SUBURBAN FUN FOR KIDS
Simon Hoggart on school league tables'
unintended effect on the middle classes
MRS THATCHER'S reforms always had side effects, usually unintended, and not all malign. We live in an ordinary suburb full of ordinary Victorian brick houses built to fol- low the railway line out to west London. Turner, Tennyson and Pope lived around the place at various times, and George II installed his mistress here. Then it was just fields and the Thames now the river is so dirty that there are signs warning you not to bathe in it. None of them would recognise the sheer, workaday ordinariness of the place. You could be in the middle-income area of any big city in the country.
Nor would they recognise the prices. Recently a five-bedroom family house round the corner sold for an astonishing half a million pounds, which is roughly 50 per cent more than it would have fetched at the height of the last property boom in the late Eighties. There are still parts of Britain where you can buy a mansion with a dozen acres for half a million. For a sub- urban Victorian villa it is a freakish sum.
The reason for the astonishing rise is Mrs Thatcher's school league tables. These were originally established to keep teach- ers — always a suspect group in her eyes — up to the mark. Now they exist to deter- mine property prices. The same upward spiral is happening in great swathes of south-west London including the boroughs of Richmond, Kingston and Sutton, all of which do consistently well in the tables, beating other boroughs in London and most other places in the country.
What the tables have done is give the better-off middle classes psychological per- mission to put their children in state schools. In the past, those who could afford independent education felt guilty if they didn't cough up. Now they have a piece of paper which states: 'These people are good parents. They have not neglected their children's education to save money for skiing holidays and cases of Jacob's Creek.' Instead of spending thousands a term on school fees, they are putting the money into bricks and mortar, which have the added advantage of being still there when the children's education is finished. As the prices rise, the demographics change too, so that the parents tend to be older, having married only after both part- ners had established careers. If you see a young woman dropping a child off at our local primary school, she's the au pair.
But the guilt remains. Parents have to fork out cash in order to still the nagging conscience. Being British we can't do it the American way and say, 'Hello. Here's an enormous cheque. Kindly name the new changing rooms after me.' We have to find an excuse, a method that is both pain- less and even pleasant, and this has led to another phenomenon: the school-based community in which many — for some people most — social events are designed to raise cash for the schools.
These are proliferating at an extraordi- nary rate, hastened by stories of the facili- ties available at private schools. If St Paul's has a cyclotron in the physics lab, we must have one too. If Putney High offers its pupils a vat of formaldehyde in the art room with a ready-sliced shark for pickling, then our children deserve no less. And if that means yet another social occa- sion, so be it.
Scarcely a weekend goes by without a `fun' fundraising function. We have quiz night (fought viciously, as only the British middle classes know how), disco night, rock-'n'-roll night, country-and-western night, Sixties night and — most recently Seventies night. If the Decade from Hell can be drafted to the cause, then there is no barrel-bottom at all we will not scrape.
We have car-boot sales. My daughter's secondary school holds an annual parents' dinner to coincide with the school's anniversary; the cash raised will go towards the £100,000 they want for a new all-weather hockey pitch. Does any school need a new all-weather hockey pitch? I doubt it, but it's the perfect guilt-soother. After all, private schools have all-weather hockey pitches. We have 'fun runs' at which indulgent parents offer to sponsor their children for £5 a mile before they realise that the course is 12 miles long. We have PTA wine-and-cheese evenings. We have the summer fair and the Christmas fayre. We have concerts in which school orchestras hit several of the notes in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. We have an annual pan- tomime which raises about £6,000 for the local junior and infant schools. Hundreds of people each work hundreds of hours to put on this show. If they were to share the profits they would be earning, per hour, a sum around one-tenth of the minimum wage in Chad.
Most of all we have the 'promises auction'. This idea, now common throughout the country, was imported from the United States. Parents offer goods and services free, and these are then auctioned off to the other parents. When we lived in Washington, our children were too young to go to school, but friends brought tales of fabulous prices paid for glittering prizes: a week for two sailing the Caribbean in a luxury yacht, lunch at the Supreme Court with a Supreme Court jus- tice, dinner with a leading television pundit in the company of at least one senator and one presidential candidate.
Our lots are more humble, including offers of plumbing and gardening, though west London being what it is, there might be signed copies of books by parents, or a week in someone's house in Tuscany. Alco- hol is a vital ingredient. Stuff which costs £2.57 at Oddbins, including the 10 per cent case discount, can be sold for £6 a bottle. At the first auction we attended, the sec- ond lot was a pair of tickets to a Premier- ship football match, including lunch in a private box. I got this for £50, roughly what the lunch on its own would have cost. At this point everyone was sober. By 9 p.m. this was no longer the case. A hand-woven cushion cover, £38! Jim Pettigrew will do two hours' handyman work, £100! A week in a leaky cottage in the Yorkshire dales, off season only, please, £600. People were in a buying frenzy fuelled by Romanian pinot noir.
These innumerable events provide many parents with a close, even intense, social life. Some need look no further: why drive for an hour round the North Circular when there's so much going on around the school? And of course, very occasionally, things get out of hand. The playground was buzzing last month with the alleged close friendship between a divorcee and a married man who had met at school fundraisers.
And we still talk about the couple who, at 3.30 a.m. during the panto cast party, couldn't wait to find somewhere private 'see you on the half-landing' has a unique meaning in this part of town. Mrs Thatcher might not have approved entirely of what she had done so much to bring about.
The author is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Guardian.
Previous page
