Infant Vs Primary-any opinions?

[rabbitrabbit]

Hi, we're moving soon and I need to register ds for school; there seems to be a choice of schools which are either 4-7 or 4-11 and I'm wondering whether anyone has opinions of whether one is better than the other? I'm thinking that a 4-11 is a good idea as he doesn't have to change for some time but wondered if that makes any sense at all!

Be grateful for some feedback. Thanks

Difficult to say, depends on school and child.

My story is...

DD started at a primary school (good school but large, 3 classes of 30 per year), she settled well and all was fine.

After a term she had to move, as we moved house. We had no choice of school as we moved in the middle of the year. She was allocated a place at a good infany school (very small, only 5 classes of 25ish in the whole school). This enabled her to settle very easily and make friends quickly. It is a good school and fortunately they gaurantee acceptance into the local junior school so although they change school they stay with most of their friends.

I think for a shy, younger child an infant school is less intimadating as it is smaller and not full of much older children, but you need to assess which school they can get into after 7, if the primary schools are better than the junior it is perhaps betterto try and get them in from the start. HTH abit.

What are the advantages of the 4-7 with respect to the 4-11? DS currently attends one that is 4-7 because there were a multitude of reasons which made it a better option (all of them totally unrelated to being 4-7) but the fact that I have to take DS to a different and "new" school where the other children are already settled brings a lot of questions into the picture.

Actually, I think one of the biggest downsides of DS's school is just that... the need to uproot him and move him to a new environment at the end of Y2.

It depends if the infant school is linked to a specific primary school. My son goes to an infant school and then all then all the children go to the same junior school on the same site. Infact it is virtually one school.

My son's school has two classes in each year. If the school was not split into an infant and junior school the school would be very big. I don't think it would be possible for a head teacher to know all 500 children well. I like having two seperate head teachers. The infant school head teacher understands the foundation stage and key stage one where as the junior school head is good for keystage 2.

In the junior school the children are split by ablity for numeracy and literacy. This would be much harder to do if there were not two classes in each year.

Admitally our infant school is being merged with the junior school because one of the head teachers is retiring. The schools argue that it will be easier to support SEN kids through out their primary school. It will be easier to make sure that the policies related to the teaching of reading and writing are the same in each school.

We have an infants and an on-site junior. Like with frances' situation, it could ALMOST be one school as 99% of kids go from one to the other. They do get a few (4?) new kids into yr 3 each year from other local infants but that's it.

I favour this arrangement because it softens the blow of the move into Big School at 11. Juniors has a different uniform (with proper shirt and tie), a male headteacher, 3 other male staff and of course has 4 not 3 year groups in it. There is a fair bit of liaison between the schools- they try and synch inset days etc and older juniors kids go and read to the reception kids etc.

I think and infant/junior set up allows a bit more formality to creep in whci I believe help the kids towards settling in at high school. They've already 'done it once'. As an aside, I went from a 3 class, 75 kids in all village primary to a 1120 pupil grammar school at the age of 10. I wasn't so much a 'small fish', I was plankton!