Student Blog: Reflections on Roots Futures London Exchange from state school pupil Kieran

I remember sitting in an assembly being told about the Roots Futures Programme thinking, “Oh this will probably be another boring assembly about something I don’t care about.” But I was wrong, this programme turned out to be exactly what I was looking for, it suited my background very well.

I’m currently studying Psychology, Sociology and Medical Science at Park Academy West London. In my spare time, I do Taekwondo. I am a 2nd dan black belt and also a teacher of the sport. I teach the age range of 4 year olds, to the oldest I’ve taught, 50 years old. Throughout my time teaching I’ve taught several different types of people, of different ages, races, genders and classes, so I get to see a lot of different people’s mindsets and behaviours. But throughout my 5 years of teaching I’ve actually never met a private school young person, this programme gave me the chance to change that.

When I started the programme, I was at first quite nervous. I’ve very much got a set lifestyle, can be quite nervous about doing new things and I had some misconceptions about the lifestyle of private school children that also weren’t helping. For example, I expected all the children to be posh, with incredibly rich parents, but I was quickly proven wrong. The students of our partner private school led relatively normal lives, only it seemed to me that in some ways they were much more fortunate than the majority of the country, causing them to be able to spend money on luxuries like a private school.

My favourite day was our visit to our partner private school, as I got to see the campus and get a sense of the lifestyle. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I even got to meet the principal. I was also able to ask him multiple questions, which he kindly answered! I also got the chance to ask some of the students questions, such as ‘do they feel disconnected from society because their schooling is being done privately?’. The majority of students said ‘yes’ to this question.

Another particularly interesting moment was when the young people from our partner private school came to our school for a visit, I got to see their young people’s reaction to our school. They found our school to be very busy, with a large number of classrooms and a lot of students all fit into just one building, whereas their school has fewer students, but with multiple buildings and campuses.

I have been reflecting on a couple of the key things that I have taken away individually from this experience. Firstly, it changed my mentality towards private school students and their lives. My assumptions of what a private school student’s life was like changed. I used to believe that they were sort of inhuman, but I now see them as more likeable figures, with many chances that they should embrace. 

Secondly, I realised how much of an advantage private school children can have over state school children, due to financial wealth, smaller class sizes (anecdotally the biggest class I saw was around 8-10, compared to our classes of 30) and access to resources (for example, I even saw a Forge at the private school!). There were of course also other resources much more similar to ours, but the amount of money put into it was evidently quite different. 

As a group, something that we took away was that we learned about ourselves and our strengths. We learned that we have quite a strong sense of community in our school. At our state school, it feels like we make a great effort to speak to, include and get along with each other. Comparatively, at our partner private school friendship groups seemed much more separate from each other and appeared to struggle more with this aspect.

This experience has shaped some of my beliefs and hopes for our future. I hope that one day my state school will have the amount of financial support that many private schools have, with a similar amount of opportunities such as visiting multiple countries like Poland, Belgium etc (as those at our partner private school did). I now believe that private school institutions could support these changes by investing more money into their local areas and schools, which are less financially fortunate, to give other children outside of their school community an opportunity that they wouldn’t have due to lack of funding. 

My big dream for our society is that one day all schools will have the funding that our partner private school does, with an equal amount of opportunities given to all young people, no matter race, gender, class or wealth. One way this could be done is through better government funding, as not all parents are equally financially fortunate. I hope the private school system becomes more involved with the state school system and we can all live in one society, without any limitations.

I hope this experience gives young people a new point of view and can change our perception of society to help create a better and brighter future in education, as it did for me. I’m still in contact with some of the people from the other school including Elizabeth! I’ve made some actual friends from it and I’m very happy I signed up

Thank you to all who made this opportunity possible and I hope to be able to do something similar again.