Private Schools

Please excuse the delay since my last letter.  I’ve got a new boss and he seems to expect me to work for a living.  So its been full (or at least half) steam ahead as I prove to the new incumbent that part-time doesn’t mean half-arsed.  One advantage of having a committed boss is that I’m getting involved in more influential stuff around the bank.  This generally means I’m doing the same sort of thing but with bigger cheeses than before.  As a result the meetings are mildly less boring as they’re held higher up in the building and the views over the harbour, the bridge, the opera house and the other skyscrapers are simply fantastic.  

The sun still comes out at this time of the year but it never climbs too high and if the meeting is timed correctly the top floor is infused with the most beautiful pale light.  Until someone pulls the blinds down so we can focus on his spreadsheet that is.  Sigh.   Anyway, I was waiting for one of these meetings to start the other day when I overheard the following conversation:

Suit 1: So where are you from originally then?

Suit 2: Coogee (an Eastern Suburb with a nice family beach)

Suit 1: Oh, so where did you go to school?

Suit 2: Magellan College in Randwick.  It’s a medium middle-class school.

A what?  I had to ask.  Suit 2, who’s actually a bit of a dude for a finance guy, explained.  “Most of the guys in this room will have gone to one of the better schools, Scotts or Kings or Knox.  Or one of the North Shore high schools.  By calling it a “middle class school” I meant it’s a private school but not a well known one.  So he didn’t have to pretend he’d heard of it”. 

Private schooling has a different connotation in Australia.   In the UK it generally denotes toffs and boaters.  There are exceptions I know, but average school fees in the UK are still 35% of the average salary so don’t tell me everyone can afford it these days.  Also, only 7% of children in the UK are in private education.  In Australia the figure is 33%.

What, you gasp.  You mean there’s a whole population of well-spoken Australians out there?  Surely that’s the best kept secret in the world?  Well no.  As I said, the connotations are different.

For a start, many private schools cater to the thousands of kids who grow up scattered away from cities in this huge, underpopulated continent.  I have friends who are as rough and tumble as they come but went to boarding school because the nearest town was 58 miles from their farm.  (My friend Big Andrea, for example, was so terrified of the experience of population density that for four years she only ever did a poo when she was at home for the weekends…ouch!).

But even in town the kids who go to private schools are sometimes indistinguishable from those who don’t.  Now clearly, the Sydney school that this week fell victim to a machete-and-baseball-bat attack by ten members of the local gang probably wasn’t fee paying.  But you’re just as likely to see groups of badly-coiffed yoovs with socks at odd angles kicking cans in an expensive uniform as in a state one.

That said, I suspect this “we’re all in it together” feeling might be a little bit of marketing by Australia.com.  This year’s hit TV show “Summer Heights High” was set in a state-school and one of the most popular and cringeworthy characters was J’aimee, on exchange from a private school (“where there are less criminals because our parents are richer”).  And up in the towers of power of the Sydney CBD a little research by your intrepid reporter did indeed prove Suit 2 correct.  Everyone else in the room had been to private school.  

Start saving folks.