There's much more to life than being top of the class This touches a nerve. Earlier this year (to some surprise) my eldest son won a place at a grammar. My son is sharp, not naturally brilliant. However, he decided he wished to attend this school, and applied himself. We employed a tutor, who was warm and enthusiastic, but privately confessed she doubted he was capable. We thought he was capable. So my husband and I helped him ourselves. We are ambitious for our children, but one tries to retain a sense of what is best for them, rather than what gratifies us. This report taps into our latent anxiety: our fear of exposing our offspring to any negative experience - our primal, yet ultimately damaging, instinct to preserve their precious self-esteem - even if we cheat, by opting to shield them from the whole truth. It's tempting to choose the false paradise - to send a bright child to the less demanding school where he might coast, near the top of the class, without excessive mental exertion. But one suspects this is merely a delaying exercise: choosing whether to puncture their conceit now, at a more rigorous school, or later, when they step, blinking, into the harsh light of the real world. LSE researchers found that being in the top 25 per cent of pupils at the end of primary school could significantly boost pupils" confidence - raising their academic attainment at 14 - comparative to a child in the bottom quarter. But to know that you aren't as clever your peers becomes no easier to accept with age. My son - now attending a school where every year 11 pupil achieved an A or A* for maths GCSE - is fast reconfiguring his opinion of his abilities. But this is an important lesson: to realise that success is neither guaranteed nor constant, and competition is fierce. He's both inspired, and fraught with doubt. As a parent, you're caught between wanting your child to be praised for writing his name, and accepting the wisdom of allowing him to discover that one's best can't always ensure victory. How interesting that the LSE report comes in the week that Eddy Newton, chairman of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, stressed the importance of losing - a "skill" vital for children. "You [will go] for interviews and not be offered a job," he said, "so you are going to have to learn to come second or lower than second." Of course children suffer if they are pressured into attending a school where the intellectual demands exceed their abilities. But, the truth is, there are very few geniuses. The rest of us work. If we don't allow children's confidence to be robustly tested, and punctured, then their artificially inflated self-opinion will burst at the slightest prodding. Confidence should not be fixed: it should wax and wane as you deserve. This is surely a more honest and healthy attitude: to permit our children to develop genuine self-knowledge before we cast them adrift into the adult world, which is unkind to those whose self‑perception dwarfs their talent. The LSE study suggests that schools focus on strategies beyond classroom ranking to boost pupils" "non-cognitive skills such as confidence, perseverance and resilience." Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, describes the LSE research as "fundamentally nonsense." The best teachers tend to cluster in the better schools, because the pupils are more enjoyable to teach. As well as learning from teachers, you learn from other pupils. If you go to a very good school, you have those two strong advantages. You may not be among the top performers in that school, but as you move beyond school, you'll encounter a much broader spectrum of people, and realise just how well you did. The LSE proposal suggests that your image of yourself depends on who you compare yourself with. So if you're a bright person, where the general run of pupils is less bright than you, you may have a bit of extra confidence. But that will be illusory, because when you go out in the world, you'll discover all these other clever people. Parents should aim to get their son or daughter into the best school that suits [them]. And if their child is in the lower half or bottom quarter, they're still better off than they are in a difficult school where the children don't want to learn, and the teachers aren't up to very much. At parents" evening, I confessed that my son half-doubted he deserved his place, because unlike some gifted pupils, he'd had to work so diligently to attain it. The teacher replied that if a boy was prepared to work hard, he'd do far better than a child who imagined he could make no effort. It was a gratifying response. If your child tries hard, and can withstand a few knocks, then confidence - and achievement - will follow. Success in life is rarely about being the cleverest.