I’m a former parent and wanted to write this review to give our son’s experience a voice. Everything in this review is clearly a personal opinion only, honestly held.
In my opinion the school’s focus on the most narcissistic children (‘alpha’ in the negative sense) and some humiliating teaching methods can lead to some unhappy and often unheard children.
I feel that the school’s apparent emphasis on the most hubristic pupils encourages unappealing characteristics (very different from our own values) which are typified observing pupils’ behaviour during sports matches where I found over celebrating, berating teammates, boasting about individual achievements and the inability to cope with even minor failures to be commonplace and seldom corrected. I believe these overly competitive and individualistic qualities could be of some benefit to these children during their school years but are very unlikely to help them in later life.
Quieter and more modest pupils appear to me to be often overlooked - perhaps in our case best illustrated by our son's only senior school application being (in my view) repeatedly forgotten / mismanaged despite us reminding Caldicott of their specific responsibilities on multiple occasions (I have numerous examples to illustrate this). That feels inexcusable as preparing for and helping with the senior school transition is a prep school’s raison d’etre. Insofar as possible we therefore tried to liaise with his senior school and complete his application independently of Caldicott.
In my opinion, widespread surreptitious external tutoring (which should not be considered necessary, particularly for an academically selective school) appears to be a cornerstone of academic achievement. In our case we observed and notified Caldicott of a material degradation in our son’s CAT scores over a 2 year period (something which shouldn't happen and which may be used as an indicator for senior school suitability). To my eyes, the school does not appear to track these scores to monitor performance against innate ability, did not appear to have noticed these material falls (which may impact the guidance the school provides on which senior schools are a best fit) and was unable to explain them (or admit to the most likely cause). As we felt unable to get answers from Caldicott we addressed the issue relatively simply outside of Caldicott with our son’s scores returning to their previous level. An external consultant we spoke to confirmed other similar conversations with Caldicott parents.
In withdrawing our son we offered to explain our concerns on several occasions. The school did not take up these offers which to me indicates an inexplicable level of arrogance or, at best, apathy. I don’t expect any school to be perfect but to at least show some interest and understanding of our concerns (even now). Sadly, if that had been the case our son would most likely still be there. I would advise any prospective parent to please think very carefully before sending their son to Caldicott and dig diligently beneath the rhetoric, external marketing or first impressions.