We tutored our daughter but she was rejected by five private schools. Now I’m glad

VAT on private school fees came into effect on 1 January 2025 across the UK. Since then, parents at some of the the 2,500 private schools in England and Wales have seen a rises in fees. The economic downturn, combined with these rising fees, has sparked a national debate on whether private school is really worth the money. Here, a privately educated parent, based in London, reflects on what she has learned since her daughter enrolled in state school after failing her 11+. Four years ago, when my daughter, Lila*, failed to get offers from any of the five private schools we applied to, I was devastated. We had prepared her for the 11+ with the usual blizzard of tutoring, but we had underestimated how high the bar was, how lunatic other families’ preparations were. Rejection is always hard, but when it’s your child, it feels like a real kicking. My heart sank as I understood that she would have to attend the local comp, which had just been downgraded to ‘Good’ by Ofsted and has almost no outdoor space. The place felt – it still feels – shoddy and rickety. My mindset is that if you pay for stuff, it’s usually better. And if something is free, you can’t complain if it’s no good. This was made clear from the outset. Communication from the school is nothing like the oily kow-towing of the private sector. Shorts The school receptionists were, and remain, the rudest and most unfriendly women I have ever met – they make the receptionists at my GP look angelic. The reports about school life I got back from Lila in the first year made me feel pale and sweaty: queue bargers meant that when she finally got to the top of the lunch queue the food had run out; teachers quite often didn’t show up for lessons. There was also a complication with Lila, which made me freak out even more: a few months’ after being turned down for all those schools, she was diagnosed autistic, then with ADHD. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was she going to have to go to this zoo of a school, but she also had additional needs that they didn’t have a hope of meeting. I really despaired. Four years on, I can confidently say that I have been humbled. Lila’s school is the best place she could possibly be. From the start, all sorts of exceptions have been made for Lila due to her neurodiversity, but they also have high expectations. She isn’t babied or belittled, they want her to do well and don’t see why she can’t. That is not an easy line to tread with a child who is often so vague and distracted as Lila – it would be very easy to just leave her in a corner and ignore her, but they don’t. When she suffered from a bout of horrendous anxiety last year that saw her unable to eat or sleep, my fear was that if she was allowed to stay at home she would refuse to go back to school indefinitely. The SEN team agreed with me and looked after her in the learning support room while she worked through the anxiety. Within a week she was back in the classroom. Meanwhile, I hear story after story about girls at those private schools that I was so desperate to get into, suffering from burnout and chronic anxiety, who flee to the safety of home and never go back. I also see pressure at those schools to have impeccable social media accounts, to be at the right parties, wearing the right clothes. I was at a school like that and enjoyed it (and plenty of girls do thrive in that environment), but Lila would have been branded a weirdo and been unable to cope with the workload. Recently I have started to wonder, seeing other parents battle through the 11+ with their own neurodiverse children, if it’s the case that private schools just don’t want our children. For a while I beat myself up for not getting Lila tested earlier. She passed all the 11+ tests, but failed at the interview stage. Had they known she was autistic it might have put her sub-optimal performance into some sort of context. But on the basis of stories I have heard, I suspect that it would have been an instant mark against her name. The “Is your child neurodiverse?” box on the application form is nominally there so that the school can make “reasonable adjustments” to the testing process, but it is also, I suspect, a big red sign to quietly turn you down. If you object or try to fight their decision, as a friend recently found, they lawyer-up fast and hard. Private education is a product that is getting increasingly difficult to sell. VAT on fees has been catastrophic for business and to justify the expense, academic results must now be dazzling. Most neurodiverse children perform extraordinarily in a few key areas, but wildly underachieve in others. Private schools don’t want these crazy highs and lows, they want children who consistently achieve 70-80 per cent in all subjects – there is a plentiful supply of those in London. Lila never really stood a chance. Lila’s life isn’t easy and it won’t be easy in the future. But the most important thing with neurodiverse children is to get them through school with as little negative feedback as possible. Had Lila somehow scraped into one of those private schools I believe she would have been constantly in trouble for staring out of the window or being forgetful and vague. She would have been made to feel stupid and uncool. Lila doesn’t love her school – neurodiverse children rarely do. But school isn’t there to be loved, it’s there to be tolerated and to prepare you for public exams as best it can. In that, we’ve hit the jackpot. *Name has been changed