Do private schools boost college opportunities?

[Annieindublin]

The school I went to was great for the bright kids, and where the parents showed up for meetings etc. Not so much for the less able. Some teachers were known to be bad, and the local grind schools were always full of refugees from Mrs X Irish class and Mrs Y maths class.
Fee paying wasn’t even considered by my parents, but they were under the impression that I was paying €15k a year for schools for mine. Someone once told them fees were €15k and they never questioned it. I think they still don’t believe me.

My sister moved house and queued all night to be in the catchment area and get her oldest child in. Worked out well. Happy kids all charged into 3rd level. The house wasn’t cheap but they still have it so that’s good.

Brother couldn’t move so my parents helped by paying for grinds as his kids were in a fairly challenging school. Worked out about the same as the fees we paid I think. Maybe a little less. Mixed results in terms of career contentment for his kids.

 

[TomEdison]

I always thought that the distinction wasn't between parents who could afford to send their children to fee paying school sand those who could not, rather it was between parents who could afford to spend a million euro on a house and those who could not.

This is a difficult one to disentangle. The parents who live in milliion-euro houses, by and large, are also sending their kids to fee-paying schools, so it's not clear how much of the social capital which the kids acquire results from one factor and how much from the other.

The difference, as I came to understand, was in a shared mindset. Sure there were some families for whom 6000 a year was loose change but for most families there was at least some element of sacrifice. There’s still a lot of alternatives for the use of thousands of euro.

It;s not so much a question of who finds it easy to pay the fees and who has to make some sacrifice to do so. The very rich parents may also attach importance to academic attainment, foster skills and attitudes which will help their children attain academic success, etc. Conversely other parents who make sacrifices to pay the fees may be doing so purely for the social cachet that they expect to result.

There's probably a fair proportion of kids in fee-paying schools who don't come from particularly academic-attainment-favourable backgrounds — as in, their parents didn't read to them, the atmosphere at home is not expecially friendly to intellectual pursuits, etc. But the school population will be overwhelmingly middle- to upper-middle class; values and attitudes that conduce to academic attainment are, on average, more prevalent in middle class homes. So you've got a parent body, a lot of whom expect their kids take academic work seriously and reward them in various ways for doing so, and the kids themselves are in a learning community where these this experience and these attitudes are shared by many of their peers. And, while the teachers in these schools are not necessarily crash-hot, teachers teach to the group they have, so they will respond to this.

The result of all this is that a fee-paying school is more likely — no guarantee! — to provide an environment in which your child's academic abilities are developed as well as they can be. Or, to be blunt, on average, higher points.

The danger that this presents is an environment that over-values academic attainment. This is not necessasrily a great environment for a kid whose talents and aptitudes lie elsewhere. They experience a constant sense of under-acheivement, and a constant and corroding sense of not being valued — even, of not being valuable — because they are not academic stars, or even at the academic median. A school that prides itself on producing stellar Leaving Cert results, and that attracts parents whose priority is getting stellar Leaving Cert results so that little Crimplene and Dralon can follow Daddy into the medical profession, is not necessarily a good school; Crimplene and Dralon might flourish much more in a different educational environment.

(I'm not saying that this is what all, or the majority, of fee-paying schools are like. But the danger inherent in fostering and valuing academic acheivement is over-valuing it.)

 

[Salvadore]

The danger that this presents is an environment that over-values academic attainment. This is not necessasrily a great environment for a kid whose talents and aptitudes lie elsewhere. They experience a constant sense of under-acheivement, and a constant and corroding sense of not being valued — even, of not being valuable — because they are not academic stars, or even at the academic median.

In the case of some private schools, you could also substitute “rugby” for “academic” and the above argument would be equally valid.

 

[Annieindublin]

I’d agree that a lot of the fee paying school do foster academic success, or rather rate it highly, rugby also… but I recall visiting one school where the headmistress proudly announced over the intercom that a 6th year student had just been accepted onto a beauty plc course and everyone applauded.

It’s difficult to see where your 2 years old might be happiest so we erred on the side of caution and applied to a few places. Then moved country so we had to start again

Also it isn’t carved in stone, kids can move. They don’t have to follow their siblings either.

 

[Leper]

I’m kind of repeating myself, but if your child has determination, ability and street-cred in abundance the notes received under paid tuition would be of benefit.

Let’s not forget the race to university is strictly points based one. Other than that I can’t talk up private school education.

 

[Premos]

if your child has determination, ability and street-cred in abundance the notes received under paid tuition would be of benefit.

On this one, plenty of books published every year also provide adequate guidance and help. I recently came across some notes provided by such a school for a subject I am particularly familiar with. While the notes were provided in the school recognisable format, they were not dissimilar to many other notes I have come across over the years. I have also come across a lot of books in different format that would provide the same information. I find that the main issue with students is not that they can not access the information or that they don't have it, it's more what they do with it.