If I ask a good state secondary school where their intake usually comes from, am I likely to get an honest and complete answer?

[Tigermoth]

I am concerned that my son's primary school may not offer him a fighting chance of getting into a 'good' state secondary school when he is 11 years old. I have tried asking our local education department about what state primary schools 'feed' each secondary school in our area. They flatly deny there are feeder schools in the state sector, yet anecdotal evidence from parents suggests otherwise.

My son is just starting year 3 and I feel that now he is in the juniors, I have really got to take the bull by the horns. His school is a standard state primary with an average reputation. He is happy there and doing well, though I suspect he is not being stretched much and the school is, of course, very short staffed. However, I am not keen to force another move on him, unless there is a strong reason to. I would consider extra home tutoring but only if there is a tangible reason to do this ie: improving his chances of getting into a good secondary school, or even, (long shot, I know) winning a scholarship.

I feel that my best bet is to contact some good state and private secondary schools and ask them how they determine their intake. Do you think I likely to get an honest reply, and has anyone else done this?

I too am interested in finding out more about this area and my guess is that the best way to find out is from other parents who have already experienced this dilemma (easier said than done I know!).
You couald also consider approaching it from the other angle and find out what secondary schools your son's primary 'feeds' into. One piece of info that I have found useful is to see what schools the year 6 from our primary school went onto last year (this was in our school's annual report). At least you can then see what secondary schools you have a chance of getting your son into (i.e. based on recent history). That's a start anyway!

As a teacher who works in a so-called "bad" comprehensive (at least judging by your standards I reckon) I felt quite depressed by this thread. Just because we are not getting a majority of pupils passing GCSEs at "good grades" does not mean we're not doing a good job. Secondary pupils obviously have some primaries that end up sending more pupils to them; this is usually to do with geography or word of mouth and as to how your child does there, it will depend on said child, not on which primary schools other pupils come from.
It would make far more sense to wait until your child is in perhaps Year 5 and then try actually visiting some of the secondary schools instead of judging them on criteria built on assumptions and snobbery.
My school has less than 20% of pupils leaving with 5 A'C grades but an Observer survey placed it in the top one hundred schools in the country for value-added (the difference in ability between pupils arriving and pupils leaving) which is the only results based criteria that schools SHOULD be judged on. It's so easy for "good" schools to just coast along with their lovely middle class pupils from lovely middle class primaries isn't it, but how much DIFFERENCE do they make to individual children?
I'm not sorry to go on about this because it made me cross.

Hurrah and "hear hear", Candy.
I completely agree with you that you can't judge a school solely by its results and certainly not by its intake.
However, I also think that it is only natural for parents to worry hugely about their kids' education and to therefore absorb and reflect local prejudices about particular schools. Unfortunately, much received opinion (both positive and negative) on specific schools is completely untrue.

Hurrah and "hear hear", Candy.
I completely agree with you that you can't judge a school solely by its results and certainly not by its intake.
However, I also think that it is only natural for parents to worry hugely about their kids' education and to therefore absorb and reflect local prejudices about particular schools. Unfortunately, much received opinion (both positive and negative) on specific schools is completely untrue.

Ooops- an accidental double post. Sorry!

message withdrawn

I left school 18 years ago, 'one of the better' comps in the area (although I didn't do well). I learned to type though!!

18 years later the schools in this area are exactly the same in the league tables, the then crp school is still crp and my old comp. still has the best reputation. After 18 years this is a crazy situation, we have 3 large comprehensives within 1 mile of each other here and nothing has changed.

We have been luckily enough to be able to send our son to an independent school (due to an inheritance - before you all start). I must admit that like Tigermoth I don't feel that he is being 'pushed' where he is even though there's only 10 in the class. The idea of a private prep school was in the vain hope that he might be a more 'attractive' proposition to an out of area state secondary with good results. Sad but true. R.

Candy, don't you think Tigermoth's son has individual rights to an education appropriate for his needs too? He can't help being what you have assumed is "middle class". I live in the same part of SE London as Tigermoth, and there are sadly some schools there with grave shortages of teaching staff and social problems which it is quite beyond the scope of even the most dedicated and inspiring teacher to handle. I think most of us here want the best for their children as individuals and are not primarily concerned with snob values in education. I would not be living where I did if I was obsessed with posh accents and sequestering my children from the realities of urban life.

Candy, I can see why my posting made you angry. From the teacher's perspective it must be extremely galling to hear yet another so-called 'middle class mummy' sounding off about state education.

I know some of my son's primary school teachers socially. They are hard working and hard done by. In private they say his school is 'going down the pan'. Regular teachers are leaving, temporary and supply teachers are being drafted in, the headmaster and the governers are at war etc etc. Problems common to so many schools, I know. But it makes me worried about the quality of my son's education. Most weeks he has supply teachers for some of the time. I don't have to be middle class to feel concerned do I? Just a worried mum.

Of course local prejudice exists. As a working mother, newish to this area, I don't hear much gossip at the school gates. So I am rather in the dark about the reputations of our local primary and secondary schools. But I do tend to think that truth will out - that any 'good' school will gain a good reputation in the end. In fact there's a local primary that's turned around its reputation -good results, a happy, motivated atmosphere - not due to a change of intake, but due to the hard work of pupils, staff and a determined head mistress. Local parents knew this. Unfortunataly, at the time we moved here, I didn't - and our
local education authority, with their policy of not recommending any particular school, did not enlighten me.

Candy, you say it would make far more sense to visit secondary schools instead of judging them on
criteria based on assumption and snobbery. If you read my original message, you will see the whole point of my posting is that I DO NOT want to judge schools based solely on school gate gossip. That's why I'm asking if any parents here have approached secondary schools direct and asked them about intake. I would also like to add I mean visiting them as well. I did not make this clear, sorry.

I, too, would like more information on value added. It seems a valid indicator of a school's ability to educate. Since we as humble parents seem to have little access to information like this (I'd love to be proved wrong here by the way!), and since the official line, in my experience, is that there are no feeder primaries, no individual secondary school intake policies etc etc we parents are thrown back on asking each other. Hence my message.

Hello Tigermoth, I have a few ideas related to this. Firstly if you are concerned about your son not being stretched then you should have a talk to the teacher. Not just in relation to getting up to a "better" school but more because if your son is not being stretched he will get bored. I have just been agonising over this issue in relation to dd's reading and eventually (in fact yesterday) raised the issue with the teacher, who has acted.
Secondly have you thought of becoming a school governor ? Not necessarily as a parent governor but via the local authority.
Finally I do think that there are links with local secondaries but related to location/tradition eg perhaps already good links with such schools but not necessarily "formal" feeder schools. However this need not stop you from looking further afield at other secondaries when the time is right.
Oh yes another thought, you could look on the ofsted website - think you can access via dfee.gov.uk to look at ofsted reports on schools. They can be a bit out of date but can give you a flavour and are a useful adjunct to the league tables (but nothing as good as a visit etc). gotta go best of luck

We are probably a fairly typical 'middle-class' family. When we moved to our current house 5 yrs ago, eldest dd was due to transfer to secondary school. In fact, we moved in 6 days before term started. The only local school which had a space for her, and which we would consider, was the local deanery catholic comp (I and my kids are catholic). The only county school with a space was miles away and had very poor academic results.
Although the catholic school's results were vastly inferior to the other, popular local schools, I persuaded myself that dd would cope fine, that it would do her good to mix wuth people of all backgrounds, and that if she truly had the high potential that her primary teachers believed, she would do fine.
Well, she has just passed 12 gcse's, 75% of them at A* and A, so you would think I would be delighted. Yet this has been the worst year of her life. Her peer group was not very academic, and she found herself hiding her achievements to avoid being mocked. There were some very aggressive, threatening girls in her year, and when the gcse pressure really started to kick in, they dealt with their stress by making her the object of their malice. dd tried to support a friend who was going through all sorts of emotional problems, and who ended up making an unsuccessful suicide attempt. All of these factors lead to my daughter being treated for self-harm and depression.
The point of all this, is that I would advise any parent to make sure that their child has a chance to be happy at secondary achool, by ensuring that there will be plenty of kids from similar backgrounds for them to befriend. If that means being choosy and politically incorrect, then so be it. I spent 5 years desperately hoping that it would all come out all right, and it nearly didn't. I'm not talking about academic results. My daughter almost lost herself in the maelstrom of adolescence, because she never had a peer group she could trust or rely on. The peer group is the single most important influence throughout the teenage years, and that is why the choice of secondary school is crucial.
Candy, the staff at my daughter's school were certainly not doing a bad job. Far from it, they were coping with a huge ability range, and had every child's interests at heart. However, their expectations were generally lower than mine, and they had a tendency to excuse awful behaviour by pointing out all the problems at home, etc. However, they didn't really believe me when I tried to alert them to my daughter's problems. Their attitude was that she had caring parents and would be OK. Unfortunately, with teenagers, parents are often the last to know what's happening.

Mooma, what an awful year for your daughter. As you can imagine, your story adds to my concerns for my son's secondary education.

I was at a variety of state secondaries - secondary modern, grammar (passed my 13 plus) and finally sixth form college - and I know how varied each secondary school environment can be. I really want my son to be in a place where they have high expectations for all pupils, from standard of behaviour to exam performance and career choice. Like you, Mooma, I also want him to be with at least some children of a similar background to him. Is this such an impossible or politically incorect wish?

Your remark that 'the schools attitude was that your daughter had caring parents, so would be OK' really struck a chord with me, even though the age difference between your daughter and my son is so great.I suspect that just because my son has no huge problems with the three 'Rs' and comes from a fairly stable background, he is easily dismissed for the large numbers of more needy cases.

Madmaz, thanks for your thoughts. I hadn't considered becoming a governor myself. It would give a greater insight into school and LEA policy. I work full time but I'll mull it over.

In the distant past I read some Offstead reports from the mid ninties (pretty depressing reading for my area) but I must look on their website again. Thanks for reminding me of this.

message withdrawn

The place to look for formal admissions policies is the local LEA website - i.e. the county council or borough. You ought to be able to find this by searching on the relevant name. Policies do vary wildly, even within LEAs - single sex and religious schools might have quite different criteria than mixed comprehensives.

In our borough, six local primaries are designated feeder schools into the local comprehensive that my daughter goes to. Some of these primaries send 99% of their pupils there, others send to a mixture of schools. If you don't go to one of these 6 schools, you have to be the child of one of the teachers, or have a sibling at the school, to get in.

In the next borough, life is more complicated, and several children come to our school in yrs 5 and 6 to guarantee getting into a good comprehensive, rather than take their chance in the selective system operated in their borough (we are about half a mile from the borough boundary ....)

I know we had a chance to look round in Year 5, at an open evening. The other thing we did was to go to the school fair, to see what the place was like relaxed.

Tigermoth, you could always just give the schools a ring and ask them. They all put out prospectuses, and I'm sure would be glad to send you one. Just make sure you don't ring before 10 - the poor secretaries are on non-stop phone answering and dealing with sick calls, late arrivals etc - not the best time for them to explain things to you!

Remember too that community based gossip is very often way out of date. Many people in our local community still tar our (wonderful) primary school with the reputation it had about 15 years ago - they have never been in it, but know all about it. I am sure this works for secondary schools as well.

Ofsted are starting to comment more on the value added element, so more recent reports may be helpful. There website is easy to use, but the reports are very lenghty and turgid. They usually have 20 pages at the beginnning giving an overview of the school, before going into ghastly detail on the teaching of every subject.

On a personal note, I was very worried about my dd starting at a great big school with rough kids - until I talked to a parent from another of the feeder schools, who let slip that she was worried about her kid mixing with the nasty rough kids from our primary! And as I knew those kids, and knew that they were all pretty good kids, I stopped worrying!

Robinw
is it the teacher or the school that isn't responding? Maybe you should ask to see the school's special needs policy. They should all have one and it is supposed to apply to bright kids that need stretching as well as to the ones that need learning support. You could try approaching the governors - they have curriculum committees and goodness knows what, and are supposed to report back to parents annually. If a bit of money or time could be allocated, maybe the hard-pressed teacher would be more receptive ..

Are there a group of bored children in the class or is it just yours? 2 or 3 parents may be heard a bit better.

message withdrawn

Copper, thanks so much for your message. It was extremely informative. Wish I could stand by our local school gate and talk to someone like you. Are you a teacher?

You say in your borough there are designated feeder schools for the local comprehensive - so this system does exist in the state sector. I assume they are designated by the local authority? It is interesting what you say about children changing schools in year 5 and 6. Do you think these late entrants stand the same chance of gettng into the comp as the rest of their classmates? My youngest son will be starting primary when my oldest is in year 5 or 6, so it's possible we may be able to use the sibling reason to get them both at the same school.

RobinW, My oldest son goes to am after school playclub, so we don't collect him from school. Dh takes him in the morning, but men just havn't the knack of stopping to chat, so our access to gossip is limited! Whenever I'm around (I drop son off once or twice a month, and go to all the big school events), I talk to as many of his friends parents as possible, lots of them work too, so we are in the same boat. By chance we know quite a few local teachers. I don't like pumping them for information too much, or making them talk shop, but our knowledge of local schools is steadily building.

As a result of reading these messages, and thinking round our options, I have phoned a local 'good' state secondary. The secretary was kind enough to tell me what primary schools supplied most of last years entry. I am now contacting those primary schools with the intention of putting my son on their waiting lists. Catchment area elegibility is less of an issue when older children change schools. I don't know whether we will go as far as to move my son, but it's a few more irons in the fire, if nothing else.