Sophia Waugh

Children have a right to an education. This has been written into English law since the Forster Education Act of 1870, which began the process of making education compulsory for children aged between five and 13, and no one in their right mind would oppose that statement. So when the number of permanent exclusions from schools is on the rise, the reasons behind this should be examined carefully. A child excluded from school is not accessing education, and therefore their rights have been violated. But is it really that simple? A breakdown of the groups most often excluded does not bring up many surprises. In nearly half the cases, exclusions are for persistent disruption. Sex and drugs, bullying and racism come much further down the line.

We all know what we think of as the great English Christmas lunch/dinner — turkey (originally from America) or goose (a worldwide bird, first domesticated in Ancient Egypt), Brussels sprouts (from Rome via Belgium), potatoes (also from the Americas). So, in fact, there is no such thing as a great English feast. Or is there? While the poor had little choice of food, the English traditionally knew how to feast. Christmas, which took over from the Roman pagan festival of Saturnalia, has for centuries been the year’s best excuse for eating, drinking, dancing, and showing off – showing off not just in silly tinsel hats, but in what you spread before your guests on the table. The stuffed bird is a key centrepiece of any English feast.

So much of the divide between state and private schools is a matter of mere perception — the perceptions of the teachers, the parents and the children. When, years ago, I announced that I would be sending my children to state schools, my colleagues (journalists on a national newspaper) turned on me as a pack of hounds, baying their disgust at what they called my willingness to ‘experiment’ on my own children. Move over Mengele, here comes Waugh. There are of course differences between the two types of education — but how many of them really matter? For my (yes, state-educated) children, many of the differences they saw between their various friends were nothing to do with education at all.

In tough times, we have to be persuaded to buy the non-essentials in life. While no one would deny an education is essential, many parents are beginning to question whether paying tens of thousands of pounds for a clutch of GCSEs is really worth it. Therefore public schools are having to come up with ever more selling points to draw in the punters. Anthony Seldon, the never willingly underquoted Master of Wellington College, has a new reason to encourage you to send your children to his school. He claims that his establishment, and others like it, can offer to teach your children ‘character’ in a way that no state school can. What is ‘character’ anyway? Can it really be taught by a bunch of soldiers coming in and telling you about their time in Afghanistan?

Family legend has it that when I arrived in Durham, a fresh-faced ingénue from deepest Somerset, I called home. ‘This is the life,’ I said, after a bare 24 hours in the frozen north, and they hardly heard from me again. I would have expected my first daughter to have a similar experience, but by the time she set off for university I had already learned how very different the new generation is from ours. I arrived from a girls’ grammar school, having chosen a university as far from my (much-loved) home as I feasibly could, determined to have Fun. I threw myself into the whole thing. I stayed up night after night drinking nasty wine and talking rubbish and I doubt there was a single pub or college bar that I didn’t try out.

The cellars at Combe Florey, the house in Somerset in which I grew up, were a place of mystery and fear. You walked down wide, shallow stone steps to a large door on which my father had stuck a postcard which read ‘I know who you are’ when, in a fit of paranoia, he decided that a neighbour was stealing his wine. Once through the door, there were more steps down until you found yourself in a large, cool, faintly musty-smelling room. Bats, furious at the disturbance, swooped around you until they sulkily returned to their lair in some dark corner. Off each wall were more cellars: in one, a large red boiler rumbled and groaned, a ridiculously grand chandelier hung, totally out of place, and a portrait of Queen Charlotte leered out at you.