See, I went to a private school til 16 and then went to my local sixth form college for A levels. The school I went to tried very hard in terms of spiffing uniform and making us do speech & drama lessons but it was mostly rubbish. It was a long way away so the massive amounts of time I spent on a school coach every day cut me off from local kids and I spent a lot of time with no-one to talk to in the evenings and hated it. I couldn't wait to get out. The sixth form college was like the start of my life, as far as I was concerned. The teaching was *much better*. There were real people doing real things, in a real town that was a short bus ride away from my house. I could go record-shopping in lunchtime. I worked in my dad's warehouse on a Saturday morning. I went to Durham, (because I didn't get into Oxford, of course) and that felt like a stifling regression to schooldays; I moved to Brighton, and it felt like life had started again. And really, of the three universities I attended as an undergrad, the best teaching and the most useful courses were to be found at the ex-poly, Brighton.

In short, I find it hard to be jealous of people that went to top schools; how can I be jealous of someone who, at seventeen, didn't know how to navigate across a town, or get a train somewhere? I really don't like the idea of exclusive private schools and the universities that are extensions of private schools because, well, when do you get to learn about the rest of life, then?