Hi,
I have just registered in order to answer your question. I am a real live St Luke's School parent.
We have two of our kids at the school and they are both very happy there. They may be happy or happier at other schools in the area, they may not.
One the whole, we really like the school. It has a really good, vibrant, enthusiastic and nurturing atmosphere. There are after school clubs, a choir, carol concerts etc. etc. Though I would expect that Milton Road does it all better!
I love the fact that the school has huge amounts of outside space to play in. We have planted an orchard, we have a football pitch, we are building a kitchen garden and we still more space left over. I'm surprised that Goldenpeach says Mayfield has 'better grounds'.
My impressions of the school come as someone who has never been a parent of a child at another (English) primary school. My point being that it is hard to know how St Luke's compares with other schools apart from reading or listening to other parents' opinions of their own kids' school
For the PTA, I have been working on a grant application to improve the library and I was privy to the stats for SEN, English as 2nd Lang, School dinners etc. St Luke's has above the national average on all of these things. 25 first languages other than English are spoken!
Kids also come and go from the school. Sometimes because they are only in Cambridge for a year, sometimes because they move to another school. We spent last year in Italy, where we put our two into the local primary to learn Italian the hard way! This is what happens when foreign kids come to Cambridge. It appears to work well and the visitors always seem to love the school.
In my DD first year one kid moved to Milton Road and one of my DS's best friends just moved there too. Purely to cut down on travel. Apart from that, I am unaware of either of my children having had kids move from St Luke's to another school.
I was chatting to a mother who has two kids at Park Street and she said that a number of kids had been moving to private schools. Read into that what you will. I think the school is pretty good but it is a very small site. St Luke's feels very spacious and that space promotes a fair amount of hanging around and playing in the grounds after school (parents included).
We chose the school because: it was our local catchment school, we had friends with kids there, we liked it when we visited it, we are not obsessed with OFSTED reports and league tables. We have never doubted that we made the right decision.
Finally, the new head (who has been there about 3 years) is very good and a can-do sort of person. The previous head was pretty rubbish. The PTA has improved significantly in the last year or so.
Feel free to ping me if you have any more questions.