One of the reasons my kids are so eternally grateful to the head teacher of their primary school was that he expected his pupils to excel, no matter what the opposition. When we took chess teams to National Championships, he actually told them that not only did he want them to "beat the posh kids" but that he wanted them to make them cry. Chess, of course, tends to be the domain of the Public Schoolboy. There are very few girls.
Quite frequently, at primary school age, my daughters used to find themselves playing a small boy who would look smugly at his blazered chums and say, all too often rubbing his hands in glee, "Oh good! I'm playing a girl!" What he didn't realise, of course, was that the girl in question happened to be a National Champion in her age group and she didn't say a word nor bat an eyelid. She just thought "Oh good! I'm playing an idiot!" Generally the games were very one-sided: the good players knew who my daughters were.
Of course, there were other state schools who participated and some who succeeded, but they were normally from Richmond-upon-Thames or Hampstead Garden Suburb. For the record, Temple Sutton won 4 national titles in a 10 year period.
This year, the school has the best team for about 10 years I reckon. They are in the National Championships again and have already accounted for Southend High (a State Grammar) and Forest School (a massive fee-paying establishment in Redbridge) and will play Norwich School in the East of England Final soon.
The Temple Sutton Head doesn't just concentrate on chess: we still have the 11+ in Southend and the grammar schools operate it as their entrance exam. He takes his best Year 6 kids and crams them for this. Temple Sutton's best ever scorer in this was a young lad who came 16th in the County. He also won the British u11 Chess Championship with a 100% score - only the 4th junior ever to achieve this. For three or four consecutive years I took him on holiday with us to the British Championships, and for most of the rest of the year I would take him to weekend events where he would clean up with prize money. Sadly, this lad came from a very difficult background and, because of his mother's influence, became very unreliable. A couple of times I went to pick him up for a County match only to be told by his mother that he wasn't there when I could see him in the bedroom window. I suspect that she was depriving him from his chess because he's been misbehaving. Essex would turn up a player short, which was extremely embarrassing, so I just stopped picking him for the team. His academic success collapsed. From being 16th in the County at 11+ he had a mediocre set of GCSEs and worse A levels. His chess went nowhere.
With hindsight, we were conducting a social experiment. We demonstrated that, with the right schooling, kids from council-estate schools can compete with, and beat, the public schools. Allow them to fall way from that and they become mediocre. So in this country we cream off at two levels: firstly, whether you can afford the privileged education and, in Essex, Kent and a few other places, whether we can run an 11+ system which allows kids to be creamed off again. We stick the failures in the sink schools and concentrate on the elite.
What's the difference between the kids? Parental attitude. In the fee-paying and grammar school, the right parental attitude is highly concentrated, they make demands of the school and of course the school provides. The norm in the other schools is tending towards the couldn't-care-less and those kids who have the potential for success are quite often labelled swats and creeps. The system is geared to make them fail.
It is a great tragedy that a Labour government didn't sweep away all this privilege and at a stroke remove all the fee-paying and entrance-exam schools. If they had, and comprehensives had become the norm, every school would have had a hard core of parents with the right parental attitude who would have carried the rest along. There would be no school in which there would have been an anti-educational hard core. There would be far fewer barriers to success amongst kids from less privileged backgrounds.
Curiously, the posh kids would have benefitted from this. Having street-hardened opposition tests them to see if they could sink or swim. The young lad I mentioned above used to terrify his opponents because, so far as they were concerned, he was a freak. A wily, sharp chess player who spoke Saarfend and could give them a bloody nose afterwards (not that he ever did but he had a commanding physical presence). Just imagine what Tim Henman could have achieved if he's gone to a comprehensive school.