Have been meaning to return to the question of student confidence for quite some time now. I got some very interesting responses:

The first one:

'As a token Oxbridge state school entrant I am FURIOUS. Furious that I got tricked into doing this. I hate this place. an extension to bloody finishing school, with people constantly telling you you're shit, where they can get away with calling you a liar and charge you through the nose for tradition's sake, yet shamelessly pay their staff minimum wage in one of the most expensive cities in Britain. I'm treated more like a kid here than I was at sixth form.'

The second:

'My experience with tertiary education and workplaces in Australia concurs with your conclusion that private school education simply imbues people with greater confidence. State school students often out-perform private school students at University, because they are more disciplined in their approach to study; this is a consequence of having to work harder than the private school students to gain entrance into their course. However, once they compete in job interviews, the confidence of the private school students renders the greater abilities of the state school student largely irrelevant. In other words, the state school prepares students for what some of us wish was important, while the private school prepares students for what is actually important.'

The third (from Dominic):

'Your students are being diffident. They would be shunned by their peers if they were not. It is profoundly unkewl to exhibit confidence in one's own abilities. Or, indeed, to exhibit intellectual ability of any kind whatsoever.

The state primary my son used to attend seemed to regard the entire purpose of education as boosting the "self-esteem" of pupils (the state primary he attends now seems to have a marginally broader notion of its remit).

Public schools instil social confidence; the Winchester and Eton boys I encountered at Oxford seemed - to me, at least - astonishingly socially assured. They were also without exception self-loathing headcases, but I suppose that's the price you pay.

My impression, based on my own education at a selective independent secondary school, is that nerds and swots are a nonconformist minority pretty much everywhere; at best, "academic" selection slightly increases their numbers within the overall school population, and perhaps reduces their exposure to some of the less genteel forms of anti-intellectual conformist brutality.

One of the major tasks of any adult who grew up as a nerd or swot in such an environment is to disabuse oneself of the notion that nerds and swots are in some sense a breed apart, and to direct one's anger towards the systemic expectations to which the "conformists" are conforming, rather than towards the conformists themselves.

I think that at the highest level the question you're addressing is simply that of social privilege; what the wealthy have is wealth, ease and a sense of entitlement which suffuses as much as they can control of their social environment, including their schooling (although this may introduce artificial privations for the sake of "character-building"). They have a general expectation that things will go their way, and that any hardships or obstacles they may encounter en route are really only a sort of a game ("this person in this university / job interview is putting me down in order to see if I can shrug it off, rally and come back at him with something; the cut-and-thrust of the tutorial / trading floor requires that one not be an over-sensitive crybaby" - understanding that these are the rules makes a *huge* difference).

It would not actually be a good thing if state-school educated pupils became more like them. It would be a good thing if studious and bright state-school educated pupils did not have the general expectation that they will be victimized by their peers (although this is not a problem specific to state schooling) and were enabled to participate in mutually supportive (and mutually critical, and politically aware) collectivities instead of becoming isolated, neuroticised and/or anorexic. The school can perhaps help with this; or failing that it can get out of the way.