We moved to a new area about a year ago and the children started in the nearest village school, which is also where all our neighbours children go. It’s a small community where you bump into people all the time.
The children have been not been very happy at the local school though, pretty much since the start . It’s a pretty small school (only 3 other boys in my son’s year for example). The school never seemed to make much of an effort to integrate them as newcomers, among quite well established cliques, and haven’t handled bullying at all well, or to be honest the basics like regularly sending reading books home. Both my children have been physically hurt at playtime more than once, sometimes by bullying, sometimes just by physically ‘rough’ games and poor supervision - not their normal style of play and my son in particular hates it (unsurprisingly!). I know of two other parents who have had to take their children to A and E after they were injured at playtime at school Another parent moved her children out of the school after two terms having joined as newcomers because of these exact same kinds of issues.
Anyway, to cut a long story short we decided
a month ago that enough was enough - they were both pretty happy at their old school, usually make friends pretty easily at clubs/ activities etc. So we went through the process of applying to another local school and have places for them to start next week.
What I feel really awkward about though is how to put this to neighbours local to us with kids in the school we are leaving. We know all of them a bit (and in some cases work with them) though I’m not close enough to any to have been discussing the details of issues at school as we’ve gone along. The neighbours kids are all really nice and my children get on fine with them but they are not in the same year groups.
I want some kind of sentence I can say which doesn’t make my children sound like the problem (they really weren’t!) but also I don’t want to go around bad-mouthing a school their own children are attending. Unfortunately I know it will come up so saying nothing isn’t really an option.
I was thinking something like ‘they just weren’t settling very well so we’ve decided to give them a fresh start in another school’ but I think that makes the problem sound like my children. Any ideas??