[Z]

I went to a private school. I think it was 10% of my school was made up of pupils who were there on bursaries/scholarships. My mum started working again so that my parents could get the money together to be able to send me and my younger brother to that school. She gets up at 5am to go to work, my dad's up at 6am, they work long days and they go without a lot of things that they would love to have in order to pay for my brother and I's education. I don't think I am a stuck up person or that I'm any of the things that people have said in this thread about privately educated school pupils. I worked my ass off to get 5As in my Highers, I've just finished my second year of a university degree. Some of my friends have extremely wealthy parents, some of them do not. I'm not sure why there are so many stereotypes being listed in this thread, but it's kind of grating to read because people who act like that in real life are nowhere near as commonplace as is being implied in this thread. Sure, there are some idiots with money (or rather, people with money who have idiot kids) but that can't be helped - in my experience the overwhelming majority of pupils at my school were there to do well and get the best education because everyone else was there to work. Two people left my year of school at the end of 4th year, the minimum age for leaving school. Two. Private schools don't just exist so wealthy people can throw money at them (and I should also mention that, in case it's being forgotten, people who pay for private education still have to contribute to the public school system too, just like everybody else) - they exist so that people have a more stable learning environment. Beastie, my class sizes were closer to 30 than they were to 15, so I'm not sure where you got that figure from.

If anything, I've found that people who went to state schools are openly hostile towards me when they discover I went to a private school because of their stereotypical views, and not because of me. That is, they have this idea in their head of what a private school kid is like and then transfer that on top of my personality, and hate away on a system by making snide comments to me. I'm humble about it. My parents sacrificed a lot to put me there and I tried my absolute hardest to make them proud of me, and I did, what's wrong with that?