The truth about private school admissions

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’.