Everything you’ll know if you went to school in Kent

Hollister is love, Hollister is life


Kent, also known as the garden of England is a county full of commuter towns and UKIP supporters. It’s where Nigel Farage stood for Parliament and the home of Britain First. All things considered it’s a bit of an odd place to grow up. As it is a rather a distinctive microcosm, there are certain things that you will just know if you went to school in Kent.

You probably went to a single sex school

For some reason most of the schools in Kent, (regardless of whether they are state or independent) particularly at secondary level a single gender affair. I’mm not sure why, if you know why please let me know. Not really interacting with the opposite sex does make you assume that you will be a crazy cat lady and confirmed spinster by the time you’re thirty. You do start to question whether you will ever interact with a member of the male of the species. And then you get to university and wonder what exactly you were worrying about, oh the irony.

Grammar schools are Very Important Places

Kent harbours one of the last vestiges of the tripartite system of state education…the grammar school. In most places they have been phased out, but in Kent they remain extremely desirable and competitive. Anecdotal evidence I have suggests that private primary schools do have a tendency to be grammar school factories. If I just think about my own school (which was a private primary), we were all expected to either go to a grammar or another private school.

There’s a real hierarchy

Obviously this is kind of generalising, but it is basically all to do with how the grammar system filters out many of the most academically gifted and generally more affluent students (basically middle class) before they enter secondary education. If your parents are wealthy and you do not make the grade for the grammar it is pretty likely that you will be sent to a private school that will get you similar results to a grammar. The thing is, because the best state schools are selective and tend to dominate the league tables the remaining schools in the state system don’t tend to be particularly good.

You’re always jealous of the North for getting more snow days

A snow day is one of the best presents that the winter can bring for your average school aged student. Not so much for their commuting parents, but who cares if you have a guilt free day off when you can go tobogganing/ Yet they are so few and far between that it is difficult not to be green with envy towards our northern counterparts who get the brunt of the snowy conditions. And sadly there hasn’t been much snow in the South East in the past few years so schooling has been depressingly consistent of late.

Abercrombie and Fitch, Jack Wills and Hollister were the epitome of cool

This was more the case during the stormy years of puberty, but on any home clothes day you would be almost guaranteed to see hoards of thirteen year olds decked out head to toe in one of these three so called ‘designer brands’. Come into school bearing a bag with a half naked man on it and the look is complete. If you weren’t part of this style tribe it is distinctly possible that you thought that a grey tracksuit was a good idea, or just went full emo.