in terms of pressure, there’s clearly some - you don’t get academic results like those girls do without a bit of keeping them focussed. My daughter certainly hasn’t experienced what I would call toxic pressure, though. I would say it’s more about high expectations than pressure.
Tiffin is a great school with really good facilities, and a staff of high-quality teachers. The girls are very happy and if your daughter is one of those who’s always felt like a fish out of water because she’s clever and slightly different, then she’ll find her tribe at Tiffin.
I think the results that Tiffin gets are as much about the quality of the students they have as any pressure or discipline that they impose. Most schools have to spend possibly 30% of their time on discipline in the classroom, 60% of their time on delivery of the content of the syllabus and maybe 10% of the time on how to score highly in exams. Tiffin on the other hand has to spend 0% of their time on discipline and also a much smaller proportion on content delivery because the girls are so motivated that they do a lot of of the content delivery themselves. This means that the teachers have a lot of time to go beyond the curriculum, revisit problem areas and teach the girls the kind of thing that they can expect in the exam: how to approach each type of question and what the examiners will be looking for.
When my daughter went into her GCSEs, she could tell me how to approach a five marker, a 10 marker, a 30 marker, et cetera; she’d been over most of the curriculum more than once, and she’d pre-prepared a lot of generic answers that she could adapt to specific questions in a topic. There’s no way she wasn’t going to score highly with that level of preparation.
I would be surprised if your independent and public schools don’t take the same approach.