yeah i know it seems weird that ppl were really unfriendly to new kids, but its true. i dunno if its private schools in general or if its just my school.
i remember on my first day, i was put with a girl i vaguely knew from my first school, and she was supposed to show me around and introduce me to ppl, and she didnt - most of the time she just ignored me or abandoned me to go off with her friends instead. the teachers didnt do much to help - they assumed that she would help me. there was also a girl who was her friend and was always doing stuff like giving me the wrong directions on purpose so that id get lost, or telling me the wrong school rules to make me do something that was against the rules and get me in trouble. for some strange reason, ppl in my class - especially the girls - hated new kids and liked to play pranks on them. one day i was half an hour late for a lesson cos i had to go to a classroom in a part of the school that i didnt know and the rest of my class ran off there and left me behind, and i couldnt find them so i wandered around trying to find them, and in the end i found a teacher and a bunch of older kids and they took me to the right classroom, and when i got there the class just laughed at me and called me a retard. they were the retards - getting lost in an unfamiliar place doesnt mean youre retarded.
about a year after i started, there was a new boy in the class, and all the class ignored him, so i talked to him, was nice to him and helped him find my way around the school etc - basically the stuff that they didnt do to me - and when they saw us they said stuff like "youre only hanging around with him cos you fancy him". i didnt fancy him, i was just being polite to him.
then last year there was a new girl. when i met her she was in the middle of a crowd of ppl, looking completely lost, and all the crowd was ignoring her, so i talked to her, introduced myself, that sort of thing. i couldnt believe people were STILL ignoring new kids as they were all 16 at the time - old enough to know some manners!
like i said maybe its just my school and maybe u cant generalise to all private schools. but i really hope this isnt the same for a lot of schools cos it really sucks.