The curious social backlash that comes with private education

‘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.