Nearly half of all private school students go to schools based in Greater London and the south-east, because this is where there is the greatest concentration of jobs paying high enough salaries and bonuses to make school fees affordable.
Could also be that London is where all the crap state schools are……
Is he assuming that school fees are set independently of wages in the local area? He should have said high wages are necessary to pay both taxes and private school fees.
What percentage of the population of England live in Greater London and the south-east? Half-ish maybe?
One of the principal charms of South London Mansions was the absence of children. No schools. At least not the sort you
One of the principal charms of South London Mansions was the absence of children. No schools. At least not the sort you’d want to send your kids to. Then almost overnight a blitzkrieg of young yummy mummies, colonising the local state primary, safe in the knowledge that by the time Oliver and Olivia turned eleven hubby would be earning enough to pay for private education.
*London is where the crap state schools are.*
Surprisingly perhaps, probably not.
http://www.centreforum.org/index.php/14-news/releases/289-london-schooling-media-release
http://notthetreasuryview.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/immigration-whats-it-doing-to-our.html
I suspect Eddy is on to something.
Eton, Harrow etc are *Boarding Schools*
So the location of the school is not necessarily the same as the location of the parent.
Surely even Hutton is not that stupid?
Further to John 77 and Eddy’s points.
Don’t forget the current importance of overseas pupils. Russians and Chinese parents are not going to send their children to places in the tundra like Ampleforth, or far-flung Western bogs like Downside, boarding school or not. (And John’s examples are both in SE).
Tim adds: No, indeed, they send them to Worth instead. Bong Bong Marcos was there in the upper school when I was in the lower…..
I was 3000 miles away from my parents, and I’d say half the kids in my year were from 100+ miles away – HK, USA, lots of European countries etc. the only kids from the immediate environs were scholarship boys.
Hutton’s a berk with half a chippy on his shoulders. So many of these dickheads are still fighting the posh boys who pinched their girlfriends.
By the way, Hutton’s Wikipedia entry is elliptical and gnomic to say the least in respect of his involvement with the Work Foundation. You’d assume it might point out that he led it to bankruptcy but there’s no mention of that in there. Could someone be editing it I wonder?
Tim,a bit parochial, but heh.
Bong Bong Marcos appears on the list of “lost” old Worth boys. Also appears on Philipino TV in front of an audience of millions. Apparently considered “knicker-droppingly” gorgeous in the Philippines.
Also not sure of your chronology, but your point holds.
Luke – “Don-t forget the current importance of overseas pupils. Russians and Chinese parents are not going to send their children to places in the tundra like Ampleforth, or farflung Western bogs like Downside, boarding school or not.”
I am told that Blair-s old school Fettes is full of the offspring of Russian criminals and oligarchs.
So perhaps that claim is not exactly true. After all, some boghole in the tundra can hardly be worse than Jockland can it?
London schools are pretty good, but the perception of London schools is bad.
Chatting with some friends recently (all in our late 20s or 30s), almost all would either move out of London or send their kids private. The only exception was my girlfriend and I (she is the only one to grow up in London).
True story, dating from the early 1980s, when ILEA was busy running education in London (right into the ground, as it happened).
My mother was teaching at a comp that was in a tailspin downwards. The pupils were bolshy and ill-disciplined, and the staff (by and large) were facilitiating this terminal decline by their ‘right-on’ ideology.
During a lunch-break in the staff room, she listened one day to several of her colleagues sounding off against private schools, and expressing delight at Labour’s pledge to abolish them once they got into office (never mind the fact that this was the early 1980s, and they had a cat’s chance in hell of getting elected). She then said ‘Actually, I send my sons to fee-paying schools because I want them to get a good education in a good school’.
For months afterwards she’d be accosted in the corridor by fellow teachers who – after doing a quick check to see that they were unobserved – would ask for any tips she could offer for getting one’s child into a fee-paying school. She noted that the enquiries always came from the teachers who professed to be the most hostile to ‘selection’ and ‘elitism’ in education.