As a former parent I wanted to warn any prospective parents of the huge mistake that we feel that we made in sending our son to this school.
In my opinion:
- The school attracts and focuses its attention on the most self-absorbed children (alpha in the negative sense).
- For me, behaviour was typified at sports matches where I found over-celebrating, berating teammates, boasting and the inability to cope with even minor failures to be commonplace.
- Quieter and more modest children are seemingly largely forgotten.
- Our son's senior school application was consistently mismanaged in my view despite providing the school with repeated reminders of their responsibilities (fortunately we smoothed this over by having a good direct relationship with his senior school).
- I question the level of achievement (senior school places and scholarships) for an academically selective school like Caldicott when compared against equivalents (including non-selective schools where we also have experience).
- CAT testing (an indicator of senior school school suitability) was undertaken but no attention seemingly paid to the results as a material degradation in our son's scores was not noticed or acted upon by the school. Instead we had him assessed externally by a consultant who told us he was used to similar calls from Caldicott parents. We were able to resolve the issue externally very simply but that should have been Caldicott's responsibility.
- The same consultant indicated his view was that a school that doesn't set homework cannot perform in line with equivalent schools that do - how could this be possible? Our view is that surreptitious extensive external tutoring is the true bedrock of academic achievement at Caldicott, compensating for the school's shortfalls.
- Our son found some of the teaching methods humiliating (eg getting children to stand up and state how they won't make the same innocent mistake again whilst the class can laugh at them).
- Some of our son's experiences were truly heartbreaking and included finding out that he took deliberate toilet breaks to avoid being publicly shamed in class by one of his teachers.
- We found the school's attitude incredibly arrogant, seemingly along the lines of 'we don't tell you how to do your jobs so there's no room for your views on the school'. I think everyone, however experienced, can continue to learn and improve and implement a certain level of common-sense.
- When withdrawing our son we offered to explain our reasons but the school showed no interest (this never felt like a school with any humility). Our son's final year tutor never even introduced himself throughout the entire year and from his final report comments seemingly had no idea our son was so unhappy.
Having removed our son, we couldn't have been happier with the school we chose instead - good values and discipline, happy, down to earth, grounded, well-rounded, fair, meritocratic, friendly and with much better results for our son. We wished we'd moved him sooner for all of our sakes and if we'd moved him just a year earlier it's seems apparent that he would have been up for several scholarships for which Caldicott had never provided any assistance.
I hope this is helpful.