On Friday May 4, at 2.30pm, 2,000 people will gather in St Paul’s Cathedral to commemorate the life of the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), who is buried in the crypt. Nearly half will be schoolchildren between the ages of 13 and 18. They will be neatly dressed, many in school uniform. Among them will be our eldest son, Robert, who is 17, and attends Wellington College in Berkshire.

Why do we send our son to a school founded in 1859, which describes itself as “one of Britain’s great public schools”? The Victorian architecture, the insistence on manners and uniform, and the system of prefects all look, on first inspection, very dated. And bussing the whole school to London to remember a soldier who died more than 150 years ago hardly seems relevant to the modern world.

But we want the same as every parent does, including those who can’t find £8,000 a term: the best education for our child. And it is those very things that seem old-fashioned — the requirement for uniform, and for discipline, the sense of community and history — that appealed to us. If we had been choosing between state schools we would have chosen the one that offered as many as possible of those values and requirements.

Are we worried that Robert won’t know how to enter the “real world” when he leaves Wellington? It is now a fully co-educational school, so women are not going to be a shock. And the “real world” is where an understanding of how to work in a team, the ability to accept authority (and the judgment to know when to challenge it) and the knowledge that there will always be people out there more, and less, capable than him, will serve him well. It is a privilege, the education that he has had, but it has been one that we have been happy to make sacrifices to pay for, mainly because it has prepared him for life, not just for examinations.

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Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, went to Eton College. His parents no doubt thought it was the best place for him to receive an education. Then as now Eton had an old-fashioned uniform, a lexicon (and even a number of sports) unique to the college, strong discipline and a sense of community and history. It is so popular that it now tests all applicants two years before entry and awards places on merit. Wellington has had to introduce pretesting this year because it, too, has become so popular. On April 26 one of the first children to take the pre-test will be our second son, Lachlan — because we believe that it is the very things that make public schools seem an anachronism that enable them to continue to offer the best education in the world.

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