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Parents investing in private education will feel pretty satisfied with the grades – but not those who can’t afford toThere’s a line in Edwina Currie’s Diaries, volume two; it’s August 1992 and her luckless daughter has just flunked her A-levels. “Denstone,” Currie writes of the Staffordshire independent school, “has a lot to answer for.” It stuck in my mind at the time because it was rare, then, to hear that viewpoint so baldly expressed, that when you pay for a private school, you’re buying grades, and if those grades don’t materialise, the school has ripped you off.In 2021, parents investing in private education can feel pretty satisfied with their return: 70% of independently educated pupils got As or A*s, set against 42% at state academies and 39% at comprehensives. In the scramble to explain why affluent kids should outperform their peers to such a degree, I’ve heard the following hypotheses: they work harder; their teachers are better; poorer students didn’t have laptops or quiet spaces to work in the pandemic; there was less face-to-face online teaching in state schools. Continue reading...