Pressure is starting to mount about where to send the eldest after primary school.

Fundamentally, my beliefs are simple. I don’t think people with money should be entitled to a better education than those without.

Children should go to the schools closest to them.

If your community is good enough to live in, then the community school should be good enough for you children.

If your local school isn’t performing well, how will it ever get better if us parents do not invest in it?

Going to school with a mix of children from other ethnic and social backgrounds will help prepare kids for life.

It’s important they see, and learn alongside people better off and indeed worse off, than themselves.

I don’t think any secondary school in the South East will provide a “bad education”.

We don’t live in a third world country, nor do I believe secondary school is the only chance to get an education.

How many of us knew what we wanted to do and be when we were 11?

When I was 11 I wanted to be a helper in the local old people’s home because I used to visit an elderly relative there and got to push the tea trolley..

I didn’t know myself, what I wanted to do, or have the confidence to pursue it until I was 26 and pregnant.

It took multiple dead-end jobs I hated for me to realise I needed to claw myself out the rut I was in. I saved up, went back to school, got my NCTJ journalist qualification and now I do a job I love.

My eldest daughter wants to be an artist. She’s quirky, but she’s no Bob Ross.

People have spoken to me about getting her an art scholarship at a private school, but the very idea repels me.

Can you imagine a kid of mine among privileged princesses?

Unsurprisingly, I went to the local school.

At the time it was not doing that well. Kids from the “undesirable estates” promised to “flush your head down the bog” and the teachers didn’t seem to notice if you were there or not.

They were old and jaded, doling out the same worksheets each week, and the staff room stank of fags and stale booze. Unless you were incredibly self-motivated (AKA a swot) then school was a chance to catch up with friends, flirt with boys, and make weekend plans.

Yes we rolled our skirts up, but under our shirts were padded training bras. There was one girl who’d flash her bits for a Mars bar, and admittedly she was quite popular, (and quite chubby) but it didn’t make inspire me to copy her.

I was more of a Snickers girl. I left school with a handful of GCSEs and my virginity intact. I deemed it a success.

Now I’m making choices for Gracie. I know, if allowed to get away with the minimum, she will.

The parent in me worries Longhill will allow this, but the 11-year-old I used to be says what about having fun?

What about the fact she can walk to school with her mates?

Honestly, I do wonder how much “more” she is capable of, and what she could achieve if she went to a school that was “doing remarkably well” but I can’t send her to the Catholic school.

It goes against everything I believe it. Confessing sins? Feeling guilty for having any fun? School governors that cover up perverted priest scandals? No thanks. I’d prefer she hung out in the bike sheds with the local lads playing kiss chase.

It’s a contentious issue. Parents only want the best for their kids, as they should, and those who choose to move so their children have a better stab at a better school are well within their rights to do so.

Parenting is the most personal thing you’ll ever do.

We mix what we didn’t get, but wanted from our own childhoods, with our own beliefs and values, then force it down our kids’ throats for them to gag on and regurgitate for their own children one day.

Selfishly, I want Gracie to go to the school closest to home. I don’t want to send her on a bus.

I want her to walk and meet me and her sisters after school.

If she’s feeling poorly or being bullied by the “bad kids” (which I’ve been promised will happen) I want to be able to be with her in five minutes, so I can bundle her in the car to the safety of my arms.

Obviously, I’ve not gone and looked at any of the other schools in case they are wonderful, forcing all my socialist beliefs out the window, and have me selling my house and soul to get her in.