My DD attends a lovely but vastly oversubscribed village primary school. She is in Y4 and in a class of 29.
The school has two mixed yr 5/6 classes - one has the older half of year 6 plus the older half of year 5, the other the younger half of each respective class. This gives respective numbers for those classes of 34 and 33. Not surprisingly, in my view, many yr 5/6 parents were unhappy when this arrangement was announced last summer.
We have had a letter from the school stating that appeals for the school are not being heard until the second week in July and class arrangements for next year cannot be finalised until after the outcome of the appeals is known. In previous years there have been successful appeals (I think there were 7 or 8 when DD entered reception) as the appeals are not ICS appeals - bizarrely the PAN is 34.
I would be concerned if my DD ended up in a mixed age class with 34 or even more children in it. She is exactly half way down the register so I don't know if she would end up in the older or younger cohort and am not even sure which would be preferable - she would also be vulnerable to changing cohorts and thus all her peer group if they continue with this arrangement over the next 2 years.
My DS1 attends an independent school which is part of a foundation with junior and senior boys and girls schools. One solution would be to remove DD from the school and send her to the girls junior school if they could possibly take her at such short notice. DS1 is a bit of an academic star and so I suspect the foundation schools would consequently look favourably on our family (although in reality DD is less talented). We haven't applied for a place for DD previously as she loves her current school so much - but do hope she will go to the senior school.
DS1 finishes for the summer before the class arrangements will be announced. The letter home about class arrangements was quite defensive and referred to bullying behaviour of parents last year. This leaves me feeling totally unsure how or whether I can approach this with the school. DD isn't keen to move at this stage and tbh we would prefer not to pay fees for junior school if we can avoid it but if we wait and find we are totally dismayed by the class arrangements we are going to be trying to negotiate with the possible alternative after they have shut for the summer.
So I guess the questions are how dire would you say the potential class arrangement is and would you approach this with the school and how?
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Class arrangements in primary school possibly precipitating move - how would you handle this?
18 replies
mysteryfairy · 20/06/2010 20:17
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PixieOnaLeaf ·
20/06/2010 20:29
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PixieOnaLeaf ·
20/06/2010 20:59
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PixieOnaLeaf ·
20/06/2010 21:10
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