Aibu as a Scottish person, to wonder wtf at the English school admission system?

[irnbruforlife]

Before anyone starts, I know the Scottish school system isn't perfect. But that's a whole other thread. I'm from north east Scotland. Children go to the school for their catchment area. The odd person will ask for a different school for whatever reason (such as bullying etc.) Their request is accommodated do far as reasonably practicable, but not at the expense of someone on that catchment area. There is no school lottery that I seem to be reading about in England, with children ending up with no placement, or having to go to school 2 hrs away despite living across the road from one, or siblings going to different schools.

There wasn’t an act of daily worship in the 80s or 90s, not here anyway. We had weekly assembly, which was vaguely religious. Nowadays there isn’t even that. Our school has a weekly Business Meeting, no assembly.

I think we had a service once a week in and we would occasionally go to church at harvest / Easter etc

Probably less in high school.

It was a non denominational school.

Yabbers- All properties in Scotland are freehold. Many in England are leasehold and the leaseholder can put restrictions on certain things.

The second “leaseholder” should say “freeholder”. The freeholder owns the building. When someone buys a leasehold of that building they are buying a 99 year/999 year/some other period of occupation. It runs down, and a property with a lease of below 65ish years is practically unmortgageable.

Stupid, (literally) medieval sytem.

Glad to have learned new things about Scotland :)

And the “lease” is of the internals of the building, if it’s a flat.

The town I grew up in Scotland has only one secondary school. There are about 7 non denominational primary schools and 1 Catholic primary school.

But how quickly is that population growing? In England it has grown so fast that services such as health, housing and education have been unable to keep pace with it over the years. Hence the health, housing and education crises.

It's not just population growth. Rising population isn't a problem if funding for services increases to match it; we have seen the opposite: massive funding cuts, especially in local government which provides housing and education.

I wonder if the Scottish education system is better resourced, and that's why they aren't short of school places in urban areas.

What is the population of the area demented?

8 primaries into 1 secondary suggests either lots of wee primaries over a large rural area or one very large secondary.

and we do have problems with recruitment and retention of teachers here which will bring problems in the future.

My bad for mentioning places with one secondary - I was thinking towns, not cities.

But it doesn't matter whether you're talknig about a city, or a town, or a suburb, or whatever. School catchments are pre-determined. You can look at maps online. Obviously a school in a city is going to have a geographically smaller area than one in a rural location.

The one negative effect is on house prices - although I know this goes on south of the border too. A house in the catchment area for a high-achieving secondary which is impossible to get into on placing requests is more than a house half a mile away in another catchment area. But on the other hand, should a school remain popular and in demand, and your property will continue to demand a premium.

Think population is around 18000 now. If yoy want a Catholic secondary you need to bus to a different town. The secondary has a school roll of 1160ish.

They somehow think some inspection report will make their child clever, so all want the school with the best report.

Surely there must be oversubscribed schools (and less popular undersubscribed schools) in cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow?
The population dentisity in much of England is such that you have a choice of schools in your local area and some schools are more popular than others.
I'm in London and there might be 5 local schools my DC would have a decent chance of getting a place at, possibly another 3 if they were bright enough to sit for selective tests. When you get the school you want, it works very well. For example one that plays a particular sport where others don't, or where there is a particularly strong music or drama department. Then we feel lucky to have had the choice. When it fails us and we don't get the one we wanted, it's not so good (that's when we come and post on here for advice!).

littlecandle I'm sorry, but what utter rubbish! Catholic schools tend to do better? What? What? Nonsense. Look at the league tables and you'll be proved very, very wrong. As I presume you're basing your judgement of ' better ' on league tables. ( I completely disagree with this - you cannot measure nurture/ opportunity for all with exam results , but that is a wholly different matter).

Your attitude is one of long held bias which is completely wrong. Personally, I prefer my children to be educated about all religions and morality and philosophy in non denominational schools rather than in an isolated dogma. And I say that as someone who attended Catholic school.

My sister, a practising Catholic, decided to send her DD to non dom over the Catholic school because it is her local school, an excellent one, and they gave her religious instruction at home/ via the church.

Get off your bias high horse.

Surely there must be oversubscribed schools (and less popular undersubscribed schools) in cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow?

Yes, but the effect of the catchment system is that young couples with the money to do so flee to the suburbs.

In recent years, with the popularity of Gaelic schools, there is also the option of telling everyone their granny was from the Highlands and sending their children to the Gaelic school rather than mix with the local riffraff.

We have choice. Scotland does not. Prefer our system.

My DC went to the catchment schools, but I could probably have got them into any school in the town if I had wanted to.

With both primary and secondary schooling, their schools had very mixed socio-economic groups, but it certainly didn't stop my DC from achieving. The teachers in large comp schools tend to be really committed to the pupils who are academically ambitious as they spend a lot of time with pupils who aren't.

I wouldn't swap our system for the English system if you paid me!

The whole leasehold/freehold thing is mind boggling - so you're not really buying the house outright?

Also I find the English age cut off dates very odd - children can start school as young as the day they turn 4? In Scotland the youngest children start school is 4.5 (cut off date is 28th Feb) and children born in Jan or Feb can easily defer starting P1 - and get a whole extra year of funded pre-school. My understanding is the English system is much less flexible.

Must be wee primary schools then, pixie. The secondary school I went to had a roll of 500 and had maybe 5 or 6 associate primary schools. Many of them are closed now though as hey had a total roll of 10 in some instances

I live in Edinburgh and some schools have catchment issues. I know in our school (I work in) we have a larger P1 think 35 with 2 teachers. Then a P1/2 composite. But my own catchment school had 85 in catchment with a capacity for 75 this year. Plus around 30 out of catchment requests.

School catchments are pre-determined. You can look at maps online. Obviously a school in a city is going to have a geographically smaller area than one in a rural location.

In many areas in England "catchments" vary from year to year. If a school has 200 places for 11-year olds, the catchment will be where the nearest 200 applicants for that school live.

It used to work like that in my LEA, and a population bulge or building a new housing estate could lead to a massively diminishing catchment.

The whole leasehold/freehold thing is mind boggling - so you're not really buying the house outright?

The majority of houses sold in England are freehold, there are some areas where this isn't the case but they are the exceptions not the rule. Flats are normally leasehold. Many people in England will also not consider a leasehold house.

We have choice in Scotland it is done through placing requests if you'd rather a school outside your immediate catchment area. These are usually granted if gone through the correct procedures in the time scale needed.

P1 is capped at 25 per class,
p2 and p3 are capped at 30 per class
Any straight p4-7 class is capped at 33 unless there is a compose class (at any level) and that is capped at 25.

If there are more than 30 for a stage then the head teacher would look at compositing to accommodate...if there is a demand then the head teacher would apply to the council to create a new post. This would generally speaking be a temporary post for a year...usually a probationary teacher until the school role settled at that number and if the school/ council could justify a teacher salary for the number of pupils then a permanent post would be advertised.

Im baffled by the English system, not in a bad way. It obviously works for them but ours works for us anyway! I'm in the west of Scotland...and a teacher

I think the only thing this thread actually makes clear is that it isn’t really clear!

Although I have just been looking at a thread on here about school places and it does still boggle.

Where I am largely kids go to one of two secondary schools - the bog standard nom Dom or be catholic school.

That’s the same with where I work. Life as a parent is stressful enough without all this.

One thing I was just pondering was the issue of league tables. Now I don’t know how the English system actually works but I know we don’t compare school Against school. We have a system called insights which uses data gathered from across Scotland which compares the school against something called a virtual comparator. So you get a sense of how another school with your exact same set of circumstances would do rather than comparing against schools in totally different environments. We also focus on literacy, nuermacy, SIMD 1, 2 and 3 and looked after children. So all the focus really goes on how the most deprived and disadvantaged do. We also get compared on leaver destinations and the like.

So a parent really choosing to get into it could find out an absolute ton of data about one particular school - attendance rates, stay on rates, leaver destinations and so on but they aren’t places school against school. Each school gets assessed on its own relative merit.

In 2017, there were 20,997 children classes smaller than 20. 106,023 children in classes between 19-25, 44, 340 children in classes between 26 and 30 and 625 in classes of 31 or more.

I work in multiple schools across our county. In my experience the majority of classes that have more than 31 pupils are P7 and it’s so they are all together rather than some pupils in a P6/7 class.

It’s better for the pupils as there are generally lots of transition activities, a residential trip, extra responsibilities etc. to prepare everyone for high school and it also helps strengthen relationships.

In my experience the majority of classes that have more than 31 pupils are P7 and it’s so they are all together rather than some pupils in a P6/7 class.

That isn't my experience at all- not as a teacher nor as a parent.