Help, need advice about Yerbury Primary

[SID2821]

Hi I have a 4 year old about to start primary in September. We have been offered a place at the much sought after Yerbury Primary School but I am having real second thoughts due to some very bad feedback I am getting about current problems with the change in head teacher and key members of staff leaving.

I am also concerned about the vibe I am getting with regards to the intake, is it all yummy mummies/daddies? Seems quite old fashioned?Will my child be the only one who goes to a local state school in Year 6?

My husband and I work in the technology sector and we see how important it is for employees to intersect with people from all backgrounds - the internet has torn down many social barriers and the people that flounder in our industry are the ones who can't cope socially with people from varying backgrounds. To succeed in our field you have got to be able to mix it up with all kinds of people. Unlike the more traditional professions like law, medicine or finance my contemporaries send their kids state - because it seems kind of retrograde to do otherwise. So top of my list for qualities in a primary school is diversity, I am not going to get that at Yerbury - am I?

I am hearing good things about Tufnell Park Primary and although I haven't visited it seems to be a very happy school with a much more diverse intake from what I can see from the school gates and web site.

Don't think we stand a hope in hell of getting into Grafton - it was my first choice and we are low down on the wait list.

Can anyone suggest any other schools?

@meditrina

Frankly either you are being deliberately obtuse, or you are not very bright.

I am sure this is getting tedious for everyone else.

Admissions is a process. In this process places are offered as soon as they have been identified. The great bulk of offers are made on offer day. As offers (for whatever reason) are turned down, places become available again and are re offered.

If this were not the case waiting lists would be meaningless.

And yes, it follows that vacancies ARE offered as soon as they are identified.

Is this a first child? It feels like it, as the lofty aspiration to achieve some social good ahead of taking up a place a a good state school is one I might have held, until we saw what it's really like first hand.

It would be great in the utopia where all school provide well for all children together, but the reality is that teachers will never have the resources to deliver that ideal. In fact class sizes alone make it sub optimal. Every single teacher I know says class size makes it impossible to do justice to the breadth of needs and ability. That's the real world and it isn't going to change.

Secondly, even if this school utopia did arrive, where all schools are state comps and all faith, private an grammar schools abolished, ie truly comprehensive, you won't see social mobility and the wealth divide change one bit. Rich kids will still adopt the views of their parents and still progress further and disproportionately be represented. Parents politics have much more influence on a child than their school or peer group.

I maintain that putting your political ideals ahead of the interests of you child is misguided and a mistake. That said, as others have pointed out, any primary school in Islington will do well for you child so that will be fine. I think you will be happy with Acland to when you get to year 7, as I know others are now. In that sense, my point is irrelevant and you actually can't make a bad decision anyway.

I was completely confused byyear posting, but having now seen prh4607bridge's comments on another admissions thread,I can now decipher that you did not mean what you said here. You said there were 144 applicants with no places, but that there were places for them. That means (in the normal use of terms when discussing admissions) that there is the right number of vacancies extant, but a delay in matching applicants to them. That delay could constitute malpractice, in which LGO would be interested.

As I said, I though it it was unlikely that an LA would be committing such widespread and obvious breach of the Admissions Code, and that something was misrepresented.

I was right, about that, but not about what. My guess was that they were in the midst if creating further bulge class spaces. That was wrong.

The actual difficulty was the wording of information posted here about the 144 children being without places. From the other thread, this is the number of children whose offer was not one of the preferences expressed on the form.

My first post was to query if that meant no place at all. No-one supplied the actual number of applicants with no place at all (and as the figure before bulge classes last year was 76, then even an amazingly high figure is credible for this borough).

If the actual number had been supllied when I queried it, then the thread would not have continued with the wrong number of children in the category I was discussing.

Sorry, OP, this is quite a diversion (which was only meant to point out that you should not rely on a PP's suggestion that you could just secure a place at another Islington school because of the tightness of availability on that area.

The extensive C&P of basic statements on how admissions works might be useful to anyone reading the thread who is coming new to this as a subject. But I recommend the longer general admissions/appeals thread, which contain quite a lot more.

Thanks for that thoughtful reply - no not my first child I have another who goes to AB now and we are very happy with it despite all the negative press it has had after a poor Ofsted.

And my son does have a true representation of his community amongst his friends from every faith, class, race it's brilliant. Whether that makes any difference to social mobility in the future who knows but he's happy and thriving.

I will still hold on to my ideal of utopia or perhaps even just the ideal of educating our kids together instead of always coming up with new ways to divide them.

I disagree that class size makes it impossible to deliver a good education. Their are many large comprehensives that are graded outstanding by Ofsted who work with large intakes and still deliver, it's just hard. It is down to the quality of the teaching.