It made me WILD! I'm so pleased there is a thread about this!
I felt like writing to the Guardian and asking which school he has sent his children to, so that I can avoid sending my child to be educated alongside the children of liars (the faith school thing), and the children of parents so ignorant that they cannot understand how the overall average GCSE a school gets relates to what an individual child within that school can achieve. Or the children of parents so dim that they think that the 'contextual' score is only relevant if your child is of low or average ability, or the children of those who are prepared to be so patronising that any parent approaching schoo transition could benefit fom those so-called 'tips', or the children of parents who see being bi lingual as a reason to avoid their educational proximity!
I am a Guardian-reading middle-class parent, living and state-educating my child in a notorious borough with more stabbings than Tooting, for example. I'm not saying that I would be happy to see my child attend each and every school my borough has to offer (based on the standard of education and ambience of the school - NOT on it's demography and the perceived nature of that demography), and if we weren't in the catchment area of one or more good state secondaries, i might well move, and consider myself bloody lucky to be able to have the flexibility and capacity to do that. I hope I would manage to do it without that degree of self-absorbed whining and advertising my life as a community liar! How do thier KIDS feel about them disclosing the lying to get into primary school? How can you consider yourself to have taken a full role on the pastoral side of the church when you feel so cynical that you publish and be damned and don't give a toss about how your former church friends might feel about having been used?
I know faith schools are part of the system and therfore likely to be played like the system but how can that family have such self absorbed arrogance that they expect everyone to pat them on the back and chortle at 5 years of lying to everyone?
Andrew Penman, as a writer, you seem to manage to portray yourself as a prat. Maybe you aren't - in which case you need to review your feature writng skills!