Primary school places - Aiming for Alfarthing, hoping for Honeywell, set on Swaffield?

[LocalEditorWandsworth]

So tomorrow is the big day - primary school offers going out.

I know lots of you will be nervously waiting until midnight tonight for your email / or your letter tomorrow ....

So this thread is for comparing notes, asking questions about schools you've been offered that weren't first choice, appeals, general grumbling and hand holding.

Good luck all x

Yes Arismama, you can put out of borough schools on the form. We did that with Henry Cavendish which is near us but falls just the Lambeth side of Balham.

The whole Belleville/Honeywell situation is insane. They're great schools but can they really be THAT much better than all the others that people are spending fortunes on buying and renting houses to get into their tiny catchments?

Yes, I can see that if you live very close to one of them it must be annoying not to get a place but there are other schools within walking distance. I went to primary school 20 minutes walk away from home - outside of London that's not unusual.

Alderbrook, Wix and High View are all within that sort of distance. They may not have been name checked in Tatler but they are all 'good' schools according to OFSTED and High View and Alderbrook offered places to all applicants last year.

It's a ridiculous cycle, people won't consider other schools in the area so the catchment areas shrink as people jostle to get in, then we complain we can't go to our nearest schools. Belleville's last OFSTED inspection was 2007 so who really knows how good it is anyway?

Mumbleema - there is a hilarious but disturbing discussion about this on another local website (not sure if I can link but you can probably guess ) where Belleville/Honeywell wannabes seem to blame variously everyone less wealthy than them, immigrants and finally the disabled for their not getting places.

Proof that it is, as you said, insane.

I found the siblings stats on NVN quite heartening - most sibs are still pretty local to HW & B