Tatler really shows its class in picking its 'best state schools'

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/tatler-class-best-state-schools

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Not known for its subtlety, Tatler has published a guide to the best state schools in Britain. As you might expect, the list of postcodes include some of the plushest in Britain: no Easterhouse, Toxteth, or Hull, but seven of the 16 listed are in London. The list proves what many have long considered the case: parts of the education sector in our island of inequality are private schools by way of mortgage payments.

Tatler's endorsement of (some) state schools seems to constitute a volte face after what feels like an onslaught of negative criticism of the state sector in the past few years. In an ideal world, parents embracing state provision and sending their children to the nearest school to sit with their peers at lunch, would solve education's ills. If everyone embraced free education, we'd feel as proud and protective of it as we did the NHS.

Especially in London, the mantra of parental choice in education has led to a market skewed increasingly towards upper-middle-class parents being able to pull strings to get places in prestigious state schools, without the social stigma or cost of going private. In the catchment area of Honeywell School in Battersea, the first listed in Tatler's guide, house prices have rocketed as affluent families move into the area, locally termed "Nappy Valley", to take advantage of the numerous primary schools nearby. A new secondary academy planned for the area has been accused of being socially divisive after excluding one of the poorest schools in the borough from its list of feeder schools.

Late last year, the Sutton Trust released a report on how parents choose schools. A quarter of middle-class parents admitted to moving house to areas with good state schools. Rightmove, the property website, even offers you the option to view properties by school.

But the trust also found that the amount of information available to people in lower socioeconomic groups differed too. About 40% of working-class parents used one or no sources of information when choosing schools for their children, partly because of lack of knowledge or acces, but also because of lack of choice – it's hard to move house if you're on the minimum wage. And grammar schools are only open in a small (mostly affluent) part of the country. The report points out that social class is still the strongest predictor of life outcomes and educational achievements, with the UK having one of the most significant gaps in the world, with little progress in narrowing the gap in 40 years.

Successive governments have placed far too much faith in the marketisation of education and parental choice to drive up standards across the board. Instead what's happened is the atomisation of the education sector with academies, free schools, and middle-class parents being able to use social and financial capital to secure a good education while schools get socially divided, stigmatised, and labelled as failing. The Sutton Trust's suggestions – a lottery for school places, and vouchers for poorer parents to use for music lessons and museum trips – feel like sticking plasters over the bigger problem, that is the massive inequality that starts from birth and increases even before children start education. Parental choice benefits the richest, and Tatler's list is the brashest, most audacious example of this.

There's a certain social cachet to be gleaned if you come from a posh family but "slummed it" at one of these schools in Kensington or Dorset. As Tatler says: "When you do finally get into the cabinet, everyone will love you, because you didn't go to Eton." Of course you'll end up in the cabinet. You're reading Tatler. Because that's the size of this: meritocracy for the sharp-elbowed rich, aspiration for the poor.

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