Picture the scene: Pembridge Gardens, 1988. I am standing in my Pembridge Hall school uniform of straw boater, blazer, and red and white gingham dress outside the school steps. We live in Chiswick and my mother waves goodbye to me before getting back into our red Ford Escort (that often breaks down on the Westway flyover) and driving across the Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout and down the Goldhawk Rd to get home. My mother is a writer, and my father is an insurance broker. My friends, who live in houses dotted around places like Brook Green, the Goldborne Rd and Kensington Church St, long before they became priced out by the property boom, are like me. My best friend lives in a house in Barons Court and we go to Hammersmith Broadway at the weekends. By and large – bar the odd tycoon, politician and Royal that you might find at any private school – we are middle to upper class; we are not flashy. Seeing Princess Diana drop princes William and Harry off at Wetherby in her royal BMW is a thrill, not an off-hand normality.
Pembridge Hall, in the Kensington & Chelsea group of prep schools that number Norland Place, Kensington Prep, Wetherby’s, Glendower and Hill House to name but a few, used to be considered the poor man’s private school. My parents only sent me there because I somehow “failed” the interview to Norland Place aged four. So off I went to Pembridge Hall, a relatively newer prep school. (founded only years before in 1979) in an Edwardian villa that offered the same prep school experience just without the marble plaque by the gates. Over the river in South London, several new prep schools such as Broomwood House opened at the same time as more affluent parents moved into historically salubrious neighbourhoods such as Balham and Tooting and deemed the local state schools not up to scratch.
Little did I know that thirty years later, my prep school would be considered the flashiest, most celebrity-stuffed school around with parents like the Beckhams, Elle McPherson, Claudia Schiffer and Stella McCartney standing at the same steps my mother had stood at. I am always bemused by people’s expressions when I mention Pembridge Hall: expressions that seem to imply that I must have been in receipt of a vast amount of private wealth and the kind of childhood that might have taken in private jets, drivers and endless foreign holidays. It wasn’t - I spent every single holiday with my grandmother on the South-West coast of Scotland - but these expressions are a useful shorthand for changing perceptions.
My prep school career took place during the 1980s, a singular decade of Thatcherite growth that preceded the recession of the early 1990s. Increasing affluence, the explosion of personal choice and a desire to do better for one’s children, led to extraordinary growth in the private school sector. Interestingly, this growth was not confined to the middle and upper classes; a Mori survey conducted in 1989 found that more than a third of parents of all private school pupils were skilled or unskilled working class. In London, where the state system was viewed with suspicion due to the collapse of standards in the Inner London Authority, parents, who viewed the comprehensive schools with something like fear, voted with their feet. Accordingly, London parents started early: the biggest growth in private school admissions was at the lower end of the market with forty-one per cent more under-fives going to private school between 1981 and 1991.
The 1980s, then, represented an extraordinary boom in private day schooling. First-generation private school parents emerged out of the Thatcherite credo and mixed with the long-established private school classes, for whom private schooling at preparatory and senior level was a sine qua non. Unlike today, both could afford the fees ranging from £5-7k per year. Add to this the number of pupils sent to private school free of charge by a parent’s employer, such as Shell or the Army, and you had a thriving sector, mining all sorts of public and private assumptions about class and legacy, affordably.
Such days are, rightly or wrongly, long gone. These days private school is a luxury, increasingly afforded only by the super-rich. For day pupils as I was, fees will now cost an average of almost £22,000 – or 30 per cent of that same household’s disposable income, up from 20 per cent five years ago. With Labour’s VAT raid on school fees now implementing an average 14 per cent rise on school fees, the private school exodus has well and truly begun, despite Bridget Phillipson’s protestations to the contrary. As I write this, I try to picture the scene outside Pembridge Hall now, all Range Rovers with blacked-out windows and mothers dropping off their children wearing dark glasses and baseball caps in their activewear. I think of my mother, in her Ford Escort, our dog parked in the back seat, and I feel rather sad. It was a different time.
