max, 18, and twins Zach and Jonah, 15 — a huge favour by sending them to state schools.
First, it never stood in their way academically. Jacob got all As and A*s in his A-Levels and a place at medical school in the toughest ever entry year. It wasn’t for him though as he’d caught the drama bug from his hugely talented teacher and is now studying at a leading drama school in London.
Max has been offered a place at one of the country’s top music colleges and the twins are studying like mad for their mock GCSEs. Their state school is hot on revision and, as a result, last year 83 per cent of pupils achieved A* to B grades at A-level.
My friend’s daughter picked up a clean sweep of A*s and is now studying medicine. Not too shabby considering how badly their parents let them down by not paying for their education.
Naturally, when I hear about friends’ privately educated children who didn’t get the grades they needed or the places they felt they deserved at university, I have to hide my gleeful reaction. Despite coughing up at least £100,000, plus tutoring in many cases, their offspring still couldn’t beat their state school contemporaries. Who looks the fool now?
But the real benefit of going to state school is that you get to mix with all walks of life. At primary school, my boys were educated with the children of Afghan refugees, kids whose parents had fled war-torn Somalia and those who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. The school drop-off was a melting pot of languages and the PTA’s ‘bring a dish from your home country’ event was a culinary trip around the world.
At secondary school, they rubbed shoulders with the children of celebrities (who were smart enough to know that paying for education isn’t always best) and children in care. It means they can talk to anyone and have no airs and graces.
This is in stark contrast to some of their haughty private school friends who either embarrassingly morph into ‘roadmen’ and start talking ‘street’, or amp up their poshness whenever they encounter anyone who isn’t from the same tiny, indulged tribe as them.
This is nothing new. When I went to Exeter University in the 1990s, the students were almost exclusively privately educated and they made sure you knew it. The first question I was asked was where had I been to school. When I answered an obscure British school in Belgium (and yes, it was private, but my parents could only afford it because they got a huge grant and it wasn’t in the least bit posh), their faces glazed over and they moved on to the next person.
One friend went into a lecture in her first week only to be asked ‘Who the f**k are you?’ because she had the temerity to come from a state school and try to infiltrate their clique.
This is why I take a quiet satisfaction that Labour’s private school tax could result in a Britain with fewer of these snobby elitists clogging up the higher echelons of our society. Those children forced out of their exclusive bubbles and into state schools will be better off for it and so will the country as a whole.
And their smug parents might just realise what a waste of money private schools are when state schools can offer just as good an education.
Even better, their kids won’t come out with the hideous sense of unearned superiority an expensive education creates.