School Standards

Caught up with an old friend last week, and amongst the many topics of discussion, schools came up.

He has three kids, two already at public primary schools, and one reaching school age next year. Reluctantly all three kids will be going to private schools next year which is going to cost a horrendous amount of money. Obviously they can afford to do it, but it will not be at all painless as they have just one income and a huge mortgage etc.

I was interested as to why they were swapping, as the local primary school is so much closer by, and 1/20th the cost. It seems he is just unable to get any meaningful feedback from them as to how the kids are doing. He gets told the class as a whole is doing well, how his children work well with others, how they don’t like to focus on the individual when reporting results as that creates winners and losers etc. After months of trying to get more meaningful information (such as Child A excels in these subjects but needs to work harder at these) they have made the very costly decision to go to a school where they can get such information.

As he was telling me this, I was doing mental calculations in my head along the lines of 3 kids x $10K a year x 12 years = $360,000 and thinking of all the other things one could do with that much money 🙂