I'm a parent whose child joined The Gower School at reception stage. This is my honest personal opinion based on my direct experience only.
For the record, all those posters who say something along the lines of 'it's an amazing school and we have nothing but praise' - none of the dozen or so parents in our year group who I was close to would agree. Yes, TGS has many positive aspects but ultimately there are some very deep structural and cultural problems at the school that unfortunately start with the headmistress and trickle down throughout the organisation.
I am deeply sceptical of anyone who says they have had a 100% positive experience at TGS.
Here is my honest balanced appraisal:
Positives: The best thing about the school is the community - parents and children are mostly extremely nice.
Lots of very good and caring teachers. Support staff are generally also very good.
Generally a good After School Club provision.
A small school which, in reception particularly, gives a gentle and free flowing introduction to Primary education.
Negatives: The fundamental structure of the school is problematic. The Headmistress/owner wields way too much power and is over officious. She deals with routine constructive feedback poorly at times and is also capable of disproportionate rudeness.
The fact that constructive feedback is at times mishandled and dismissed is particularly galling as TGS is ridiculously time demanding of parents. With both parents working this grates very quickly and after a while begins to feel borderline neurotic. Expect your child to constantly be set time demanding projects that they are not old enough to complete independently and which therefore become the parents' homework! Expect to receive endless long and repetitive messages daily over several channels. Expect to prepare and deliver snacks to feed your child's class and bring flowers to the classroom every term (stealth tax!).
The school oversteps what should be a clear boundary between education and parenting. The school is exceptionally prescriptive with mandatory parenting workshops about what you should and shouldn't be doing as a parent. This often feels overbearing and patronising.
Expect fees to rise significantly year on year, while the educational provision and facilities do not improve (in fact in my experience they got worse year on year).
As has been pointed out over the years in this thread, there is still a very high turnover of staff at the school. Anyone who has read through this thread will have an understanding why that is. Unfortunately, a very small minority of staff are poor. This lead us to experience several instances of substandard and wholly inadequate pastoral care at the school. When you do experience safeguarding issues, I found there not to be a culture of taking on board constructive criticism and the school being willing to learn from (sometimes completely unacceptable) mistakes.
I often felt that the focus on the basics of Maths and English were overlooked with far too much time spent on dress up days, engagement in pr awards for the school, endless charity events, rehearsals for assemblies, performances and plays. These things are all great but should be secondary to basic education! In reception it's not such an issue but by Year 2, I had to pick up the slack by tutoring my child, which shouldn't really be the case when you're paying for the privilege of private education!
The final nail in the coffin for us were several safeguarding issues in quick succession, which were so worrying that our very real academic concerns were secondary.
If the school (as it claims) had a culture of working with parents to really resolve issues and learn from mistakes perhaps we could have given them the benefit of the doubt and continued for another year.
However, the Headmistresses' behaviour meant we lost faith in her and therefore the school as a whole, as she has built a controlling culture around her that disempowers her employees.
If I had my time over again, I would categorically choose another school.