Think they are ‘buying’ exam success for their children

Rising fees at the UK’S independent schools mean that pushy parents believe they are ‘buying’ success for their children, a teachers’ leader has said. Dr. Mary Bousted, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said there was a growing ‘sense of entitlement’ among parents who pay tens of thousands of pounds to privately educate their children, telegraph.co.uk reported.

She said that as fees became higher and higher, parents increasingly believed that they had effectively ‘bought’ their children good grades and a place at a top university and expected the school to ‘deliver’ this.

“People think that if you work in an independent or private school, you don’t have pressures. Well, you don’t have the same pressures as teachers in state schools,” Bousted said.

“You are probably less likely to have children who come into school hungry and cold and with very, very fundamental problems with their home life, which makes the job of a teacher in a state school more challenging.

“But teachers in the independent sector often tell me ‘we don’t have that, but what we do have is a sense of entitlement among parents’.

“The entitlement is this: We are paying all this money for our children to be educated, therefore we expect you to get them through exams with very good grades and go to a top university.

“And somehow in that equation the sense that the parents have a role to play beyond paying, and that the child has to have the aptitude and ability ... gets lost in the equation.”

The average private school fees — including both day and boarding schools — is £16,686 a year, a rise of 3.5 percent from last year, according to data from the Independent Schools Council.

Bousted was speaking at the ATL’S annual conference in Liverpool, where delegates passed a motion calling on independent schools to carry out an audit of private school staff workload, and to produce guidelines for employers.

Helen Porter, an independent school teacher from Berkshire, said: “The workload is particularly high for colleagues at this time of year in the build up to external exams and when the ¿rst choice university offers are