Hi,
I'm hoping for some advice about what to do for my son, who is 4 years old (not 5 until Easter) and currently in reception class and has been since September.
For various reasons, including him still not being settled and lack of support among other things, we have decided to change him to a different school. We are just about to send off the in year admission forms to the council school admissions team. The school we want to change to definitely has reception spaces available and I have spoken to the headteacher there a few times and I expect we will be accepted there once everything is processed.
However, the current school were very unhappy, to say the least, to receive the forms notifying them of our decision to leave. It has been a stressful couple of weeks of them resisting filling out their part of the forms and a very rude phone call from the headteacher wanting to know what was better about the other school and why I wanted to leave and what I expected from the new school. We finally got the forms back and when we looked at them discovered the headteacher filled them out with lots of lies. She essentially said that she doesn't support the move to a different school, that we did not do enough home learning to support our son and so he is behind and that we were promised things by the new school that I absolutely did not say! she also lied about what support has been given to my son to try and help him with the settling in process. My initial reaction was to call up and have another phone call with the headteacher, confront her about the lies on the form and try and get her to change what's been written. Or to call school admissions and tell them that she has lied on the forms. But I have actually decided to leave the forms as they are and send them off regardless of what she has written on them. For the sake of just getting the process started and the application in before Christmas and also not getting into a back and forth with the school and them delaying the process even more than they have as they weren't happy about filling out the forms in the first place. (Please let me know if anyone thinks this is the wrong thing to do!)
My main concern now is that I feel extremely uncomfortable about sending my son into a hostile environment while the forms are being processed. Now that I've seen how negatively they obviously feel about the fact we are leaving, I'm worried that they will either treat him unfairly or they will say something to him about the fact he is leaving. They've shown themselves to be dishonest and spiteful and as he is already so unhappy there and begs me not to send him every morning I just feel awful about sending him there after this. What grounds do I have for not sending him back there? Considering he is still 4 years old and not turning 5 for a while, so doesn't legally need to be in school yet? I obviously don't want to negatively impact the application or us being accepted into the new school.
Thank you in advance