ENGLAND’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19722, 13 December 1926, Page 16

ENGLAND’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

LONG WAITING LISTS AMERICAN’S APPEAL At present it is as difficult to secure I admission for 3 boy to an English public school as it is to become a member of the M.C.Ci Mr Ernest Trcux, the American acto?. said to an interviewer recently: “I brought my two boys over, with me, having been told that the best schools in the world were in England. But I find’ that all the schools which my friends recommend have waiting lists years long. Can someone tell me if there is any public school my boys can enter without having been registered prior to birth?’’ This is the explanation given by one prominent scholastic authority: “People are thinking more of education. than ever before, and there is in consequence a vastly greater number of parents who want to give their boys a public school education. Therefore it is harder to gain entrance, and if parents do not wish to be disappointed they would be prudent to enter a boy at least four or five years in advance. “The two schools vin to which it is hardest to gain entrance are Eton and Winchester. They have great waiting lists. A boy should be entered at least ten or twelve years before he is likely to enter the school at Eton, or even at birth, which, of course, is done in a great, many cases. Winchester docs not allow a boy to be entered before he is eight. All the other large public schools have long waiting lists, and there is a tremendous rush for places.” Public schools, in fact, have longer waiting lists than they have. ever known. Winchester has a waiting list sufficient to last for the next four or five years. Here there are ten boarding houses, each with about forty boy*, and each house master deals with the applications for his own house, and has his own waiting list. There are also seventy scholars who are boarded within the college building. They secure entrance by foundation scholarships. A few special vagrancies may be dealt with by the headmaster as his own nominees, and in other ways. Social status is sometimes said to govern acceptance of an application for admission, but this is strongly denied. “A boy’s social position is no bar in my experience,” says the headmaster of Haileybury. “I should certainly not consider it so with regard to my own school.” Haileybury is another school with a waiting list extending over several years.