Independent School, Me

Hello internet,

This post is about education, and is my attempt at a frank discussion about private education. Let me begin with a little background on how I ended up at private school.

My family are not rich by any means. My parents are both from ordinary backgrounds, my mother from a family of somewhat hippy lefties who brought her up partly on a boat, and my father is very much the product of his inspirational mother, who came from a factory workers back-to-back in Halifax to being the first in her family to university in a time when for a woman going to university was still a rare and difficult thing. When her husband died she did a fantastic job of bringing up her two sons. Carrying the respect for the value of education forward, my father went to King Edwards Camp Hill, a grammar school in Birmingham, which can't have hurt him getting to Bath to study architecture.

They met there, left with four kids, eventually had six, and for reasons detailed in an earlier blog found themselves compelled to take us all off to Africa.

Twice.

To put it succinctly, they certainly put trying to live a rewarding life far ahead of any financial considerations. We ate a lot of wholefoods from great big bags we kept under the benches in the kitchen-dining room. We had a nice holiday and a shiny fridge when some relatives died but most of the time it was unreliable second hand cars and older siblings' clothes (even if, or maybe even especially if, those older siblings were of the opposite sex). We weren't poor: we got by. We had different expectations to other people: mostly we weren't materialistic. We were rich because we had each other. We were all very proud of each other, and still are I think. We were reasonably academically successful, but most of us not especially so.

I believe I have actually gone to private school three times. The first time was Phoenix school in Malawi. I was four or five. All I can recall are some vague memories of songs and attempting to draw cartoons of a turtle which had so many gadgets hidden in its shell it was like an organic Swiss army knife. The second time I went was Braeburn High School in Kenya when I was thirteen to fifteen. I have plenty to say about that at some point, but I am not quite brave enough to tackle it right now. I don't think those first two experiences really count, because they were international schools. They really don't tell us very much about the nature of private education in the UK.

When I was fifteen, just after I had done my GCSEs, I left home. I went to Birmingham, to live with my paternal grandmother. I had originally applied for Camp Hill, the school of my father and, I think, possibly his father as well. I didn't get in, and tried my luck at getting into King Edward's School, one of the most successful private schools in the country, though the fees would surely be too high. Not only did I get in, but in light of my parental income and academic ability they gave me a full scholarship. I have joked sometimes that, since I was applying from Kenya and my first name is somewhat exotic, they thought I was African and that they were doing some good deed or increasing their diversity to meet some quota or something.

They were an important two years of my life. I am not sure if in hindsight I would choose the same again. I certainly changed a lot there and I don't know how much of it was for the better.

Early on in my time there, I mentioned the scholarship to somebody. They advised me not to tell anybody else or I could suffer bullying. As it was my fairly boring BBC accent which I had to work so hard to maintain in the face of the barrage of Kenyan and international influences was a sufficient disguise. I now sometimes wish I had succumbed and been a little more interesting.

Birmingham is a heavily multi-cultural and multi-ethnic city, and King Edward's in some ways reflected that, though it had disproportionately few people that some might call black (though I wouldn't because I am so post-racial and stuff). There was not racial tension as such, but people were perhaps a little overly racially aware. There were distinct social groupings of people with different skin colours, which also roughly corresponded to whether you preferred rugby or cricket.

King Edward's had many of the arcane words and traditions stereotypical of private schools. Assembly was called "Big School". The school years, in ascending order of age, were Shells, Removes, Upper Middles, Fourths, Fifths, Divisions and Sixths. People actually used these words, nobody just talked about year sevens and eights and so on. Eton Fives (a sport involving a wall, I believe) was played by some, and fencing lessons were offered free (of course I took them). There was a complex system of ties depending on what particular achievements you had made in your time at the school. I left with the same tie I came in with, fortunately it only very occasionally made me feel like an inferior human being.

I lived miles and miles away, in Wythall in Worcestershire. I commuted in by bus and train every day, which made my school day a couple of hours longer. It didn't matter: I had no social life. I knew nobody in the village or the town nearby: those few people I had come across I really didn't get along with. I suppose my social life consisted in large part of watching the West Wing and going to dance lessons, both with my grandmother.

I exaggerate. At King Edward's I started getting into societies. I have already mentioned fencing (I sucked). I also did Greek play reading (in translation), choir (my favourite), a little debating (I lost both times, horribly), philosophy society (my presentation on Plato was terrible), and my foray into song-writing society gave me the push to start writing my own songs and evetually start a band: that was mainly because the songs I heard there were so ear-bleedingly awful.

In my two years there, my expectations of what I could get out of life were raised astronomically. I went there with the dreary sneeze of an idea of wanting to be Prime Minister (doesn't everyone at 15?) and left realising so much more was possible. There was a whole culture of leadership and progress and optimism and growth. There was in fact a leadership club, and there was the combined cadet force. There were enterprise days, and genuinely fascinating assemblies like the one with the magician and the one with the history of pop music. Many including myself were encouraged to apply for Oxbridge, and as I have learned though I didn't get in (twice) having that chip on your shoulder can give you a surprising amount of drive. The school was an incubator of quirkiness, culture, the celebration of excellence and ambition. All this had an effect on me. It meant I ended up getting my As at A level, redeeming my disappointing IGCSEs. I became a more interesting person, in interesting ways. I also left feeling resentful, rebellious, and rudderless, but that all worked out fine eventually too.

What, if anything, does my experience tell me about private schooling in general? Well it definitely gives rich people (and people like me who can blag their way in) unfair advantages in life. The people who unlike me don't detest the whole Old Boys thing can no doubt milk it for jobs and whatnot. And I also believe that King Edward's was a relatively modern example. It was cosmopolitan and relatively liberal, and as a day school was a very different beast to some of its boarding cousins. I am undecided on whether private schools should be abolished. It seems a shame to rid the world of machines that churn out so many excellent and interesting people, but I am sympathetic to the view that they are terribly unfair. They certainly are. We do live in a world where there are more values that just fairness, however. We also care about brilliance, and beauty. This is all irrelevant to my main point though. Whether private schools are abolished or not, state schools need to learn from them. They need to learn about tradition, communities of learning, identity, fostering a culture of ambition and excellence, and yes, quirkiness. Even if that means that people in different parts of the country get different educations, so be it. The world is made all the richer by having lots of different types of people. I am not saying that there were not problems with King Edward's: there most certainly were. Yet still there is so much state schools can learn.

I think we can have the best of both. I think we can all have a decent shot in life and we can all be different. Governments have long thought it is their business to manage education. However, like the control of interest rates and the treatment of disease, education is far too important to be left to politicians. Set it free. Let it be publicly funded, but not centrally controlled. That doesn't mean I like you or any of your ideas, Conservative Party.

Caleb