List: What your elite Victorian private school says about you
Victoria’s elite private schools come with ballrooms, polo pavilions and headline-making scandals. The kids wear blazers and the parents drive Range Rovers. Here is what yours says about you.
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Victorian private school students wear their blazers with pride, happy to have parents with a spare $40,000 to drop on their school fees.
Their schools come with ballrooms, polo pavilions and indoor aquatic centres — not to mention raging drug problems and absentee parents.
Melbourne’s elite private school kids will make up a bomb scare to get out of a maths test.
They would wear their school uniforms on the weekends if they could, but can usually be identified by their Scanlan Theodore dresses, Country Road casuals, RM Williams boots, polo shirts (collar always up) and self-satisfied smirks. They can usually be found hunting in packs on Glenferrie Rd, getting chucked out of Chapel St nightclubs, driving Range Rovers with P plates and hanging out at Head of the River and A-grade footy finals matches with other private school kids years after they finished school.
Carey Baptist Grammar
If you’ve just returned from two weeks at a Noosa penthouse apartment, then you’re a Carey kid.
Carey families holiday in Queensland, Aspen, Bali and Europe, where they will hang out exclusively with other Carey families. Carey kids are known for snorting cocaine at the school formal, stealing each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and getting drafted into the AFL. Carey is known for being a party school, and that’s for the parents, not just the students.
The school is famous for its annual mother’s lunch, where 500 women wearing $800 Alamais dresses start knocking back espresso martinis at 11am. The school is so rich it bought the mansion next door to it from a struggling private school, which isn’t notable enough to make this list.
What TikTok says: $30K a year to become a DJ.
Haileybury
All the rich kids in the southeast go to Haileybury, or want to go there. But insiders say the school struggles to attract second-generation students because all the successful ones move from Keysborough to Kew and send their kids to Carey instead.
The multi-campus school has a clear pecking order, with students from the Brighton campus at the top (with its smaller proportion of international enrolments), followed by Keysborough, and Berwick at the bottom. Berwick students are known as the country hicks, and the female students from there get called the “horse girls”.
Although it’s highly academic, the school has long been known for its sporting prowess, especially its AFL program. So why is it shutting its rowing program?
What TikTok says: Full scholarship for ping pong.
Caulfield Grammar
Caulfield Grammar students are the Carey students of the outer east, lording it over the local high school plebs with their good hair and fancy 4WD cars. Exactly how many Caulfield kids are on sporting scholarships is a closely guarded secret, but the school has long been accused of poaching all the best sporting talent from the surrounding schools.
The super-sized school managed to engineer a total takeover of nearby girls’ school Shelford Grammar and has a 50m Olympic-sized pool with a movable floor that can be raised and lowered to adjust the water depth.
Caulfield Grammar takes itself very seriously, and was highly embarrassed for having to sack a school talent acquisition manager for having brothel ads on her social media pages.
What TikTok says: This is your third high school.
Trinity Grammar
Traditionally hopeless at sport, Trinity Grammar has long had an inferiority complex. It suffers from having a smaller, landlocked campus, which is much less fancy than its closest neighbour, Xavier College. Still, this home to smart nerds who are good at languages and athletics is full of kids who are relieved their parents can afford the high fees. This makes up for the fact that Trinity is not in the APS but the second-tier AGSV. The school largely flew under the radar until a teacher was one of Victoria’s first Covid superspreaders and a deputy principal cut a boy’s hair, sparking one of the most explosive private school old-tie power plays ever seen in Melbourne.
What TikTok says: The most half-baked private school on earth.
Ivanhoe Grammar
The school’s motto is “courageous and kind” but Ivanhoe Grammar’s female students love the fact that they’re at the big rich co-ed school, not the cheaper girls’ school down the road.
And the male students love that they’re at a co-ed private school, even though it’s on the wrong side of the river and dangerously near Heidelberg. “This is not Heidelberg, it’s Eaglemont,” male students are heard to say while they hang out at Ivanhoe Station waiting for the end of the year so they can egg the girls from Ivanhoe Girls’.
There’s a divide between students, with those from the Mernda campus driving tractors and those from Ivanhoe driving Volvos.
What TikTok says: You couldn’t get into an APS school.
Lowther Hall
These days, parents at this uppity Anglican girls’ school in Essendon are happy an infamous mafia wife is no longer a school mum, blocking the kiss and go drop-off area with her large 4WD.
Lowther girls like to tell others they live in Moonee Ponds, not Essendon, even if it’s not strictly true. The school suffers the lack of a brother school offering a ready supply of formal partners, dates and potential husbands. The St Columba’s girls have the St Bernards boys, the PEGS kids have each other, but Lowther Hall students have no one.
The students hang out in Rose St and make sure they have the biggest drink bottles, the coolest hair and the latest Mr Winston hoodies, so people know they’re from Lowther Hall, not St Columbas. As one past parent puts it: “Lowther Hall is quite competitive, but you’re not competing against much, are you?”
What TikTok says: Nothing.
St Kevin’s College
You’re still defensive when someone brings up the tram chant. You wish people would talk more about all the good things the school does, not the few “bad eggs” who ruin things. You hate the Herald Sun. You go to St Kevin’s College. Sorry about that. Still, you’re better than the kids from Ipswich Grammar in Queensland who stole a wheelchair from a disabled man while on a school rugby trip.
Skevs kids historically had the edge on other Catholic boys schools, because all the smart kids from the country were sent there. But many people, including a vast number who still work there, worry that it’s lost its way. The school has long prided itself for being the second-best Catholic boys’ school after Xavier, and its inclusion in the APS gives it additional cred, especially with the Sacre Coeur girls and the Loreto girls.
What TikTok says: Great chanting skills.
Xavier College
You still can’t get over the fact that Josh Frydenberg isn’t your local member. You wear RMs on weekends so everyone knows you go to a posh private school. You are hoping you’ll get a summer internship at Minter Ellison law firm, which you call “Minters” so everyone knows your dad’s a partner there. Being Catholic embarrasses you when you’re with other private school friends but it’s OK because your school is the poshest Catholic school by far. You’re dating a “Gen” girl, you catch the train at “Glen” station and you like the fact that your school is more expensive and has fewer scandals than St Kevin’s.
Yep, you’re from Xavier.
What TikTok says: Your dad’s got connections.
Melbourne Grammar
You barrack for Melbourne, you live in South Yarra, your dad and grandfather went to Melbourne Grammar. But family dinners at Entrecote, L plates on a Porsche Cayenne and a holiday house in Sorrento doesn’t make up for the fact that everyone secretly hates you.
Parents, boys and old boys lost their shit recently when the school temporarily banned chanting at school sporting matches, believing their membership of the “Grammar Army” elevated them to God-like status.
The school is home to some of the poshest parents in Victoria with the median taxable family income a whopping $336,000. But it’s also home to a joker who poured milk on female rowers from a bridge over the Yarra.
What TikTok says: You started partying in year 11.
Scotch College
Yes, you think going to Scotch makes you better than everyone else. At least that’s what your dad tells you because he went there, too.
You love the fact that your school is the alma mater of 71 old collegians who have been knighted and that most of Melbourne’s top 100 companies are run by Scotch old boys who hire other Scotch old boys. Too bad that you’re spending your lunchtimes in the toilets vaping and trying to escape the bullies.
You are pining for the good old days when the school was run by Tom Batty, who managed to stay out of the Herald Sun. You aren’t sure about the new guy, Scott Marsh, but you like the idea of doing less academic work than before.
Scotch old boys’ events look like Rodd and Gunn conventions with students trying to impress the old guard so they’ll get a big four accounting internship.
What TikTok says: Do you know who my dad is?
St Catherine’s School
You live in Toorak, you’re a rower, you’ve got shiny blonde hair and you’re dating a boy from Grammar who you will one day regret marrying. You get your make-up professionally done for school photos and you wear granny’s pearls on special occasions. You’re a St Caths girl and feel pretty pleased about this fact.
It’s a bit of a worry, though, that some girls at the school would do anything for TikTok, including one 13-year-old in 2020 who drove through a Macca’s drive thru in school uniform. And do you remember the St Caths girls who engaged in behaviour so vulgar it was worse than a scene from Mean Girls? They made a schoolgirl drink her own urine after telling her it would cure acne at school camp.
What TikTok says: You think you are a character in Gossip Girl.
Methodist Ladies College
MLC is one of the biggest girls’ schools in the leafy inner east. It prides itself on being the school of choice for rich, smart professional women. But these barristers, accountants and surgeons are shocked at their daughters’ skirt lengths, not to mention their formal outfits and fake eyelashes.
MLC’s selling point is its year 9 Marshmead program, which the school fancies puts it on the same pegging as Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop. It’s wrong. All the naughty girls expelled from other schools who end up at MLC are sent to Marshmead in term four, where they will have a very bad influence on other new students.
Like Lowther Hall, the school suffers from not having a designated brother school, although it is situated in prime teen boy real estate next to Trinity and Xavier.
What TikTok says: $40k a year to deliver a baby calf.
Geelong Grammar
Geelong Grammar students love the fact that their school is more posh, more expensive and has richer parents than Geelong College, or pretty much any other school in the state. What a pity that it’s in Geelong, or to be exact, Corio. Still, the school’s signature pale blue blazers give them cred, and are much prettier to look at than the drab grey ones worn at St Caths.
Even the snakes love the lavish school, with one tiger snake calling a student’s dorm room home earlier this year.
Geelong Grammar doesn’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to claiming its territory, even going to the extremes of trying to trademark “Timbertot” for its early-learning program. Unfortunately its efforts failed, despite the school’s lawyers arguing it would suffer “particular hardship and substantial inconvenience” if their application was rejected. Yes, of course they did.
What TikTok says: Your dad is so rich he forgot your name.
Who should we cover in part two?
Originally published as List: What your elite Victorian private school says about you
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