After watching a YouTube Short in which the documentary filmmaker Stacey Dooley claims private schools are harmful because they don’t give privileged children a sense of “what Britain looks like,” a viewer shared an opposing view that received 2100 likes: a product of both a private school and a state comprehensive, he or she has come to the conclusion that “private schools are there to educate the next generation of leaders, whereas state schools are there to create obedient workers.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyJpC9Q-c1Y )

As a tutor whose students range from one attending a Tin Shui Wai secondary school to one at Eton College, I totally get where the viewer is coming from. Generally speaking, private schools place much more emphasis on discovering potential and developing originality, while the majority of state schools take a cookie-cutter approach to educating the young, expecting everyone to regurgitate the same material and rewarding students for their ability to guess the model answer. In adulthood, the privately educated are therefore more inclined to view career development as a no-guts-no-glory journey, intent on creating rules rather than following them; their state school counterparts, raised to see obedience as a virtue, are usually content being a cog in a corporate machine.

In my experience, when these two types of students apply to university, they have very different concepts of what makes a good personal statement. Private school students can often instinctively grasp that they must showcase their uniqueness, rightly believing that if they don’t, they won’t stand out among the sea of applicants. State school students, by contrast, tend to take shelter in a formulaic approach, deeming material that makes them different from the crowd too risky. This makes sense: if you’ve spent years looking for model answers, you’ll naturally assume there’s only one correct way to present yourself as an applicant in writing; the word “personal” in “personal statement” might therefore as well not exist.

Below are two replies to the third question UK university applicants must answer in their UCAS personal statements (“What else have you done to prepare outside of formal education, and why are these experiences useful?”). The first version is the kind typically written by kids brought up to think rigidly. They assume they simply need to supply the information the question asks of them, not realizing that admissions officers are also interested in how their minds work, and will therefore also pay attention to how they choose to answer the question. The second version (written by me) focuses on one extracurricular activity only, but presents it in a way that connects back to the major the student wants to study. As you read and compare both versions, put yourself in the shoes of an admissions officer and ask yourself, which one is more likely to leave a positive impression?

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What else have you done to prepare outside of formal education, and why are these experiences useful?

First response

I was a member of my school’s tennis team, which helped me cultivate team spirit and understand the value of perseverance during challenging matches and long training sessions. I also played the piano and violin, which taught me that music can relax and ground me in times of stress while encouraging creativity and emotional expression. In my free time, I volunteered for the SPCA, because I am an animal lover and I believe a civilized society should take good care of the most vulnerable, including those who cannot speak for themselves or protect their own well-being, regardless of circumstance.

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Second response

Physics has become such a big part of my life that even my experience of playing tennis is filtered through the subject. When I discovered that a heavier racket enabled me to hit the ball harder with less strength, for example, it struck me that I was witnessing the concept of momentum transfer in action. When I noticed the ball bounced higher on a clay court than on a grass one, I made the connection with surface interaction. I was eventually chosen to be a member of my school’s tennis team, an achievement I attribute not only to training three times a week, but also to my ability to apply principles of physics to tennis manoeuvres.

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Michelle Ng

英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。