Examining your conscience

Ignore the sneering. There's no doubt that state education is the right choice for middle-class children and their parents.

Tomorrow, along with thousands of other parents, I will push my firstborn out of the door and doubtless pace the house, in the sort of anxiety that used to be the preserve of expectant fathers, waiting for the phone to ring. If it's good news, I will feel a bit smug; if it's bad news, I don't know what I will feel, because I've never been here before. For Thursday is GCSE day, the first big public reckoning with a decision we made when our son was four: to send him to the nearest state school.

I can honestly say that we have never wavered from this course, even when yet another friend admits to having pulled Precious out of the state system because it's not meeting her exceptional needs.

I've occasionally been berated for putting politics before my children's interests, a charge that bafflingly most often comes from parents who have institutionalised their children from a young age. But in the weeks since the exams finished - weeks when nothing more can be done - I've felt assaulted on every front by a campaign to kill off what remains of middle-class confidence in the possibility of an education that is both fair and good. As late as yesterday, the Tories have sought to assure me that any momentary satisfaction parents may feel over good grades would be ignoring drastically falling standards in core subjects.

It took a row with a well-known novelist to restore my spirits: "But you don't live in Lambeth," he sneered. "No, actually, I live in Hackney."

"So what sort of school did you go to?" he countered. When I answered "A private one," his sneer deepened into a snort of contempt. I'm grateful to him, as it was just the reminder I needed.

At my progressive private school in the 1970s, I was allowed to skulk at the back of the class in maths because I wasn't any good at it. When I read under my desk nobody much minded (I was good at English, so that was OK). One of my friends was expelled for underperforming, even though at the time she was coping single-handedly with a manic-depressive mother. For all the talk of caring, we knew it was a conditional environment - conditional on talent, good behaviour and, of course, money. We weren't educated so much as trained to achieve what our parents wanted for us.

The contrast between this and the education my son has received is startling. It's true he has probably learned more French from his Congolese friend, an unaccompanied refugee who arrived two years ago without a word of English, than he has from his teachers. But his maths is far better than mine: he understands powerful concepts I never grasped, such as the full significance of the equal sign in quadratic equations. Where his education really outshines mine, though, is ironically in the very value-added areas that my old school prided itself on. Music, to him, isn't just for students headed for the Royal Academy (though there are plenty of them) - it's steel pans and found percussion instruments and his Congolese friend's inspired vocal compositions. It's hip-hop and bebop and improvised jazz piano pieces by students capable of articulating the fabulous diversity of London in the most sophisticated ways. "You're just lucky to have found a good school," sniffed my novelist friend.

Yes, I am lucky. But, of course, being middle class, I wouldn't dream of sending my son to a bad school. This is what I will be reminding myself as I pace the floor on Thursday.