h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think it's going to be more of an issue as we get more active athetists. For instance what if I go to the local skeptics in the pub, I blog saying 'god doesn't exist', and I perform abortions at work.

Ok I only do the first two, but if I hadn't been a man I would have done all three. Either way I would not want my children at a church school and they would get rather upset when told I was going to hell.

It really did annoy me that I couldn't select a secular school for religious reasons, but I just kind of ignored it because I thought we would get a place there in any cse. When we go through this process again with t'Other, in a couple of years time (if t'Boy is there already we will get places as siblings but still have to go through the forms), I will make a fuss of asking for a form for choosing a secular school.

Still undecided as to what to do though, have half convinced ourselves to stick with the private school now whatever happens, now that we have HAD to consider it again.

The waiting lists have opened, two places have been allocated leaving us as #1 on the list for our catchment school, but we don't know of anyone else planning to move and as we know, or know someone that knows most of those kids we are not optimistic a place would come up.

So this week we shall be forking out our money to the private school

If a place does come up after he's started, would you move him?

If it comes up after september then almost certainly not, unless we hit a major financial problem.

We might reconsider when it is time for t'Other to apply, and put both of them into the same state school, but this is all very 'it depends' territory. If I get made redundant (less likely than it looked a month or two ago) or more significantly if J does, and he cannot find an equivalent job quickly enough then we would have to move him/them back into the state schools.

Am really fed up about the whle thing - what would happen to my boy if we *couldn't* afford to pay for private? I shall be making a pest of myself with our local councillors about all this.

In the nicest possible way, *nothing* would happen to your boy if you couldn't afford private. You'd do what every other mother who cares about their kid's education does. Encourage your child to work hard, add some work of your own if you feel he needs it, join the PTA to help improve the school, keep in touch regularly, go to fetes, assemblies and parents evenings.

Well in fact I would homeschool him if nothing else changed - he would not be going to the school we were offered under *any* circumstances. I don't want his opportunities limited through being sent to the second worst school in the county.

And in fact this would disadvantage him not just for primary but for secondary too. A couple of years ago the council changed the secondary school catchments so that they all cover the whole area, so it is basically distance from the shool that governs whether or not you get a place. My village is the furthest point away from all of the schools and in the first year after the change 24 children in my village did not get a secondary school at all. The was uproar and things were changed so that if you go to one of the schools in the village you get feeder-school priority over closer children - but of course we haven't been given a school place in the village, so there is a very good chance we wouldn't get a secondary school place either.

The local council will be hearing from me a lot over all this, as it is an inherently unfair system.

Complain to your MP too, as it's a system broadly devised by parliament. You can also complain to the Schools Adjudicator about unfair admissions criteria. There are pockets of places all over the country where bizarre things happen during admissions - children living on the same street going to the same primary, and then one side of the street going to one secondary school and the other to another. Or, children in a 'corridor' not getting into either of their nearest secondary schools and having to go to one that's two bus journeys away on the other side of town.

#1 on the waiting list at this stage is probably more promising than it seems. People up sticks and relocate relatively quickly and they are generally keen to do this *before* their children have started school (and then they move to their new area in time for the new school year and discover that there are no places at their new local primary, but that's another story). They might not be planning to do this right now, but it still happens. So - fingers crossed.

Mol

I think you'll achieve much less by complaining than by any other route.

Certainly, you'd be worried if a school is described as the second-worst in the county. But these judgements are derived from divisive league tables which have never been adequately used or implemented in the last 15 years since they were dreamt up. Even allegedly bad schools produce a large proportion of very able pupils (and most secondary schools are not able to discriminate against those schools in any case). There are excellent teachers working in these schools, as much as there are poor teachers working in very good schools. A league table judgement could be based on something as insignificant as the way a school manages their budget or safeguarding concerns. Yes, I know pupil safeguarding is very important, especially at this age, but in 99.9% of cases, the school are blameless for any transgression.

Moreover, if a school is found to be wanting, it tends to either be closed or taken over by a new regime these days, so there's no guarantee it will remain a poor school. They're arbitrary judgements all. Ask to visit the schools yourself and watch lessons in progress - that's the best way to come to a judgement.

I had some more points to make, but I've forgotten them. Watch this space.

B

What other route can I use to influence the system here except to complain about it to the right people? Complaining about it got the 24 kids in my village who initially didn't get a school a place in their preferred secondary school and established this 'feeder-school' status for the kids in the schools in the village - the fact that this is still deeply flawed needs to be raised so it can be sorted out.

Not based solely on league tables - I know two people who taught in the school t'Boy was allocated, neither would send their own kids there, very few people 'choose' this school in fact - they are one of only two schools in the area that still hven't filled up to their allocation number. One of my teacher friends left a few years ago when she started her family, she said the majority of the children in their intake do not speak english as their first language and I can't see how one teacher, with a class of 30 kids two thirds of which don't speak english, is going to be able to have time to stretch my son who is going to arrive in september already reading and writing.

I'm a normal, busy, working mum. With the best will in the world, joining the PTA is not going to sort out the things I am worried about. I'm happy to get involved in my children's school wherever he goes but I wouldn't be in chrge, how much influnce cn one parent have? It is all very well saying that poor schools don't stay poor for long but in the meantime those are years of his eduction he won't get back, and just hoping it gets better will do nothing to address the problem of secondary schools later.

I'm not prepared to risk his eduction, and put in all that effort to work hard to get involved with a school that is three miles away, in another community in another town, in the wrong direction for me to be able to get t'Other to nursery and me to work.

hear hear

" how much influnce cn one parent have? " Well, that's why you team up with other parents.

I know how you must feel about it, there's a secondary school in my town that went into special measures a month or so before the places were announced for my son's yeargroup, but not reported in the local press until all parents informed and accepted places! It finally came out just as my friend's child got to about 4th year, now he's in 5th year - it's closing. That was a school my son wouldn't have gone to whether or not it had been in special measures as I had such a horrible time there when I was a kid, but there are still children coming out with good results.

I'm not saying you should send your son there no matter what, but the comment about 'if we couldn't afford private' upset me a bit because of course there are some of us out here who just have to live with what the state give us. Had I been able to afford private no way would Teenacher been at a school for children with learning difficulties that he's leaving in two weeks and going to have to immediately go to adult education college to get his English and IT GCSE because the school only does PE, Maths and Art. He could have been at a 'normal' school if I could have paid for it.

So I suppose, if you're not happy with the state choices, enjoy the fact that you *have* other choices where some of us do not.

And that last was the whole point Mina, we are *lucky* that we can just about stretch to pay for the private school. If we couldn't then we'd be stuck in a dreadful school, or have to homeschool him which would torpedo what is left of my career. I can be angry about the whole thing at a slightly detatched level because ultimately, we can choose not to accept the awful school the council has given us. I would be upset on a whole extra level if we didn't have the option to opt out, in fact I would be devestated.

There will be other families in our position who can't make that choice...actually, that isn't quite true, I don't think any of the other schools failed to take all the kids from their catchment area that wanted a place, but there will be people who didn't get any of their choices who didn't put their catchment school in there.

The council have started to process the second round applications and t'Boy has been moved down the waiting list for our catchment school

So somebody who moved into the village in the last month or two has been able to step in ahead of us in the queue.

This whole process is so upsetting.

Wha-a-a-a-a-t? Now that IS horribly unfair.

Well apparently it disdvantages kids who moved here five minutes ago, to give a school place to a kid that has lived in the catchment his whole life and requested a place there at the outset.

Fortunately we have today been offered a place at our 3rd choice village school which is better than nothing. Since I looked round before they have now got the funding for their new clssroom and hired a teacher so it might be better than it appeared. It is the village one I can't walk to (due to a dangerous road with no pavement - not safe to cycle up it with the boys during rush hour) so will be forced to drive to drop off. Need to look round it again and see how I feel now, and try not to compare it to the private one we chose and worked out we could just afford.

It feels so much better to have an option now, and not to feel excluded from our own community!

It's a shame this has been such a trauma for you. Let's hope T'Boy likes the school and his classmates.

So we have decided to go to the village school we've got now - I still have misgivings about it though. I know it does well in the ofsted reports but still. We had the first parent's meeting last night and they whole hour was spent telling us how the school can't afford anything and parents come in to do lots of stuff to supplement what the teachers do.

I was worrying before about fitting my responsibilities for work inside school hours - now I feel like the school expects me to be there inside the school day too. I'm under a lot of pressure at work just now, and that is going to increase just as I feel this pressure to be working at the school too. I'm not sure I can cope with all this. J thinks I am being silly, but it isn't him that is expected to do all this stuff is it? Feels like the whole system is built around the expectation that mum is at home and available to support the teachers while dad goes off to work.

The last 15 minutes of the meeting was spent asking us to cough up donations so that they can afford to have a teacher for year 5.

Hm, I think you're right, schools do seem to have a very outdated expectation of how families actually operate. There is this bizarre assumption that parents have nothing better to do than turn up to help (or attend events) during the school day. Schools seem to have absolutely no concept of the fact that parents have to work, or that their working day is generally *longer* than the school day. And then they moan that events aren't well-supported and parents don't care. Or that parents drive their children to school, totally failing to understand the split-second timetabling that parents *have* to adopt in order to get to work on time.

If it's any consolation, this would probably be exactly the same at *any* school. The only solution is to rise above it. I have *never* gone in to help at our school (something which I would in any case find tedious in the extreme - but I did once do a presentation at the local secondary school about local government, which is much more my thing). My contribution has been as a parent governor, attending evening meetings. And DH, when he was full-time at home, assembled the school's new bike racks. We have also had the school pets to stay over the holidays, joined the 100 club fundraiser (write one cheque for £12 a year), attended all the parents evenings and the shows, and I usually can manage a flexi start to turn up at class assemblies (one per class per year) and a day off for May Day. I don't do Sports Day, class trips, helping out in class, or any of the PTA evening events (pamper evenings and so on), although I'll sometimes send in a cake or a raffle prize.

Holding a collection to fund a teaching post is outrageous - fundraising should be for extras like nice craft materials (which are hugely expensive). Get yourself on the finance committee of the governing body as soon as possible - it's possible to be creative with staffing.

A school is a community. That means it's made up of a diverse group of people who should be able to use their different talents in different ways to support the common purpose. There *will* be ways in which you can use your talents, at a time convenient to you, to support the work of the school, and the school *needs* that kind of support just as much as, if not more than, it needs extra (untrained) bodies in the classroom. And if you are hearing your own children read daily (only 10 mins, do it after they're fed but before they're tired, it takes a while to find the right window of time), reading them a story at bedtime, and encouraging them to count, recognise shapes, and write, you will be doing fine.



Honestly, honestly, don't let it get to you. The school gate can be a horrible place at the nicest school.



Mol