Do I push my son to prep for grammar?

[bingowingsmcgee]

Ds age 9 is very bright and his teachers have indicated that he is grammar school 'material'. His cousin goes to the local grammar school, and we always planned that we would tutor ds and he would hopefully follow suite. However now it's come to prep time, he doesn't really want to do the prep or have the tutoring. He is hugely gregarious and wants to go the local comp with his friends, which is 'good' according to ofsted but poor with lots of behaviour issues according to local parents. I have no idea what to do for the best for him. Do we push him to prepare and sit the test in order to buy time, with him resenting it? Or do we just let him go to the fairly crappy comp and hope the top sets have enough decent kids in to get their gcse content covered?

I volunteered in a "good" secondary modern and I wouldn't recommend it for a bright student. The top set maths class had at least half the class who were aiming for a C at GCSE. There were at least 5 in the class who sat bored in every lesson.

I'd agree with that. I went to a comp. I was in the Maths top group and the grade range was A to D. That's a hell of a range for a teacher to try to keep lessons relevant to all. There were only 3 groups, basically, top, middle and bottom, the bottom group being the disruptives and innumerates, so the middle group was E/F level. What I found strange was that despite there being 6 groups, there weren't 6 different levels, it was instead a top/middle/bottom for forms a,b,c and then another top/middle/bottom for forms d,e,f. I think it's a great disservice to all pupils in such a wide range A to D.

When we were looking at secondaries for my son, we went to a couple of comps and asked about Maths for gifted as it was our son's best subject. The teachers at both just said that "gifted" pupils could do the external Maths challenges - they weren't even offering further Maths and weren't offering anything above normal Maths lessons. It really put us off the comps, especially given my experience.