Spectator Life

It wasn’t until I locked eyes with a Premiership rugby player as I got out of my car at 8 a.m. that I realised I might need to up my game for drop-offs at the children’s new school. I would need to start wearing eye make-up, for starters. I should also give a little more thought to an outfit than picking up yesterday’s T-shirt and cut-off jeans from the bedroom floor – although ‘outfit’ is one of those words that makes me wince, like ‘gift’ or a ‘pop’ of colour. Still, ‘outfits’ are what a certain type of woman around here goes in for. Among a sort of country-prep-miles-from-anywhere subset, you will find mothers trying their best to fit into what the Times has identified as the ‘Ganni Mum’ tribe.

I can’t remember the exact date of my departure from university. It was sometime in the summer of 2021. My flatmates and I packed up our things, had a sombre pint at the pub, hugged, and then went our separate ways. I boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads with a degree in English and Philosophy and no feasible job prospects. I was also broke. Three years had come to a precipitous end, and it was time to move back home. I was worried about my future. The thought of becoming a bum terrified me: the sort of graduate who day drinks, listens to Limp Bizkit, starts a true crime podcast from his bedroom, and screams at his mother for not washing his pants. But I returned home in spite of my fears, largely for one reason: I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a university hanger-on.

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.  My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire It wasn’t always this way.

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child. These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus.

Sometimes, on slow days, I picture Sir Keir Starmer and our Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, doing the can-can while sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘la la la I can’t hear you’, to a backdrop of mounting concerns about VAT on school fees. It recently emerged that Tony Blair (for it is he) was firmly against it back in the 1990s, on the sound basis that taxing parents for sending their children to school is a bit stupid. But Starmer is no Blair, more’s the pity. It is abundantly clear, now, that this is an education tax, pure and simple, and that it has some decidedly problematic consequences, foreseen or not.

‘There is absolutely no need for any child applying to our school to be tutored,’ said the headmistress of a prestigious London day school during the Q&A session. Relieved, I left the hall to wander around the booths in a nearby room. I was struck by the many tutoring agencies, offering advice, courses and books on how to boost your child’s chances of securing a place at an elite school. In light of the headmistress’s earlier comment, I couldn’t help but recall the famous words attributed to P.T. Barnum. ‘A sucker is born every minute.’ The majority of applicants are tutored to the hilt Not long after, I found myself on a tour of a reputable school for possible 7+ entry for my son.

English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just throttles the supply of mournful Yeats-quoting burger-flippers but I think it’s a concern. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s worth studying English and only some of them are being able to quote Yeats. A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love In response to this crisis, there seems to be consensus among teachers that GCSEs need to change.

It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t subject to VAT), the head apologised for lengthy queues to register, get coffee, join a tour. Another 200 people had turned up in addition to the 600 booked in. Among them, I spotted several families whose children are currently at local prep schools. Labour starts charging VAT on school fees from January. But an estimated 10,000 children have already been taken out of independent schools, mine among them.

In the weeks since the Labour government came to power, we’ve gone from debating compulsory teaching of maths until age 18 to entertaining the idea that the times tables may be too stressful for children to memorise. My resilience, my determination and my empathy are largely products of being bad at maths When I was at school in Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the response to such a suggestion would have been an eye-roll, or the blowing of a loud raspberry. The comment that ‘if you can’t have what you like, then you must learn to like what you have’ was commonplace, and maths was taken by everyone until age 18. I was at the top of my class until, at age 15, I began to fall behind in maths.

Up and down they go, criss-crossing the country, cars packed full of stuff. Duvets, pillows, vapes, cuddly toys, packs of cheap pasta and rice, Aldi-brand vodka, clothes horses and apprehension. There are around 1.7 million undergraduates and a third of them, the freshers, are most probably leaving home for the first time.  Some are already at university, including my youngest, who I dropped off at the University of York last week after playing ‘spot the student car’ on the A1. She’ll be studying to become an educational psychologist over the next three years, getting an education herself and a high degree of debt – plus expertise in Pot Noodles.