Move House, Campaign, even Lie – But Don’t Pay Fees
This report from the BBC is interesting: parents are prepared to lie to get their children into a good school.
Incredible, isn’t it? Having done the Water Cooler thing with the report, and asked colleagues and friends, I have to say that no-one is surprised or even dismayed by it. It is regarded as one of the travails of 21st Century family life.
And compared with the same people’s reactions to the information that you pay fees for your children’s education, it’s considered to be positively virtuous.
Using deceit and dishonesty to get an advantage for your children is socially acceptable. Good, old-fashioned hard work and self sacrifice is socially unacceptable.
You tell me who has the problem.
It is the difference in perception. If everyone pays taxes for the same services, then people feel that they have the right to the best of those services that are on offer, as that’s what they’ve paid for, just like everyone else, so why should someone else have an advantage. Anything else to acheive that level playing field is fair game. Particularly when it comes to their kids. And it happens in fee paying schools as well. Parents will say or do anything to get their kid in the right fee paying school and then never follow through except to have junior show up and then pay the bills.
Comment by Anne — October 30, 2007 @ 9:28 am
I think that you are right – up to a point.
Everyone pays for the service, regardless of whether they receive it or not. Even you pay for the education system, Anne.
So if the people who paid school fees were buying a short cut into the best state schools (in the way that the liars I refer to are) then you would be absolutely right. But they aren’t.
They are buying out of the system altogether.
It is exactly the same as the argument about public transport: “If only,” people say, “everyone used the buses and trains instead of their own cars, then we would have an efficient transport system.”
Bollocks.
If a service is underfunded to the point of insufficiency, then it is absolutely insane to blame the people who decide to avoid it at their own expense. The systems (both education and transport) are underfunded and mismanaged for reasons completely unaffected by their level of use.
Comment by grumpyoldman — October 30, 2007 @ 9:45 am
Right. Everyone pays for the service, whether they use it or not. But if they opt to use it, then they want the best of the service that there is. consequently, if there is a good school and a bad school and the fiscal outlay is the same, the parents will do what they can to use the good school. Because while they may be able to change it, and make it more efficient and deliver better teachers, that takes time at which point their kids (which are their primary concerns) are out of that school, with a worse education. That’s why you send your kids to a private school a gazillion miles away instead of to the one next door. They deliver what you want.
And the option of earing £25K disposable income just for one year of school for one child isn’t available to everyone. So needs must is people’s perceptions.
Comment by Anne — October 31, 2007 @ 11:39 am
Well, apart from quibbling with your figures, I can’t argue.
We have a ‘free at the point of delivery’ education system, and people are entitled to expect the highest possible quality – i.e. not get shafted. After all, this isn’t the Soviet Union.
Just because something is free at the point of delivery doesn’t mean either that we should accept shoddy service, or that the option to refuse and go elsewhere be denied us.
And taking up the option to go elsewhere doesn’t imply that the service is shoddy, either. You see the same consultant whether you go private or in the NHS – the difference is the room service in your hospital. Teachers in public and state schools take the same qualifications with the TTA and are given the same licences, to the same standards, by the GTC. They are supervised by the same local authority advisers, and inspected to exactly the same standards.
For the majority of people who opt out, the reality is that they already live in the catchment areas of the best schools which, as you know, contain the most expensive houses. Like us, people who choose to pay for an education aren’t paying for something better (we live in the catchment area of a school that gets better results than the one our children attend) but for something with a different culture.
Comment by grumpyoldman — October 31, 2007 @ 12:03 pm