Sneering private school mothers have always looked down on state school mums like me. Now they’re being forced to rough it with us common folk… and they deserve everything that’s coming to them

Even though it was over 15 years ago, I still remember looking around at the primary school I had set my sights on for my first-born son Jacob. Despite being in North London, it was set amongst green fields, with a huge playground and outdoor space for all the classrooms.

It was rated excellent and the headmaster told us that many pupils went to the most prestigious schools in the area. The classrooms were filled with colorful paintings and the children were well behaved and neat in their beautiful uniforms. I was sold.

But when I told one of my snooty friends, she reeled in horror. “You’re sending him to the state school?” she sneered in disbelief. It was as if I had announced that I was going to release my five-year-old into a crevice hole.

This is a reaction I’ve encountered so many times over the years – and I know I’m not alone.

Another close friend told me about a dinner with some wealthy guests who questioned her about why she would even consider sending her daughter to a public high school. According to them, this amounted to child neglect.

As if we are somehow failing as parents if we fail to cough up tens of thousands of pounds to get our children to the front of the queue.

Well, the shoe will soon be in the other direction if Labour’s plan to add VAT to school fees becomes a reality if they win the general election.

It is thought that almost a quarter of a million children will have to leave their gold-plated private schools and brave the state sector. Imagine all those poor Tarquins and Arabellas having to compete against the common people!

Do I feel sorry for them? Not a little. For years, their parents looked down on families like mine, who had no income to pay school fees. For most of their childhood, I supported mine with my writing and my husband Mike, 48, ran his own small business – we didn’t earn enough to send one child to a fee-paying school, let alone four.

When my boys were little, I had a radio debate with Katie Hopkins and she made her opinion clear: Her children would go to public school because of her dead body.

Although the conversation was good-natured, I still felt like I didn’t love my children as much as she loved hers just because I couldn’t afford the costs (even with the 20 percent discount offered by dodging the VAT). ).

In fact, I think I did my four boys – Jacob, 20, Max, 18, and twins Zach and Jonah, 15 – a huge favor by sending them to state schools.

First, it has never hindered them academically. Jacob achieved all As and A*s in his A-levels and a place at medical school in the toughest entry year ever. However, it wasn’t for him as he caught the drama bug from his hugely talented teacher and is now studying at a leading drama school in London.

Max has been offered a place at one of the country’s top music schools and the twins are studying like crazy for their mock GCSEs. Their state school is in need of an overhaul and as a result, 83 percent of students achieved A* to B grades at A-level last year.

My friend’s daughter picked up a bunch of A*s and is now studying medicine. Not too shabby when you consider how badly their parents let them down by not paying for their education.

Of course, when I hear about friends’ privately educated children who didn’t get the grades they needed or the places they felt they deserved in college, I have to hide my gleeful reaction. Despite coughing up at least £100,000, plus tutoring in many cases, their descendants still couldn’t beat their public school contemporaries. Who looks like a fool now?

But the real benefit of going to public school is that you come into contact with all walks of life. At primary school, my boys were educated alongside the children of Afghan refugees, children whose parents had fled war-torn Somalia, and children who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. The school drop-off was a melting pot of languages ​​and the PTA’s ‘bring a dish from your home country’ event was a culinary journey around the world.

In high school they hung out with the kids of celebrities (who were smart enough to know that paying for education isn’t always the best thing) and kids in care. It means they can talk to anyone and lack charisma and grace.

This is in stark contrast to some of their haughty private school friends who either embarrassingly turn into “roadmen” and start talking about “street,” or amp up their chic when they encounter someone who doesn’t belong to the same small, indulgent tribe as they do. .

This is nothing new. When I went to Exeter University in the 1990s, the students were almost exclusively privately educated and they made sure you knew that. The first question I was asked was where I went to school. When I answered an obscure British school in Belgium (and yes, it was a private school, but my parents could only afford it because they got a huge grant and it wasn’t posh at all), their faces glazed over and they moved on to the next person.

A friend went to a lecture in her first week and was asked, “Who the hell are you?” because she had the nerve to come from a public school and try to infiltrate their clique.

That’s why I quietly rejoice that Labour’s private school tax could lead to Britain clogging up the upper echelons of our society with fewer snobbish elitists. The children who are forced out of their exclusive bubble and into state schools will benefit, and so will the country as a whole.

And their smug parents may realize what a waste of money private schools are when government schools can provide just as good an education.

In fact, their children will not come out with the horrible sense of unearned superiority that an expensive education brings.