Being a prep school mum? I won't miss i

Spectator

09-07-2025

My younger daughter finished prep school last week. These years are often billed as the best of one's life. Indeed, I know the most charming 18-year-old whose pleasingly unfashionable dream is to teach at his old prep school – such were the halcyon times he enjoyed there.
At my daughter's leavers' assembly, I shed a few tears – as did she, since she's been exceptionally happy there since she was two years old. There hasn't been a single day when she hasn't wanted to go in. She's had some inspirational teachers, and the occasionally eccentric nature of the educational offering has really suited her. (Another reason I cried was because I'm a sucker for anything remotely mawkish, so a group of kids warbling the chorus of 'Time to Say Goodbye' is catnip.)
But my overriding feeling is one of relief. I've been a prep school parent for well over a decade and, while much of that time has been wonderful, it's all the associated trivia that's been so taxing: the school gate politics and the class WhatsApp groups.
Nits are a seemingly unavoidable feature of childhood, but having discovered a company which will divest you of lice – and vast sums of money – with clinical professionalism, I'm marginally less neurotic about them than I used to be, knowing I can sink further into my overdraft to have them dealt with. Verrucas still make me queasy, though we've mercifully avoided ringworm and impetigo, with the latter heading up the terrifying pantheon of childhood infections, to my mind.
But it's not just the fact that small people are essentially petri dishes of bacterial and viral experimentation. They can be vile to each other – especially the girls, so many of whom seem to relish withholding party invitations and excluding each other from friendship groups. At my elder girl's boarding prep, she was horribly bullied for homesickness by the only other girl in her year who'd been anything like as miserable.
And yet it's the other parents who really complicate the prep school years. Why read a school email when you can exchange 84 WhatsApp messages before breakfast as to whether it's uniform today or PE kit as usual? And despite being hopelessly disorganised, I've been class rep twice, so I know that these same channels go awfully quiet when volunteers are needed for a summer fair.
Mercifully, one can mute WhatsApp notifications. Or just do what my husband has always done: refuse to join the groups on the basis that only one spouse needs them – and then rely on the recipient to disseminate any relevant information. But it's the social minefield that other parents create that's so wearing.
At my elder daughter's socially smart, academically indifferent pre-prep, the parental interaction kicked off within the first few days of Reception. One mother invited all the others for lunch in the first week, which seemed like a lovely gesture. As we tucked into the sorts of morsels that wouldn't touch the sides for anyone without a chronic eating disorder, she explained that it had been five years since she'd redecorated, and she wanted to 'consult the hive mind' with regards to knobs for the new units. As almost all the other mothers ooh-ed and aah-ed over her selection, the gravity of the situation began to sink in – not least that I could be mistaken for someone who could give a flying turd about even her own knobs. I was careful to clock which other mothers were similarly unmoved, conducting my own social Rorschach test while eyeing up the possibility of a second mouthful of quiche.
Why read a school email when you can exchange 84 WhatsApp messages before breakfast?
Sure enough, it wasn't long before daily conversations between these women started (who all seemed to sport identical athleisure wear and were invariably married to men with third-rate degrees from fourth-rate universities – yet who somehow boasted eye-waveringly lucrative jobs in the intellectually stifling spheres of property or insurance). These conversations revolved around nothing more profound than handbags, reformer Pilates and Verbier vs Val d'Isère. There's a time and a place for such discussions, obviously – but all the time and everywhere?
Even if one manages to avoid such chat, as we did with our younger girl's no-frills prep, the sucker punch that is the 11-plus soon leaves even the toughest of us winded and bruised. A lack of transparency reigns. Nobody admits to coaching – and yet everyone does it. When I volunteered (in a class WhatsApp exchange, obviously) that my younger daughter had just started maths coaching, about a dozen others quietly confessed that their child had been seeing a tutor for several years.
Similarly, everyone plays their cards close to their chest about their child is applying for senior school, lest they increase the competition by encouraging an extra applicant or two. The pressure placed on children in Year 6 as they jostle for position is unbearable, and encourages faux modesty and mindless bragging on the part of their parents in equal measure. (When I once commented on an acquaintance's impressive four-year-old daughter, she simply said, 'Yes, she'll either be an Olympian or Prime Minister.')
Don't get me wrong, I've met some truly wonderful parents at my girls' prep schools – but they tend to be the ones who aren't too obsessed with their own and their offspring's friendships and education. The ones who realise that whichever highly selective school their child ends up at won't make a massive difference to their exam results. The ones who don't see prep school as a networking opportunity. Essentially, the ones who can see that it'll all come out in the wash anyway – or, in the words of Julian of Norwich, that 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well'. About a month ago, an email arrived from my younger girl's new senior school, sounding out interest in acting as a class rep for Year 7. I quickly closed my laptop.