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Lily Allen has shared her memories of attending one of the UK’s most renowned private schools, declaring that the food was “disgusting”.
The pop star, author and actor discussed education as the main theme of an episode of Miss Me?, the podcast she hosts with her longtime friend, TV presenter Miquita Oliver.
Allen attended a total of 13 schools during her childhood, including King Charles III’s junior alma mater Hill House School, where fees are as high as £21,600 per year.
During the episode, she and Oliver took a question from a listener about their favourite (and least favourite) school dinners.
“Urgh, I went to this one called Hill House, which was actually where Prince Charles went to school,” she recalled. “They had this f***ing disgusting brown bread that had massive seeds in it, and I was like, I can’t eat this, I’m a Mighty White girl.
“I just found it absolutely revolting.”
Asked by Oliver if, in general, the food was “posher” at private schools, Allen suggested they were in fact worse than the ones at state schools.
“No! These schools are all about their profit margins,” she responded. “I actually bet that the school dinners were worse at private schools than they were at state schools, because it’s all about coining it.”
Reflecting further on her time at Hill House, when she was around seven years old, Allen said that sports day involved a “cannon run” where children had to run around an obstacle course before assembling a gun cannon.
“It was f***ing weird,” she said. “We also did rifle shooting and fencing. I was quite good at fencing. That was the poshest school I went to.”
The “Smile” singer, who was expelled from a number of the schools she attended, suggested that private schools such as Hill House and Eton were the reason British politicians were so “f***ing horrible and ruthless...”
“It’s because their mothers abandoned them when they were seven years old and sent them to completely loveless schools,” she said.
In the same episode, Allen explained why she had decided to send her own children, daughters Ethel and Marnie, to private school in Brooklyn, New York, despite her own misgivings. She lives in the US with her daughters and her husband, Stranger Things star David Harbour.
“I think there are great public schools and there are great private schools,” she began, “so I don’t think that it neccessarily is about one or the other, it’s about what is available to you in your area, in which you live.”
She said that Ethel, 12, and Marnie, 11, had been state educated while her family was living in London because they were close to a “really great” school, which Oliver also attended.
“When we moved to America they went to public school here until the end of elementary school, and then we switched them to private school,” she said.
“That was not because I disagreed with the public schooling system, it was because there is a lottery here in Brooklyn, where we live, and the school that was offered to Ethel was a) too far away for us to commute, and b) I didn’t like the school, I didn’t think it was a very good school.
“So that was the option that was afforded to her and we had the resources to do something else, and I made that decision.”
Earlier this month, Allen admitted that she still feels self-conscious about her lack of traditional education, having left school when she was 15.
“I’m not educated,” she said. “I left school when I was 15 and I don’t even have one GCSE, not one qualification, and I am ashamed of it.”
