In the education jungle, the season of acceptance and rejection for state-school admissions this year has passed, leaving us pale and trembling at every buff envelope to hit the doormat.
Now we're in the anxious month of last-chance appeals and the manic scramble for alternatives. "I'm sure they'll be fine whatever happens," we lie sweetly to our co-sufferers, before heading home to bash out another protest letter and measuring catchment zones with a pedometer.
I bumped into the mother of one of my children's friends from state school clutching a sheaf of appeal papers, with a desperate glint in her eye. She has one child the couple can just about afford to educate privately but needs a state school place for the second. It's either that or up sticks from London, where she looks after her elderly mother.
It makes her one of a growing number of parents fighting the allocation system for a place in a decent state school. London parents account for a sizeable share in the last-hope appeals: nationally, 88,000 parents appealed last year; more are expected to do so this year. A burgeoning industry has been set up to guide parents through the appeals system, with solicitors charging up to £2,000 to handle the process.
Everyone knows the chance of success is slight. A vast well of demand outstrips a tiny trickle of supply: the state school system doesn't work for many middle-class parents in the capital - and an awful lot of fudge goes into covering that up.
No wonder that here in Islington many of us still shake our heads at the tale of localMP Jeremy Corbyn. Here is a chap whose 11-year-old a few years ago achieved the holy grail of education in the borough: getting out of it and not having to pay for the pleasure.
His bright son Ben was offered a hotly coveted place at the Queen Elizabeth School in Barnet, a selective grammar. The school is a beautiful old building in stunning grounds. It is as academically brilliant as Westminster school, just not as full of the offspring of London's top smug people. Did Mr Corbyn jump for joy and kiss the postman?
He did not. Being a firm believer in comprehensive education and possessing, unlike the rest of us, unbending principles in the matter, he refused to condone the boy going there. His missus promptly left him - and sent the child off to leafy Barnet.
I sympathise with the Corbyns' dilemma. How to educate your children (assuming you are lucky enough to have any financial choice in the matter), involves a mix of private principles, middle-class guilt about getting ahead on the opportunity ladder, combined with a firm desire to do exactly that when push comes to shove. It's hardly ever said, but it does divide parents: even ones not so red in tooth and claw as Mr Corbyn.
A lot of parents feel the tension of the choice. I know one woman whose daughter got a scholarship at a private school - and whose extended family are so cross about her going that they won't talk about it. On the other side of the divide, I rather admire the Conservative columnist Andrew Gimson, who agreed to have his daughter go to state school in London because his wife Sally - a Labour candidate - felt so strongly about it.
Often though, the private option wins out because it's too much upheaval to move house and face the silent reproach in future decades that the children might be doing much better had we emptied the rainy-day accounts and avoided the bog-standard "satisfactory" school.
But we are also prone to impossibly high standards and a bit of herd-like behaviour. The designer Stella McCartney - herself state-educated because, she once commented, her famous dad was "tight" with dosh, intends to do something very different with their own children.
Her husband Alasdhair Willis, another product of the state system, says they are not sending their kids to a state school because there aren't any good ones in W11 where they live. I can't see why this is true. The Fox School in Kensington, with a big intake from the area, is garlanded by Ofsted as an "outstanding school... with exceptional qualities, marked by its high standards".
It also has a hugely mixed social intake and lots of children without English as a first language. I've no idea what is driving Stella and Alasdhair's choice but however good a school's results on paper, parents will often fret about variety in a school - where what matters is the structure and discipline to make it work.
The new generation of Tories are in a bind: so many are privately educated and their social set still errs on the side of sending Noah and Dido private. Not so easy if you're trying to avoid the charge of being a posh boy who doesn't understand the "squeezed middle".
The favoured primary solution is Kensington's St Mary Abbots, where David andSamantha Cameron have sent their children. I guess, if we are being nosey, the Camerons don't live in the catchment area since moving to Downing Street, but they did when they applied.
The Goves also send their offspring there (very strict about homework, I hear) and the parental profile is as boho-posh as you can get in the state sector. The school gates throng with the children of film-makers, architects, journalists who are prepared to live in shoe boxes and worship on Sundays to qualify for a place.
The Camerons even attended a quiz night, shortly after the birth of their fourth child, to show that they're fully part of state school life: it was recently revealed that Dave is looking for an academy for his oldest child.
That's where the going gets tough. When a couple of children with posh first names drifted out of our state primary in year three, we held our nerve. But by the time it is years five and six and you've studied the criteria for the best academies and realised your children are the wrong faith, wrong academic band (more places available for the least able) or your garden gate is the wrong side of the cut-off, panic sets in and you start to squirrel St Cake's brochures underneath the sofa.
There is an alternative view: which is that it doesn't matter if the school isn't that good. A colleague told me the other day he took this view, not least because he and his siblings had succeeded despite some rubbish teachers and learned more at the kitchen table than they had at school.
I did point out this was unlikely to happen to our children, because like a lot of London professionals we work ridiculously hard and only arrive in the kitchen when they've dashed off their homework and we're too zonked to understand a verbal reasoning test.
True, you could rely on the new social mobility initiatives, which will mean clever children from state schools will have a better crack at the good universities and might well do better in the Oxbridge race than their well-spoken friends who went to the pricey day school. Still, it's a scary risk to take, because academic basics do matter.
That's why we stumble through the great middle-class education war zone in fear and hope - and wonder if the little blighters might one day show the slightest sign of appreciating what we went through for them.
Source: Anne McElvoy, London Evening Standard - 11th April 2011
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