Guardian today- great article about choosing schools....

Thank you for posting this article.

It should be required reading for all parents about to enter the secondary transfer process.

To offer some suggestions in answer to happygardening's questions:
The opportunity to express 'preferences' seems to automatically bring a sprit of both competition.
It also brings anxiety - that a second or third choice would be 'bad'.
Anxiety at the school gate is catching, as is competition. People who make one choice feel the need to justify it to everyone else as he 'best' choice.

People believe myths about comps, and have not been in one since their own school days. People have no idea how to interpret statistics and seem to imagine that if 6% of all pupils in a school achieve 5 GCSEs then it is mot likely that their top-achieving child will achieve the same as the overall average.

We see a high level of posts about appeals because posters who happily get on wth preparing for their allocated school don't post!

Parent are more involved and anxiety-ridden about everything. Would our mothers ever have posted worries about lunch box menus or looked to provide a varied and gourmet menu through the week? Half the concerns and questions raised on the primary and secondary boards would never have been posted by our parents generation!

This attention to detail is great and is probably behind some of the improving stats in exam results, but it also creates a level of hysteria around the 'perfect' school experience.

Thank you for posting this - I am driving myself crazy trying to weigh up the pros and cons of the eight (!) schools we can choose from. I'm actually a little reassured to have some perspective now.

OK massa

Excellent article. I'd add that there's clear evidence that standards vary much more within schools than between them, which makes the extent of the angst around choosing schools even more misplaced.

Sorry, Mrs Mair

I left school in 1987 with precisely zero qualifications btw. I picked up more hours where I'd been working already, working full time from the day I turned 16 (which wasn't strictly legal, my birthday being right at the start of the academic year - but hey ho).

I said that if the theory was followed we could end up with two 15,000 pupil schools.

One reason parents give a bigger stuff these days must be that pretty much all jobs require far higher qualifications than they used to, and more of them. When I was a kid, 5 GCSEs was more than enough to leave school with and get a job - nowadays employers demand a degree to do admin in an estate agents' office.

I think the burden of training and education has shifted to the state, basically. Apprenticeship schemes might be addressing this to an extent.

"Because there is much more media than there was"

::cough:: The Internet.

It's not difficult to find people much like yourself to help reinforce your prejudices, anxieties and so on.

15,000 is surely a typo

15,000?

I thought ds's (absolutely fine) comprehensive was large at a tenth that size - 8 form entry plus sixth form.

Things changed in about 1987 when the idea of parental choice was introduced by the government. Up until then children went to the primary or secondary school in whose catchment they lived. The theory behind the change was that good schools would expand as more parents chose them, and poorer schools would have to pull their socks up or close down. No-one in the government seemed to realise that by following that theory to the letter it could end in a city like mine could end having two secondary schools each containing over 15,000 pupils.

I've read the article and agree both sectors are equally happy producing at best misleading glossy brochures/marketing material. I also agree that parents probably have less to worry about particularly in terms of health, we are more invested in our children, and more concerned about future employment/housing and materialistic possessions. There has been an enormous emphasis in the recent past on the importance of a university education and it's now shifted recently to an enormous emphasis on a university education at the right university. Apprenticeships are seen as the destination for the academically less able, and are thought by many to be associated with lower incomes and status.

I suspect we will not be able to change parental attitudes now.

parents agonise mostly because it has become a thing they can do. In those days, if you couldn't move house to a better school or have the religious school option, or afford private, or pass the exams to get into whatever higher level school was available as a scholarship student, you took what was on offer. In more than a few homes, parents didn't get as far as/finish secondary school anyway, so they were pleased to make their big contribution to their childs education of not needing them to go out to work. Choices were something few parents had or even expected.

I am not sure why and how it changed. What I know, above, is my husband's family's experience. He had no siblings involved in schools, as students or parents, from leaving school over 30 years. So I dont know how it reached the point that out school has allowed so many out of district applications that everything that made the school catchment we happened to move into good, has been eliminated due to overcrowding in the short 3 years since it opened.

Have n't read the article but you can't take as fact what the schools 'report' regarding satisfaction.

Where is that info from? Ofsted inspection surveys? How representative are they.

Funny that the editor of the Guardian didn't take his own paper's advice, and educated his daughters privately.

If this is the case (I'm not saying it isn't) then why are current parents more worried about which school their DC's go to than my parents generation were? Why is MN talk full of parents appealing, stressing over their DC getting a place at school they don't want or scrimping and scraping to pay school fees? We do parents move house to get into the "right" catchment area? Why do so many parents I speak to seems so desperate to get their DC into school A rather than school B? Are all these parents just uniformed?

Eeek: having previewed it this time a working link: disidealist.wordpress.com

Oh it's DisappointedIdealist (blog here: disidealist.wordpress.com/), so that explains why it's good.

I couldn't agree more with that article.

As an aside, op I bet you have the Guardian app - it launches automatically and is a bugger to link from.

"The relationship between promotional material and reality is not always close."