‘My posh friends were horrified I sent my children to state school – but I’ve had the last laugh’

There’s no area where the great British taste for oneupmanship and hypocrisy flourishes more flagrantly than within the Bash Street Comp vs Public School divide, says Rowan Pelling. Which is how she brought a dinner party of friends fretting about Labour’s VAT plans to a crashing standstill…

Pupils run across the historic cobbled yard at Eton College (Getty)

Hear that plaintive screech on the wind? That’s me on my teeny-weeny violin playing a lament for all the parents who will have to yank their offspring out of private schools, due to Sir Kier Starmer’s class war. I’m talking, of course, about Labour’s decision to stop tax breaks on private education, meaning VAT will now be levied on fees and some people will have to send sprogs to Bash Street Comp with all the great unwashed. Farewell cadets, small classes, fencing and Mandarin; so long meditation and sea bream for lunch! 

But that’s not what anyone’s paying for, of course, whatever they claim. Nope, they are forking out up to £50k a year to jet-propel their offspring over the heads of contemporaries in life’s queue and get them thigh to thigh with the ruling classes. They look at Carole Middleton, the former air hostess whose daughter married the Prince of Wales – by way of Marlborough College – and they think, “I, too, could be mum to a princess!” 

I freely admit I am borderline deranged on this topic, but I’ve long felt there’s no area where the great British taste for both oneupmanship and hypocrisy flourishes more flagrantly than within the state school divide.

I live in Cambridge, where I’ve sent my sons to local state schools because – call me a communist! – I believe it’s good for children to be educated within their community alongside contemporaries of all backgrounds and abilities. Also, I’d have to sell my house and rent to send them privately, which strikes me as sheer stupidity when so many state schools are now ranked good or outstanding by Ofsted. 

Nevertheless, many of the city’s devout leftie academics apparently don’t agree and have sent their children to the exclusive Perse or Leys schools.

Why? I guess we’ve all heard friends and acquaintances, even close family, trot out the usual excuses – to the point you can play Public School Bingo, scoring a point every time you hear they’re “easing the pressure on places for children in the state sector”, “subsidising bursaries for poorer kids”, or that the nearby school is “full of drugs and knives”, or that their child is too talented or sensitive to be educated alongside your own rough-hewn sprogs.

Meanwhile, my high Tory friends behave as if you’re committing child abuse by placing a child in state provision, preventing them from taking up their allotted place in life as a future “leader” hedge funder, judge, general or dotcom millionaire. Their anger at Labour’s proposals has a different refrain: “It will lead to a two-tier system” whereby only the super-rich will be allowed to afford private schooling, followed by a lament that this is all being driven by a “politics of envy” and  “social engineering”. 

Schoolgirls from Christ Hospital School, Hertfordshire, in 1953 (Getty)

This usually then leads to them saying that their brilliant children are now barred from Oxbridge. They apparently haven’t noticed there has always been a two-tier system, but now they’re going downstairs on the bus while the Russian oligarchs, Chinese businessmen and super-rich stay upstairs. As for the slight reduction in Oxbridge places for privately educated kids: hu-bloody-rah!

When I was at Oxford (Q: How do you know someone’s been to Oxford? A: They’ll tell you) in the 1980s, I was amazed by how many male contemporaries were Josh Nice-but-Posh, there to party, take drugs, go to Bullingdon and Piers Gaveston parties and hang out with public school mates.

Then they were parachuted in to help an old mate like David Cameron run the country or some old pal run their business. Were these people the brightest our country had to offer? Absolutely not. But, it’s amazing how quickly people will abandon any beliefs they hold about a meritocracy when they are the benefactors of a chumocracy. Even more astonishing is how many lies they will tell themselves while they take up those positions.

So, I no longer choke back my “politics of envy”, I just let “Mrs Chippy” out for a scrap. I recently brought a dinner party to a two-hour standstill because I was just tipsy enough to ask my banker host whether he knew that the Charity Commission examined bursaries in 2021 and found less than half went to poorer families.

Pelling (left) covered in egg after finishing her Oxford exams (Author’s own)

I even went into my full, “Hello Pot, it’s Mrs Kettle calling” routine: have you seen the shedloads of drugs posh kids take at parties? The sky-high levels of anxiety and eating disorders?

Then I detonated the A-bomb: those state school kids taking all the Russell Group uni places have almost certainly worked harder to get their A grades, and research published in the Oxford Review of Education shows they’re more likely to get first-class degrees. Suffice to say, I won’t be asked back. 

Full disclosure: my own schooling was half-private, half 11-plus and bursaries. Not as swanky as nearby Benenden, but certainly snootier than the girls’ comp Hatton whose pupils gobbed at us in the street. Little wonder, when you think how we’d been separated into sheep and goats, aged 11, in a way that made little sense. You could be the next Emily Bronte but if you were terrible at maths, you’d be slow-tracked for the next five years. 

And this British social streaming, via education, state/grammar/private, never ends. Establishing your superior education is a fun game any bully can play at any moment. I was recently at a party where I chatted to a much-admired TV presenter, often praised for his sensitive line of questioning.

Britain already has a two-tier system when it comes to education (Getty)

We discovered we’d been university contemporaries and, inevitably, he asked which college I’d been at. The second I said St Hugh’s he and his public-school chums hooted with disdain and he went into a “comic” riff about loser colleges for women and thickos.

“Don’t think girls’ colleges were actually part of Oxford,” he said. Hil-ar-i-ous. He had no idea the college went mixed-sex the year I arrived, but then he probably didn’t move much outside his London public school circle. 

So, why do we continue with this snobbish charade and sharp-elbowing? What does it lead to other than schisms? Is it OK that 39 per cent of the top jobs are dominated by the 7 per cent of people in the UK who have been to private schools?

People rich enough to have kids in private education now are wealthy enough to move close to a good state school and pay for tutors for “backup”, so I won’t sob for their misfortune. Almost all the great secondaries-turned-academies now have A-streams at their centre (or grammar at their core), progressing academic kids through maths, Stem, English and languages. 

Increasingly, they offer orchestra, public speaking and Duke of Edinburgh Award schemes. True, my two state-educated sons can’t conjugate Latin verbs, don’t play the violin, have terrible table manners and say “fink” instead of “think”.

Pelling’s own schooling was half-private, half 11-plus and bursaries (Author’s own)

But they are funny, hold their own in arguments, have many friends and are at ease in most scenarios. The older one is particularly skilled at talking down armed muggers. I enjoy telling people that he got no GCSEs whatsoever, then did the IB at an international sixth form, alongside students from 40 nations and is now studying psychology at Sussex.  

I believe that any reform of private education should be accompanied by good policies for state education. In fact, I predict if Labour comes to power, it will be just like that moment in 2021 when the aspirational classes discovered Aldi lobster. London’s chatterati are already on to the fact some of the state schools in the poorest of boroughs like Hackney and Newham are now outperforming the likes of Eton when it comes to their Oxbridge targets.

Just imagine how they’ll revel when they have a spare £100k to spend on holidays and kitchen extensions. And the rest will be left to imagine that glorious moment when the child of a mini-cab driver outshines the banker’s child on a truly level playing field.