Hello good people of mumsnet, first time poster. I am a dad to a wonderful 4 year old, who has just started reception in September. The crux of the issue is that I think the school she goes to is pretty good, but my wife has convinced herself that it's bad.
Clearly it's not even been a term, so it's early days, and my daughter is summer born, so she's fairly young. But, after a bit of a settling in period, she says she likes her school. She's not so keen on the breakfast club and after school club, because there are more 'big children' around, but she goes in really well, and always comes out saying she's had a good time.
It's a state school in South London (2 forms per year, so I guess around 400 odd kids), so clearly there is a wide spectrum of parents who send their kids there. Some mums hang around every morning smoking and drinking red bull outside their cars... which I don't love. But a bunch of the reception parents seem nice, and that they care about their kids' education.
The school does seem to really make an effort to engage parents. They do a monthly "parent drop in" where you can sit in for half an hour to see what they do. I've just come back from a meeting where they explained their use of phonics, and how we can help, which I found really useful. They use some decent looking third party applications to help, such as Oxford Owl for learning reading. They have been accommodating with us when we've asked to chat about our daughter's progress, and there is a fairly new executive head (who oversees a few schools in the trust) who gave a presentation to parents, which I found helpful. It's rated "Good" by Ofsted, and they had a positive review recently, and their goal is to get to "Outstanding".
The biggest red flag we had was that about 4 weeks in, we asked to chat to her teacher about her progress. As mentioned earlier, the teacher was very accommodating and made time for us after school. But she did say that our daughter wasn't really eating anything at lunchtime (school dinners), and then after lunch she wasn't as engaged. It's good that we know, so we can send her in with snacks to ease her in, but my wife thinks they should have actively told us about this, rather than waiting for the meeting. Speaking to some teacher friends, it may be a bit unreasonable to expect schools to be monitoring this.
How do I get on the same page as my wife? How do you judge how good a primary school is when you have no frame of reference?
Thanks for reading this far :) Any shared experiences would be helpful.