體驗英國二手校服文化｜大搖大擺去買二手！沒人說你窮，還會帶來意外的社交收穫
A full British school uniform can cost the equivalent of more than ¥4,000, which shocks newly arrived Chinese parents. Dr Xiaoyun Peng describes the second-hand system that absorbs it: stock sorted by school section, age and size in an exhibition room on site, run entirely by parent volunteers, with items at roughly 20% of retail and half of them close to new. She sets this against policy — the 2021 School Uniform Guidance requires schools to consider cost and bars them from mandating particular brands or single suppliers — and against culture, where affluent families buy second-hand as readily as anyone else and charity shops are ordinary adult retail. Her observation for Chinese families is that concerns about hygiene and face dissolve on contact, and that children take their cue from whether the parent treats used clothing as a compromise.
中國媽媽親歷孩子英國“中考”，校長來信勸家長不要“雞娃”
While her elder son sat GCSEs, Dr Xiaoyun Peng's daughter's school sent parents a letter about resilience. It referenced the government and NHS push on adolescent mental health, then, with unusual candour, cited King's College London research finding that grit accounts for under 1% of the variation in exam results; motivation, home and school environment together add about 4%; intelligence accounts for close to 40%. The head neither dismissed resilience nor sold it as a formula. Peng contrasts this evidence-based restraint with the inspirational register familiar to Chinese parents, and describes her son's half-term during the exam period: rowing in the morning, practice and a walk in the afternoon, no revision classes and no extra work. She argues that Britain's capacity to resist escalation is structural rather than a matter of relaxed teachers.