Robertswood schoool Chalfont St Peter

[Sunnyside13]

Helll fonts of Knowledge :) moving this year to Chalfont St. Peter (or nearby) and wondered whether anyone here has children at Robertswood primary and could let me know a bit more about it? I'm especially interested in how caring / nurturing the school is with regards fairly sensitive children. Academic results less important to me at this stage. Thanks loads! Xx

You need to check if it has spaces in the years you want. It is not a wildly popular school and reading and writing results are shocking. Maths results are fantastic so something is wrong! Other schools are much better and invariably full. It has always been the case in this area.

I guess it is nurturing but very many children are not doing well in key areas and they don't have high FSM or SEN either. No doubt they are having to work hard to improve their results. It depends if you want your child to make good progress or are you not bothered?

Thanks :) it does have spaces and other local schools don't seem to have. Hmmm. X

Other schools are pretty sought after. Robertswood never has been. You will be struggling to find schools with vacancies I'm afraid but if you are not bothered about academics then it should be ok. Other people, with a grammar school system in place, are bothered. Transferring from Robertswood will also be a problem if you are not in catchment for an alternative junior school. You would also need to check out if the junior schools have linked infant schools making spaces less available to others. It's a minefield!

Robertswood is a primary so no difficulties with transferring for Juniors. I know and have worked with several of the staff there (including senior leaders) and would be very happy for my child to be in their school.

I don't know much about the school itself mind and have never been there. My gut feeling is that it's on the less favoured side of Chalfont St Peter (is there an "interesting" estate that forms part of the catchment area?) and so educationally motivated parents do everything they can to get their children into the Academy, which has always had a good reputation. That means that their intake isn't as balanced as you would think from looking at the area round the school. My experience of schools like that is that they are fantastic places to be! My perception is that they are far better at nurturing and supporting children and allowing them to reach their full potential than schools which have "easier" children to work with. Rather than just looking at the results, see if you can find out about progress made by pupils and also the amount of pupil mobility. It could well be that they have children there in the infants who get good end of year 2 data who then leave for other schools, and are replaced by others who haven't had such a solid grounding in KS1. As I understand it, the progress data compares end of year 2 with end of year 6 - it doesn't recognise that the pupils in year 6 aren't the same ones who got the results in year 2 (happy to be corrected on that if I'm wrong).

As always, you need to go and have a look round and decide if it's the right school for your child.

I meant transferring out of Robertswood if you didn't like it. I know it is a primary school but looking at the attainment, although maths is excellent, reading and writing is dreadful and it is in the bottom 10% in the country for these curriculum areas. The staff may be lovely but the school has major problems it needs to address. It does not have massive PP or FSM so is failing very many children. I bet Ofsted will arrive fairly soon as it has not been inspected for 5 years.

As my comment above, large numbers of very bright children leaving to go elsewhere is not easy in this area and does not explain why the maths results are good and other results poor. Without knowing the movement of children in the school, and it is not a RAF or Army school, I would guess the movement is not huge. There is no reason why it would be unless there were lots of dissatisfied parents who could afford private.