AIBU to feel angrey after Holland Park School open morning?

As are awful, soul-destroying places for the nice kids who want to learn and have a quiet life, and soul destroying for the teachers in daily battles for learning and order. There's often little support for the teachers and I've known too many schools where staff are treated with open contempt by senior management.

A close friend taught in such a school in London in the 90s, fairly notorious I believe and exactly as described above. He had a lot of life experience (Royal Navy, Falklands) and ended up being ill, including an ulcer. Mixed ability classes and he said there were very bright kids who were just able to power through but those who needed a bit more input and could do well in a calm environment really struggled, as did the poor Somali refugee children without a word of English who were just thrown into his history class and expected to get on with it.

How nice of them to provide the Local Authority with a means to fill the most undersubscribed and likely judged Inadequate school in the area if there aren't enough places in the preferred schools. And they provide a source of income to the private companies that now organise the majority of admissions appeals and clerking services for the oversubscribed schools to pay for.

Students always showed us around schools.
That’s normal isn’t it

hmmmm I’m more concerned about the safeguarding aspect of this story… random visiting parent gets to question students in the classroom??? This is a risky activity that should not have been allowed under KCSIE. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t send my child there,

Agree with this. I am in the NW and all but one of the local high schools are now academies. Three were converter academies so kept pretty much the same. Two are now MATs but only because theyve had local primaries join. One is a MAT of two and one of three. My kids went to the former and it was a calm but lovely school with a really caring atmosphere; pastoral care was amazing. I used to visit the occasional class when I was a governor and certainly no one just sat in silence copying things off boards.

OP - it’s just not the school for you. Keep looking.

Well if you don't qualify for any of the schools you've listed, the LEA's only obligation is to offer you a place in the nearest school which has places left after everyone has been allocated. So unless you're able to go private or homeschool it's generally best to fully complete the application. If you're going to get a school you don't like it's probably better that it's one that's fairly close to home than a school that absolutely nobody wants on the other side of the borough. And you can still appeal for higher preference schools if you're allocated one lower on your list anyway. So you have nothing to gain from leaving slots blank.
But that wasn't really my point. Just that the headline figures of total applications vs places offered don't necessarily mean that a school is heavily oversubscribed. In fact according to the data on its .gov.uk entry this school is currently about 100 pupils under capacity.

The last report was Inadequate - that’s why it was taken over by the MAT. The school has been having serious problems for some time.

So you didn't like this school. Maybe another one would meet your expectations.
You don't have to send your child there.
Obviously the parents of the pupils attending the school must be reasonably pleased with it.
Have you checked out the ofstead report?

The school is doing something wrong. More and more schools are doing it and it’s harmful. Children should not be being forced to remain silent all day, have little to no breaks, and be punished overly harshly for very minor things with no discretion or flexibility. It’s authoritarian and oppressive and doesn’t encourage the development of many skills that children should be gaining from school. It shouldn’t just be about exam results. The OP is quite rightly horrified that this is being normalised, and should be complaining and protesting about it. Nothing changes if people say nothing and do nothing.

These schools are far too reminiscent of the “troubled teen industry” in the US which has caused untold harm and trauma to teens. These ultra strict schools seem to be based on the same flawed ideologies which are not supported by empirical research.

i find it very surprising that people support these schools. If I said I was bringing up my children at home with similar strict, inflexible rules, expecting my children to remain silent for large portions of the day and to work without breaks, telling children where they could and couldn’t look. And everytime they accidentally broke a rule, I would send them to sit silently on their own for long stretches of time, ban them from looking out the window and made them do lines in a darkened room, I’d probably (quite rightly) be reported to social services.

If I had to work under these conditions, it would break me. Why would you want to break a child?

I wasn’t taking about being late for class, but about the draconian behaviour systems that punish kids for things like minor uniform infractions, ordinary social interactions, and other things that certainly wouldn’t be “punished” in a workplace.

Some of these behavioural systems are so rigid that they are doing the opposite of teaching children to mature and take responsibility for themselves. They are over-structured to the point of being soul-crushing and so joyless that there’s no enjoyment left for kids to learn as opposed to sit there while lecturing is done at them. They won’t be sitting in rows reading out textbook material in unison at work, nor being told everything to do by their boss. They’ll need to be self-starters, not functionaries!

I was at school when table-based activity learning was all the rage and a bit of structure and quiet and desks facing the front would have been nice. But on touring current state secondaries recently I was horrified — it was like Gradgrind’s return. Michael Gove and the Tories were of course very keen on this stuff, but it’s very far from actual education, just a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. (I teach myself, too, though in a different bit of the education system.)

What really puzzles me about isolation rooms is how on earth anyone contends they are consistent with the current massive emphasis on attendance. In a recent case report, one child had spent more than half the school year either suspended or in isolation rooms. Unsurprisingly, when she was in class she had missed so much she hadn't a clue what was going on, was constantly humiliated as she couldn't answer questions etc, and unsurprisingly played up all the more. How on earth could it not occur to a school in that situation that just maybe it might be worth trying something else?

well ok?

What do you want me to say.

I am not sure why you think kids chatting or messing around in the corridors instead of going in class when the bell has rang should be encouraged, or what it has to do with being supportive or how is it "draconian".

I don't know any of the kids to be personally offended by it 😂

Maybe some schools only allocate 30seconds and force them to sprint like crazy, the schools i know give them enough time to pop to the loo, have a chat with their mates and make their way across the building. Total non issue.

If you don’t fill up all your choices, in some LEAs you can be allocated somewhere way out of the area. I’m not in London so don’t know how it works there; but in my LEA we had to use all our choices even if we weren’t that keen on our local schools, or we could have ended up being given a place we wanted even less!

Some children have massive school-based anxiety combined with learning difficulties, and really struggle with just getting into class. If, when they finally make it in, they are immediately punished, what effect do you imagine that has one their anxiety?

Children with dyslexia and/or executive functioning problems may really struggle to organise their belongings. Others don't bring the right supplies because their parents can't afford them, or can't be bothered. Should they be punished for their disabilities or for having impecunious or uncaring parents?

to be honest, I haven't digged that deep 😁, I was just curious what oversubscribed meant in this case, but yes, the numbers published will also give a breakdown of "first preference", "second preference' and so on.

It depends where you live, I would never put a "preference" even a third preference, for a school I want to avoid. If you get it, you can't query it, because you were given one of your "choices".

I know parents who didn't put 3 choices, just 2 - but some counties don't let you have a blank.

But eleven year olds are not at work!

My neighbour’s child, a lovely happy girl at primary school (and not remotely disruptive), found her start at a strict girls’ comprehensive so terrifying because of the draconian punishments and unsupportive atmosphere that she has been deeply unhappy. She found adjusting to secondary so awful that she went through a period of nightmares, tears and school phobia. And her mum is a teacher!

These behavioural systems might be good for kids who are disaffected or who need keeping in line; but for lots of children they aren’t good. My DD would have fared dreadfully in a school with policies like that, because despite being very able and usually very compliant she would have absolutely rebelled against that one-size-fits-all borstal-style system.

I went to HPS in the 80s, before it was knocked down and rebuilt. When my eldest was transferring to secondary in 2019 I went and did the tour, mostly out of curiosity - and I hated it. The head was still Colin Hall at that time, the foyer area was decorated with baskets of lavender and Jo Malone candles, and Hall put up a slide during his talk showing his ‘linen cupboard’ - bundles of ironed sheets tied up with twine with hand-written labels. His comment was along the lines of - this is how I organise my linen cupboard, so you can imagine how I run my school… it was truly insane.

Yes, the building is physically shiny and there’s a pool - but it felt like a kind of luxe prison and utterly sterile. I asked the deputy head about their SEN dept; they didn’t even have a senco and he seemed completely unbothered, could tell me nothing about how kids with additional needs were supported. HPS in my day was anarchic and often chaotic but with some utterly brilliant English teaching, a messy and creative art dept, and it really did embody what they were trying to do with ‘comprehensive’ education. It has gone way too far in the other direction now, and even though Hall is long gone, friends with kids there and who work there tell me the culture he established is little changed.

But it’s not just HPS - I think most secondary schools are failing children these days. I understand why they feel the need to deploy punitive discipline, but punishments for every little slight undermines the effect of these punishments and contributes to the massive upsurge in anxiety among young people. It’s very depressing.

In Isolation rooms children are supposedly given worksheets to do. No-one actually explains to them how to do them, of course, so if they don't understand they are left looking blankly at these incomprehensible questions for hours on end. And yet governments claim that children are entitled to full time education.

HP has a terrible reputation at the moment. I know quite a few people whose kids are there and they are all so upset about how it’s been run and there were protests before from parents before it got turned over to a academy.

I’m January I met some mums for a drink (that turned into a rant) and apparently there is a business manager (or something like that) who has no education experience but seems to make most of the calls about classes etc.

Id follow @Shookethh advise about KAA. I believe they have a good reputation so worth a visit!

All my kids are state educated, never heard of or seen detention rooms

It really is as bad as OP says. I had very similar vibes when I looked at it a few months ago, and I know people who have taken their children out because they were bored rigid and not achieving. I felt really quite sorry for the pupils, particularly any with a spark of creativity, it just gets crushed out of them.

I’ve never heard of such boring sounding schools…that art class 😳It all sounds so depressing and grim
Im amazed more aren’t shocked on here.

Doesn't "total applications" mean everyone who named the school at all on their application though? I don't think they will all be parents who actually want their child to go there. When I applied for secondaries for my DC I put our catchment school as third preference, just in case, but in reality I knew it was massively unlikely that we wouldn't get our first preference and almost inconceivable that we wouldn't get first or second. But my DC would be counted amongst the applicants for a place at our third preference I think.
As far as I know everyone in England gets to nominate at least 3 schools and it's as many as 6 in some places, which would massively increase the total applications. It would be far more useful to know how many children applied but were ultimately placed at a school they ranked as a lower preference as surely that is the genuine measure of over subscription? I'm not sure if that data is published though.

We stayed in a(n) hotel. As it was in college term perhaps the student hostels were full of their students? I can’t remember where it was, but it was an easy bus ride from the training college and had a supermarket next door. We were each given an allowance for food (which was about the same amount we’d paid for the whole trip) and sometimes shopped in the supermarket.

I do remember things like getting on very crowded buses, and people always squashing up and helping us onto the bus.

We did visit some teacher training student accommodation at least once, to spend the evening together. I remember this particularly well because there were dividing walls between the cubicles in the women’s toilets, which were opposite a row of sinks, but there were no doors on the cubicles. There were doors on the toilets in the training college, though.

What was the official point of your visit to Leningrad?

Edit: I have a friend who worked as a nanny for an English diplomatic family in Moscow in her ‘year abroad’ as she was studying Russian at university. It might well have been at about the same time as you were there.