I find this discussion increasingly bizarre. If people are going to claim that a school is good for scholarship-level kids then obviously it makes sense to then make value comparisons with other schools focusing on the needs of such kids.
Part of my nurturing philosophy is about having my kids taught valuable life skills. Swimming is one such, and it is something that might save their life at some point. My nurturing does not include putting a child at risk of head and spinal injuries on a rugby field or horse. Herd violence and an activity that carries about the same danger as taking ecstasy have not in fact made it onto my list of nurturing thingies. Other activities with a significant degree of risk certainly have.
I want my kids' minds nurtured too. That does require some attention to core academic values, such as basic functional skills, like, er, literacy. Having moved from Cokethorpe, my DC is now having to experience awfully tewwibly damaging hothousey thingies like have spelling and grammar properly corrected. Wow! Call the child psychologist. I am a bad parent. Meanwhile over in Ducklington the web site has got “academic” written over it a lot, but the online UCAS guide on Issuu has a helpful section on UCAS preperation (uncorrected for several years), the new online A level guide for English Literature (you couldn’t make this up) says that English might be useful if you are thinking of becoming a Politian, and the maths page has the incomprehensible quote I particularly enjoyed the statistics, which probability and hypothesis testing. Er, what??!! Statistics joins basic grammar as a bit of a weak area here clearly, as the school also thinks it is OK to inflate A level results by suggesting a subject has a "100% A-B” record when one kid took the exam and got a B. The Cokethorpe GCSE English guide has Random capitals Appearing and disappearing All over The Place. Unit 1 is Non-fiction Texts and Transactional Writing, but Unit 2 is Poetry and Prose texts and imaginative Writing*.
If a school that exhibits such contempt for basic literacy and transparency in its public face looks like value, go ahead. Just be clear that such a choice is not about avoiding a hothouse (in fact they are in the Far East, not Oxfordshire), it is about abandoning core academic values. I could cite rather more serious issues than the ridiculous web site from my own experience to back up that view, but people can at least check that for themselves. You might able to find some letters home telling kids they needn't revise for exams, or that they won't be allowed study leave to revise for GCSE or A level, or that academic lessons are being cancelled for Epiphany.
Burford is a good school in my area and has many subjects on its curriculum, classics aside, that you cannot study at Cokethorpe. Computer Science, Engineering and German are available in 6th form. It has a good reputation in my village which is in its feeder area and is OFSTED "Good" if you care about that. OFSTED remarked that the sixth form there is a real strength of the school in a 2018 interim inspection. They also said "the school has a culture of breeding good behaviour and is vehemently against any form of bullying." I'm not a huge believer in OFSTED but it is a step up from un-evidenced gossip.