In my study at home stands a small cork board with the names of eight target schools for my ten-year-old son. The state schools are on the left, the private schools on the right. The decision is due soon and I still have no idea what to do.
There aren’t many things that Britain genuinely does better than anyone else in the world, but secondary education is one of them. The discerning Russian plutocrat, who could buy anything anywhere, would have his son in England for his teenage years followed by an American Ivy League university. International league tables rank our private schools top of the world — their quality is world famous. But what’s less well-known is that exam results in the best state schools are now just as good. Which, given that they get by on less than a third of the money, is quite striking.
Over the past year, as a parent, I’ve been plunged into the great maze of English secondary education. As a Scot, it’s entirely new to me. I went to my local primary in the Highlands followed by my local comprehensive: no tests, no choice, no worries. When my dad was posted to Cyprus with the RAF, I boarded for five years with the military covering my fees. So having seen upsides and downsides of both the state and private system, I now have to choose for my children. As I’ve looked at and around all kinds of schools, I’ve discovered just how out-of-date my assumptions were.
Take the idea that private schools always perform better than government ones: for many years, that was true. Let’s look at Cambridge University’s admission statistics. Before the war, only about 20 per cent of its undergraduates came from state schools.
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