Our son is in his second year at Aldro. We feel that it is a unique school, offering the boys a very real 'boys' experience. They have outdoor sports every day, and on Tuesdays have x2 games sessions. The junior department prepares them well for the imminent rigours of Y5 onwards, and they are successful in placing boys in their senior schools of choice.
It has generally been accepted that Aldro 'feeds' Charterhouse, but not all of us are inclined towards that option, and many boys go further afield, with Wellington, Bradfield, Sherborne & Cranleigh just as popular.
I agree with BlueStringPudding that there are more working Mums. In our year group we have around a third that work. Of course we have our smattering of very wealthy parents, but you rarely know until your son ends up at a playdate at a huge house set in 50 acres of Surrey parkland! And we like that. Having come from Cobham, where the glam and glitz is all very much on show, we have seen far less of this, and we are blessed with an incredibly friendly and sociable year group.
The school is unique in it's family atmosphere. I think this come from the fact that it offers boarding. The campus is home to many of the staff, and they become friends as well as colleagues and this permeates throughout the school. We're not kept at arms length, and the 'leave your son to us' attitude that's endemic at manny inside the M25 schools is nowhere to be seen. In fact you wouldn't be surprised to see a mum picking up dirty kit on a Thursday evening on her way out for dinner!
The one thing to bear in mind is that from Y4 the boys go to school on Saturday mornings. It has to be this way to enable them to timetable so much outdoor team sports. For us this took a lot of consideration, but the huge benefits of so much sport have outweighed the extra school run, which we've recently mitigated by giving in to the begging and allowing our son to board on a Friday night.
For us an amazing and very special school, which we hope will be made even better with the addition of our new Head due to start in September, who we expect to rattle a few of the long-servers cages and inject a little umph into the sometimes more 'traditional' teaching methods. :-)