OK so what would you REALLY do to get your kids into a 'good' school?

[shimmy21]

If you had the money or the opportunity would you...
lie about where you live?
practise a religion you don't believe in?
move house?
buy a second investment property?
bribe the panel?
appeal on spurious grounds?

or any better ideas?

[anteater]

Why not just work harder and pay?

[jampots]

i would move house altough managed to get dd in simply by applying due to low birth year - will have to move to get ds into the same school though.

Wouldnt lie, practice religion, bribe or be any way deceitful

[shimmy21]

I was thinking of people who appeal on the grounds for example that their child has been bullied when they haven't really or a friend who appealed on special needs grounds that her child (who has a minor hearing problem) could only conceivably go to oversubscribed local school A instead of local school B for social reasons.

[noddyholder]

we moved house and increased our mortgage significantly to ensure ds got into the best school. we are now moving as the mortgage is too much and is seriously affecting us financially month to month so be careful with moving as houses in these areas are usually v expensive!

[FairyMum]

Only move house.
Work harder and pay? Que?

[nutcracker]

I wouldn't...

Lie about where I lived
Buy a second investment property (same as the above one to me)
Bribe the panel

I would....

Practise a religion i don't believe in (but only if i hadn't the option of moving).

[shimmy21]

I'm just asking myself how far I would go for ds who wont get into our excellent local secondary school unless we do something.

Moving house is the obvious one but for a lot of reasons (money included) it's not easy to find something suitable in the right area.

Not saying I would do any of the others but I have heard stories of people who have.

[welshmum]

Anyone read 'Might contain Nuts' by John O'Farrell? it's about this, quite funny and easy read. The mother disguises herself as an 11 year old girl to take the entrance exam for her daughter...much hilarity ensuses etc

[Caligula]

Can't believe anyone would say "work harder and pay".

So bloody offensive to all those people who work bloody hard on a low wage.

But in answer to your question Shimmy, anything practicable.

[Blu]

Shimmy: were either of those appeals successful?
Because IME of preparing material for the original application and appeal on SEN grounds, you need to have a lot of independent evidence, including signed statement from your GP and specialists, etc.

Of your list, I would move house, that's all.

[shimmy21]

yes Blu, friend's SN appeal was successful. dd does have genuine SN but in fact is an highly intelligent, sociable, popular child who would have been fine at any school. The bullying appeal was successful too but to be honest I don't know what 'evidence' was produced.

[Polgara2]

Sigh, am in the process of trying to move house for this reason and its bloody hard going!!!

[Tortington]

ive lied about where i live
and i have appealed - twice

[LipstickMum]

We moved to the catchment area of a good school. I think that's about all I'd do, I don't think I could lie about stuff (not to say that I never lie!) I'd just be so worried about being found out. How can you lie about where you live anyway? Does that mean using a grandparents/relatives address on forms etc?

[clerkKent]

This is what we did:

moved to a local authority with the best reputation for Nursery school provision...then 6 years later:
private tutor
Saturday school
gave up evenings out and even the daily paper to pay for the above
spellings every day for a term
weekend practices on NFER tests
strongly encouraged DS to attend church choir for 2 years
researched all possible public and private secondary schools in reach of home; read Ofsted reports; dragged both children around open days at various schools; agonised over the order to list schools

...and DS got in to his and our favourite last year.

[shimmy21]

Custardo were the lies and the appeals for the same applications? i.e. did you get caught lieing and then appeal or what?

[Tortington]

lol no, i put my mums address down to get ds1 into a better senior school - we moved after his first year anyway 300 miles away.

the appeals were to get my kids into the local catholic school when we moved - i have twins and although they cant discriminate against twins they do. itshoves the class sizes up. anyway i won that one and then many year ago my son was at a good primary school and we moved out of area and them applied to get twins in the sachool and they said no. so i went to appeals panel and asked them what they thought was best - moving my child who was settled in a good school out of that school or have me take twins and olderst son to two different schools 6 miles apart - i won that one too.

[Uwila]

I'd move and I'd join a church (but not one I couldn't genuinely believe in). I'd buy a second property if I had the money. I would not bribe the panel, and I probably would lie (not because I'm morally opossed to it but because I would get caught).

[dinosaure]

If I absolutely had to, I'd remortgage the house and pay.

I would also move house but only if I thought that there were other benefits from moving to a different area.

None of the others.

[DominiConnor]

Having gone to really bad schools, would do all of the above.

As anteater says, money can get you things, but that's neither necessary nor sufficient, nor indeed an option for most people.
We reviewed several private schools for the gang of two, and they varied quite a lot.

But are we all talking about the same thing here ?

With all due respect, I'd guess around 10-15% of parents are personally able to judge the quality of a school with any accuracy.
Is it not the case that in truth we're talking of avoiding crap schools ?

The only reasonable argument I've heard for banning private education is that it would make middle class parents actually do something about the large number of schools that are simply not fit for purpose.
Some schools put out pictures of local drug dealers to warn parents. But of course they are in working class areas, so the only police action is to threaten the schools under the data protection act.
A sit in protest at the local nick might well embarrass them into action.
But look at how the media responded to people on working class estates who realised that they had become dumping grounds for convicted paedophiles being released into the community on the grounds that they "probably" wouldn't reoffend "much".
The middle class arts grads wrote articles about how poor their spelling was on the placards. I studied insurrections, varying from Gandhi’s India to Free Luna, and am a trained (though not very competent) journalist. Most people on a council estate don’t have access to that, so they get crap schools.

Forgive my language, but the father of one of my godchildren endured financial hardship to ensure that "his kid didn’t grow up talking like a nigger". Would have been racist but he's black. Schools in East London fail in the basic task of teaching kids that have been born here the ability to speak in a way that allows them to be understood, much less impress at a job interview.
But they get taught about 117 religious festivals of different faiths, so that's all right then,

The correlation between parental income and university is horribly high. Thus you are forced to either accept that poor kids are stupid, or that a decade of a Labour government has done little to address social inequity.
The response is “social engineering” where popular universities are forced to try and compensate for the failings of the state system, by making allowances.

The pay of state teachers for hard subjects is simply too low to attract good candidates, unless they really want to be teachers, and even earning 1/5 of what less smart people get is not a nice thing.

Middle class people like me can work the system and/or buy a new house, and I can bluff theology of Christianity well enough, and would take a positive delight in using lies against evil.

But that's not a good system is it ?

[RachD]

We've already had ds christened catholic, even though we are not catholics.
And we plan to 'practice false religion', by attending mass, in order to get ds into the local, best , catholic school.
I don't consider that very bad, considering what lengths some people go to.