Who is teaching your child?

We’ve all seen them, we’ve all been to school, maybe even sat in their classes: the earnest, fragile, well meaning or merely arrogant middle class souls fresh out of ‘uni’, friend to all students and keen to change the world, for the first week; by the end of the second they have travelled up some Richter scale of mania, wide-eyed, out of control, tearfully screaming into gales of laughter as the previously calm, bright-eyed class (carefully selected for a probationary year) has transformed, lesson by inevitable lesson, into a feral zoo; one  which, despite advice, support or psychological aid to their purse-lipped, palsied apprentice, fails to return to civilization until the broken, betrayed and irreparably scarred individual departs in search of another, less traumatic life.


‘Teach First’? Think first, would be better advice (then find a more suitable occupation).


Where do these bruised and battered failures relocate when mercifully released from their duties: trauma wards? Library reception desks? A safe life in some quiet, safe space? Well, yes: private education.


Unchallenged in this unchallenging, undemanding environment, trauma-soothed, they slip easily into the comfort zone of stress-free classes (15 undemanding, house-trained students) and just as easily, comfort slips into complacency.


Surely, you’d think, this is a false tranquility; surely, they are descending into greater, less visible stress. Surely. Parents are paying for their child’s education so teachers would naturally be more accountable, be placed under greater scrutiny, greater pressure to produce the A grades already ‘bought and paid for.’ You’d think. How is it then we find many of these parents even more detached from the system than their comprehensive counterparts?


Let’s look at a case study. Buckinghamshire (or ‘Bucks’) is an obvious example, high end home counties comfortland with a high percentage of thriving private schools, like Berkhamsted (or ‘Berko’), founded in 1541 and lying camouflaged as an ‘ancient pile’ with an ancient reputation in its woodland watershed. However, here’s a modern (guerilla) extension: alongside this profusion of private schools lies a corresponding host of private tutors, a symbiotic relationship spawning businesses and websites like ticks on a hippo, all working industriously (and unconsciously) to support the good name of the school.


Why, you might be forgiven for asking, would parents pay extortionate fees for their children to attend these schools then happily (even desperately) pay all over again for private tuition? 


Interview any of these students for a half hour and the answer is clear: teaching in private education can be shockingly poor: dull lessons, little sense of progression, painfully limited feedback (the paltry ticks and comments on sparse pages of textbooks tell you there are few late nights for these ‘teachers’). Shocking, until you recall who might be doing this teaching.


So, how do they get away with it? Why do parents (some, in fact, who can ill afford it, who sacrifice holidays and new cars on the alter of education) who would be more demanding of poor service in their local John Lewis; why do they pay and pay for a substandard product? 


Partly, it seems, as they have little evidence to make comparative judgements, they are paying for the name of the school and take the teachers at their word.


However, the real answer lies in the position of education in the English consciousness (and perhaps why we continue to lie so low in educational world rankings). It is in the image of the private school as a source of social mobility, an institution in which the focus on academic achievement ranks lower than the promotion of self confidence and a file of contacts for later life. These privileged students, products of the monied system may often be inferior to their counterparts in the comprehensive sphere but they’ll never be allowed to feel it; ‘inferior’ has been deleted from their vocabulary, something which will become painfully clear when both attend the same interview. No, the ‘teaching’ in private schools occurs not in the classroom but outside, on the playing field, in the debating chamber, in the range of extra-curricular activities and positive reinforcement on offer. The impoverished level of academic teaching is compensated by private tutors (drawn, oh so ironically, from comprehensive schools) while the failures can bask in their protected safe rooms, taking an enthusiastic pride in the quality of their annual results, like real teachers, as if these results actually were their own achievement.

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DG