To be a bit shocked that every one of my friends has done this?

[benetint]

I've spoken to all my friends that have older children about how they have selected schools for their dcs. Nearly all of them have said (in confidence) that they have basically hung around outside the gates at chucking out time to see how the parents and kids coming out look/behave/sound.

Is it time to get a new set of friends? Or would you join them?

Anti-social behaviour is one thing, dubious fashion sense and being a bit loud and excitable at chucking-out time is quite another.

I'm just picking closest school to me and sticking my son in it

Not sure if that makes them loons or me

I've seen female pupils at a local secondary caked in make-up at the bus-stop. They're in defiance of school uniform policy (up to them, if they get sent home then they know why). But dressing like you're off to a nightclub makes me wonder just how much attention they are paying at school if their "look" is so important. And what time they get up to put all this make-up on and be on their way to school at 7.45am.

A group of girls mucking about at a town centre bus stop, throwing each other in front of the buses. They were all laughing, so it wasn't a case of bullying (just fecking stupid).
If I'd managed to see their badges I'd have phoned the school.One of the girls was very distinctive. They would have recognised her if I described her.
I had my DC with me at the time (they were both at infant/juniour so I was trying to keep them away).

I did check the pupils coming out of school when my DS was Yr6 but because I wanted to know what kind of bags and shoes they were wearing

Seems like a good idea to me. One of the reasons I like my ds's school so much is that the students are polite and respectful of others when you see them in town, or around the school.

I wouldn't send my dc to schools where a large proportion of the pupils came across badly in public.

Many people think that peer group is one of the biggest factors on the success or otherwise of their child. Checking out the peer group seems sensible if you think peer group asserts an influence, as school is about more than academic results.

When girls are so busy pulling their skirts up short that they get hit by a car the school really should act
but then it was a private London Girls school in the 1970's ....
and the makeup and hair dye rules were broken wholesale - two girls told to make their hair 'natural' for the school photo had to grow out a bit to find what colour natural was

its not appearance that sets the tone of a school (Winchester boys and their blerdy shirt tails hanging out) its the demeanour.

There's a school near me where the children don't carry bags of any kind to school - homework, sport - and whilst they wear a uniform they're not smart or tidy in the morning. That was enough for me, but it was the drinking coke and eating crisps on their way to school that sounded the death knell. It's not just the poor parenting involved there but the fact they'd be running around the room all morning prior to a massive sugar crash.

talkin point noted. Tbh it was the littering, swearing and general rubbish behaviour that shocked me most about my local school.

Parents want their children to attend school with other children who are well-mannered, well turned out and not dressed like Russell Brand. Shock! Who'd have thought it?

You should definitely sack all your friends if they have such pretentious ways.

Having had my house vandalised by the little gits charmers that go to our local secondary, sworn at, spat at etc etc I can say with complete conviction that it will be a cold day in hell before I would let any child of mine within the gates. I think posters are right when they say that you can tell a lot about a school fom the behaviour of the pupils on their way to and from it. There's a difference between high spirits and being out of control.

I've never done it. In fact I put DS1's name down for his junior school without even having looked round it (it was the feeder from the infants, so almost everyone went there)

Like alistron1 DS1 chose which secondary school he wanted to go to. We looked round the choices (all 2 of them!) and he chose the one he liked best, which was actually the one none of his friends went to. (And luckily was also the one I liked best)

And yes, facebook is awful. Teenage girls!!

i went buy the least walking distance

I know several headteachers (very good, well respected heads running successful schools in a wide variety of catchment areas) who actively recommend this approach.

It's obvious though, isn't it? If you don't make a special trip, surely you'd notice behaviour and the way they dress and make a judgement based on that?

I decided which secondary school DD was going to when she was one. We then moved nearby. Good job as house prices then rocketed.

So the general consensus is its ok at secondary to look at the way the teenagers act/look but not ok to make the same judgements about the parents and kids at primary?

For my DNph (starting college in Sept) my sister and I went with:
gut feel on visiting the school
the feed back form parents and kids who go to the various local schools,
the Osted report
the science and maths results at GCSE
the no of kids going onto A level colleges and where they are going

No. Looking at kids and parents only tells you how middle class the school is.

It doesn't tell you how good the school is.

The schools near me which are the most middle class, where the girls and parents look the least slutty, are the worse schools.

Unfortunately I believed that being a very middle class school it was the best school and sent my poor kids there for years before I realised how I was damaging them :(

Luckily I've learnt my lesson now so won't be repeating that mistake for secondary school.

You don't see the parents at secondary school, and that wouldn't occur to me anyway.
I would definitely look at secondary pupils as they come out of school. It tell you a lot.

It hadn't occurred to me to actually do this, but I do agree that there is a lot to be said for forming an opinion based on what you see, rather than relying entirely on Ofsted. An old family friend was in teaching for 40 years and spent most of those at a school with a consistently outstanding ofsted report. She says that ofsted is of very limited use in isolation because it is such a tick-box exercise.

When I lived in London I was near one of the best private girls' schools in the country and near a big academy catering for a relatively poor area with a lot of crime and anti-social behaviour. Walking around the area with a baby was a bit of an eye-opener. I was constantly having to point out to the private school girls that I was not going to throw myself and my child into the road so that they could parade past three abreast, and I twice had to have a go at older pupils for shoulder barging me when I had DS1 in the sling. On another occasion I had a set-to on a bus with a young teenager who didn't want to move her lacrosse kit out of the only available seat on a bus so that I could sit down with the baby, and who went into a huffing and muttering frenzy that Vicky Pollard would have been ashamed of.

On the other hand, I never had more consideration and care than from the academy pupils. A group of teenage boys on the bus, playing music loud, throwing a plastic bottle at each other and generally looking like a bunch of hooligans, all leapt to their feet when I got on with the baby and two of them caught me when the bus driver drove off and I nearly fell. They were articulate and delightful and waved me off when I got off at my stop. On one of the rare occasions I used a pram and was struggling on the bus, a girl and boy from this school ran up to the bus to help me get the pram off. When walking past the school the children stepped out of the way, and quite often boys and girls would say hello to DS1.

I once emailed the private school about the manners of their pupils and never received a reply. I also emailed the academy after the group of boys on the bus were so pleasant and received a nice, grateful reply saying how pleased they were that their pupils' good behaviour in school was reflected in their good behaviour in the community.

If people chose schools based on the public behaviour of it's pupils, the well known independent and the high performing boy's grammar in a town near us would be empty.......

I didn't do this, but I think it's quite a reasonable thing to do!

I live very near a comprehensive school and in the mornings we often see the kids walking to school smoking fags and occasionally drinking from beer cans. Same at coming home time. Call me a snob ("YOU'RE A SNOB!!") but that did put me off sending DD there.

My mum chose an out of area school for me because she saw the kids from the local school smoking a lot on the way home. Of course, what she didn't see was that it was exactly the same at the school she chose, just not on open evening . So I left all my local friends behind and travelled for an hour a day for five years.

I can see a certain logic to this. I was totally put off a local secondary school by sitting on the bus with a large group of them one afternoon. The thing that put me off (aside from the amount of obscenities in each sentence) was the total lack of aspirations that any of them had. They were talking about what they wanted to do when they left school and not one of them aspired to go to university and have a career that was based on a degree. They all envisaged themselves as staying in the small town they were born in and getting fairly low paid jobs. Whilst this is absolutely fine, surely one of them should have aspired to something else?

I think it's ok to do it at primary too, if anything, what you see outside the school gates of a primary where there will be parents present is even more telling about what the school will be like.

There is only so much that teachers and buildings and facilities can do of a school, the parents attitude to school reflects in the children, and that does make a difference to what a school is like.