Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Back row: David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman.

Standing in middle: Hillary Benn, Chuka Umunna.

Front row: Fiona McTaggart, Tristram Hunt, Tessa Jowell.

GF,

If it is available to all, there would be no necessary to bid for it. That should be the aim of government, but that is by raising the "standards" of state education and educating parents to "enable" their children.

The difference is that children sent to hot houses (crammers) of education, i,e. public schools, is that a generally given a stable routine driven environment which their home life would not provide. The parents often avoiding the responsibilities of parenthood for various reasons. (Incompetence and family dysfunction sometimes being the reason.)

Again, when I played sport (Squash in particular.) I paid for coaching, because I could be pushed and could organise it around my working day. I valued the guy (Naz) and the work outs, part of my education. He taught me to discipline myself when I was in my 20s and the gain from repetitive application to build up skills.

I paid for the regular intensity of his coaching, while others preferred to drink 5 pints a night and think coaching expensive.

There is room for choice.

========

Back to BDEV.

8-)

By Bryony Gordon

7:00AM GMT 02 Dec 2014

Samuel Johnson said that a man who is tired of London is tired of life, but that was well over 200 years ago and I really wish people would stop quoting him as if he would have said the same today and not, upon looking in an estate agent’s window, high-tailed it straight back to Staffordshire.


Dr Johnson never had to wait forty minutes to be wedged in a stranger’s armpit on the tube – a daily occurrence for any of us who happen to live in that vast, vomitous mass that is sneeringly referred to by the wealthy as 'Sarf London’, even if parts of 'Sarf London’ are more expensive than truffles sprinkled in gold and served on a platinum plate with diamond detailing.


He never had his toes broken by a wheely suitcase, and he was never sworn at by a cyclist who careered into him after running a red light. Had Dr Johnson come to London now, he would have been completely exhausted by it. People would be shouting blue murder at him as he slept-walked slowly through Victoria Station; they’d be elbowing him out the way as they raced to be swallowed whole by the tube.


Can I let you in on a little secret? Nobody likes London, especially not the people who have the misfortune to live in it. There’s a popular misconception that people who reside in the capital are all members of the metropolitan elite, and that we walk around with a sense of entitlement, our noses turned up because we happen to live near some good museums and the Prime Minister.


Undoubtedly that is true for a minority who can afford not to use public transport and get to escape to a country pile each weekend. But the rest of us are just trying - and often failing - to make a living in a city that does its best to suck it out of us.

If our nostrils seem snooty to you it’s only because the air outside of Mayfair and Chelsea stinks of fried food, stale beer and body odour; either that or we’ve just seen what an asbestos-ridden two-up, two-down is being flogged for by one of the seven estate agents that have popped up on the high street.

Ask a Londoner what their favourite thing about the city is, and if they are being brutally honest they will probably tell you it is listing all their least favourite things about the city: the shoddy public transport that shuts down most weekends, because who travels at the weekend?; the fact that being rude is the norm; the tourists stupid enough to actually come on holiday here.

I really hate the place, and I was born here. Some days, when parts of me get stuck in the doors of the Northern Line because there is space for my left leg but not my right, I genuinely think I might die here, too. It has always been the London way to stick it out but recently something has changed. I come from a long line of Londoners - my parents were born here, and my grandparents too – and we were all delivered in hospitals that have now been turned into supermarkets or luxury 'apartments'.

Yet slowly but surely even my family have moved out, lured by the fact that they can buy entire estates in Devon for the price of a two bed flat in Elephant and Castle. Most of my friends have gone, too; our capital city is now so skewed, that by moving out and downsizing both jobs and salaries, they are actually upsizing their quality of life.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that people in their thirties are leaving London like never before. According to a report published by the Office of National Statistics, 58,220 people aged from 30 to 39 left the capital between June 2012 and June 2013; a record number, and a ten per cent increase on 2010.

They aren’t all escaping the rat race for the fresh air of the countryside. A huge number are moving to smaller cities that have ten times the charm: Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Liverpool and Newcastle. They are no longer willing to be hoodwinked into believing that London is the only place in the country with museums and culture.

That exhausted people with small children are leaving London in droves is completely understandable, because it has always been a city for the young, hopeful and energetic. But my 22-year-old brother tells me that many of his contemporaries from his London school have decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere – they see no future for themselves in the capital. To them it is a city that has been monopolised by the super rich, by bankers and oligarchs and celebrities who have turned even the Old Kent Road into Park Lane.

Some time soon, London will be nothing but a playground for the wealthy that doubles up as a tourist attraction. That makes me feel a bit nostalgic but it also hardens my resolve to up sticks as soon as we can afford to shove our one-and-a-bit-bedroom flat on the market. It was Vince Cable who last year described the capital as a “giant suction machine draining the life” out of the rest of the UK. That may well be the case, but those ONS statistics show that after years of taking, it is now finally giving something back. London has reached tipping point, and it is about time, too.

The Telegraph

MrT - just a slight correction ..... if you're "thick" you've no chance of getting into a top school and indeed, such a child would almost certainly not thrive - too competitive ....

but if you have other attributes such as music, you may get accepted ..... perhaps not now because of the cost, but in the past even the top public schools were very cosmopolitan with pupils coming from a surprisingly wide spectrum

GF.

but if you have a determined child, that child will work and outperform the average in the school.

Those kids may not have money, but something better an intensity of interest of their parents who are "able" to support them.

I often admired the intensity of "work" my grand childrens' parents put into their academic and "cultural" education and what they make available for them.

That is why they are and will be high achievers.

a good school whether in the state or private sector, is most assuredly NOT a crammer ..... such a regime is usually counter-productive in the long run anyway


fred - and no doubt too because their parents are aspirational

MAx,

What is your beef, is it that Balls, Miliband. Hariet, Tristan are high achievers and you are not?

(Measurement of high achiever being dependent on what you value.)

cynic Send an email to cynic View cynic's profile - 02 Dec 2014 13:44 - 51939 of 51942

stealing a march is perjorative and inflammatory, which is exactly what you meant it to be.........................................

exactly, yes and whats wrong with that.

YOUR QUE JUMPING IN ORDER TO BEAT THE REST, NO IFS NO BUTS, its as simple as that.

Its a trait of all Tories unfortunately, and Mitchells actions just about summed up what Im getting at, IM BETTER THAN YOU BECAUSE IM WEALTHIER THAN YOU.

so had did some royals get in to op schools one is so thick he admits it .

it does not bother me what school they go to it is our they turn out that matters .
my friend mary beard is a loverly person and clever

Cynic,

That is what must have happened in Cameron, Osborne and henchmen's cases.

And their "education" has been detrimental to a large percentage of the UK community.

But they learnt the "rules" and benefited and protected their own.

Fred.

If you cant see what that cartoon was lampooning, you need to go to Specsavers.

very quite about the pedoes in gov when it was jim it was on ever minute of the day for months when it involves the gov silence

the private schools breed pedoes and look after each other making sure its get out of press . they put people in place to investigate knowing they will resign and then another resigns and before you knpow it 10 years as passed and all those involved have died so until the last one is dead we will not get to hear the facts of the pedoes in gov

Thatcher knew all about it.

Max,

I suppose you could find a similar image of Farage and cronies dressed as spivs or brown shirts.

51948 - absolute bullshit! .... what about ensuring that you live in an area where there are good quality state schools? ..... how do you rate that, or do you only wish to berate those who choose to use the private sector?

And no Labour PM didn't know , how very naive of you

GF<

I agree with your p 51948, and add.

I can do as I like with you, you pleb, because my name is Thrasher and I went to Rugby.

--------

He must have used his head as the ball and had it kicked a few times too many.

Fred, were you born with a huge chip on your shoulder?

Mitchell the hates plebs but it beter than what he is a stinging liar

Labour’s Posh Boys (and Girls)

By Mark Wallace
Follow Mark on Twitter.

It's become a regular refrain from Labour ranks that the Tories are posh. The infamous Bullingdon photo, which Carla Millar today mimics above, is used as shorthand to pick at the number of privately schooled men and women in the Cabinet and in the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

The failed attempt by Labour to make class an issue in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, with activists dressed up in top hats and tails, stands out as an example of their enthusiasm for the subject.

And yet even a cursory look at the Opposition benches reveals Labour has its own fair share of posh boys and girls.

Ed and David Miliband are the sons of a millionaire academic.
Ed Balls had the good fortune to enjoy an excellent education at the private, all-boys Nottingham High School.
Harriet Harman is an alumna of St Paul's Girls, and the daughter of a Harley Street doctor.
Hillary Benn's father may have given up his hereditary title, but the family weren't so keen to redistribute the Stansgate Abbey estate.
Chuka Umunna is the grandson of High Court Judge Sir Helenus Milmo, and was also privately educated, at St Dunstan's College.
Tessa Jowell went to St Margaret's School for Girls.
Fiona MacTaggart attended the famous Cheltenham Ladies College.
Tristram Hunt is the son of Lord Hunt, attended University College School and, well, he's called Tristram.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being privately educated – I was lucky enough to go to RGS Newcastle. But the fact that my fellow old boys include Labour Peer Lord (formerly Sir Jeremy) Beecham and Ian Lucas, Labour MP for Wrexham, should suggest that Labour is being quite hypocritical in trying to cast it as a negative – and a Tory negative at that.

As much as the left might try to pretend otherwise, the simple fact is that politicians on both sides of politics tend to be disproportionately posh. Slinging mud at the Government for poshness invites mud to be slung in return – and a mudfight gets nobody anywhere.

Attacking people who have been fortunate in their education and their start in life is damaging for our national life, too. The collectivist idea that someone's class ought to invalidate their views is as idiotic and unfair when done through inverse snobbery as it is in old-fashioned snootyness towards the poor.

We saw the damage that can be done by such inverse snobs when the Blair Government abolished the Assisted Places Scheme in 1997. At that point, the scheme gave 34,000 pupils the opportunity to access private education that they could not otherwise have afforded. New Labour may have ditched Clause 4, but they were still sufficiently into class war that they closed it down, cutting off such opportunities for any more children.

Those battles are still being fought today in education. Despite years of criticising the restricted access to private education, North Tyneside Labour are spending a fortune on lawyers in order to stop the fee-paying King's School becoming a Free School - opening up a great school to all, regardless of financial means. That they are mounting their legal challenge at taxpayers' expense only adds insult to injury,

The nation would be better off if Labour MPs put their schooling to use thinking up better policies, rather than shouting about school ties.

That is not to say that any of us with an interest in politics should ignore the correlation between political success and poshness. It should be a matter of concern not that the well off are represented, but that the less well off are not.

The same trend can be seen in the arts, in business, in journalism and elsewhere. Social mobility is too low, educational outcomes for the poor are all too often well below average and entrepreneurialism is well behind many of our competitors (as Allister Heath reported yesterday).

Instead of lambasting those who get the best start in life, we should work out ways to raise levels of education and opportunity for all to the same standard. In an ideal Britain, there would be little demand for private education.

Labour were right to start the academy programme – but they should now fully support Free Schools, which radically extend the opportunities and innovation pioneered by academies. Similarly, their opposition to welfare reform means a continued jab in the eye for hard workers who see some earn more than them through the benefits system. Fighting cuts to business red tape means that they prefer the risks and costs of setting up a small business to remain prohibitive. Continuing their commitment to high taxes necessarily means that those with the least money have even less of it to spend on themselves and their children.

We have an opportunity deficit in this country, which all parties should want to fill – particularly one claiming to be the champion of working people. Stopping the hypocritical attacks on "posh" Tories would be a start – and it would free up time for Labour to focus on ideas that would give to everyone the opportunities currently enjoyed by relatively few.