Good state secondaries awful primaries

[Flittingaboutagain]

Good morning.

Starting to wonder about the school applications I have made.

The local primaries are under funded, under performing and with bad reputations. The secondaries are the opposite. We cannot afford to educate the children the whole way through from primary to year 11. So, with limited resources available, does it make sense to consider independent prep?

Will that be enough to instill a love of learning, self confidence and a foundation of knowledge to support them to thrive in a decent state secondary school? "Give me the boy until he's 8 and I'll show you the man" seems more evidence based than "state til eight"?

Grateful for your insights if you had the same dilemma with choices available.

I’m in a similar situation. We could afford the fees for primary school but presuming wages stay the same we would struggle with the increases in fees at secondary school. So we are considering saving the fees and sending to state primary to make up the difference when it comes to secondary. One of the private schools was open about additional fees on their website which was useful in considering overall affordability.

It's so unusual for all the primaries to be awful and the secondary schools good in an area, I think I'd want to do more digging to understand why/if I was looking at the wrong thing.

State schools are pretty much all underfunded now.

How are you measuring "underperforming"? If it's true that students are underperforming at primary school, might the secondary school just be bringing them back up to the level that they should have been (hope that made sense!).

I would definitely worry about a child moving from a small independent class (which I assume is what you would want) to a large secondary school. I've only really seen people do it where they are moving to a grammar (and the independent is essentially a grammar preparation school). But if your secondaries are as good as you say, maybe there will be a similar experience.
I don't think even the best primary school can instill a long lived "love of learning" - there are so many other factors at secondary level not least puberty and peer groups which you can't protect against.

It also remains to be seen what Labour are going to do re education. I'd worry that the now good state secondaries might be completely different by the time your children get there.

Thank you both for your replies.

I'm measuring underperforming against that national average results. Are there better indicators? Very happy to be educated on this!

One point I hadn't considered really was what we'd do if the situation changed for the worse with the secondary state provision.

I don't think it makes sense to do it that way unless the Primaries are really bad
You need to look at more than academics, especially for Primary.
Try and get a better overall picture of the school before dismissing it

I have and that's what I meant by bad reputations and underfunded so the overall picture of the schools is negative. What does really bad look like to you? Maybe my standards are too high.

Have you visited the schools? What do they feel like inside? What was behaviour like?

How big are the cohorts? Sometimes our results are phenomenal (100% at expected or greater depth) and sometimes under the national average just because we have small year groups. The teaching is still the same.

Like pp have said it's very unusual for all the primaries in an area to be bad and all the secondaries be good. As presumably all the kids who went to the bad primaries then go to the good secondaries?
Either way. I would suggest that you send them to the best state primary you can and save the money each year. Then when they reach secondary you'll have large savings to be able to pay private for secondary.

Or move?

That's very unusual ime. Far more often it's the other way around...great primary (or at least one fantastic and one very good one in a catchment) but then poor Comps.

If ALL of the primaries are really that poor, I'd be seriously questioning the results I'd found on the Comp - because their sole intake will be dc from underperforming schools, they'd have to be flat-out award-winning level of brilliant to turn that around.

If you look at the secondaries in my County, unless you dug very deep you'd come away thinking Comp A was 'the best'. Because all the published results put it at the 90th percentile for the Country and there's lots of news stories about how fantastic it is, how kids results are great. It's not though - those 90th percentile results are based on it being the best of their grouping, from a much wider area, of similar schools. Comp B down the road is far far better but only 60th percentile as published by the Council, even though results are actually higher than Comp A. Bonkers and misleading.

It's very unusual for this to be the case. What are you judging the primary schools on? If the cohorts are small, their performance to national data is almost irrelevant.
Go and see the schools in action first. Start with the one closest to your house (easy for transport) and work from there.

Primary school "gaps" can usually be filled by parents too as the knowledge isn't beyond our knowledge level.

That doesn't really make sense as pps said.

Is the "bad reputation" based on information from parents who currently or very recently have had children at the school? My DC went to a junior school with a bad reputation... based on the school 10 years previously and people who knew nothing about the school continuing to pass on the information.

All schools are currently underfunded due to years of Conservative governments. This may or may not improve now.

50% of schools will be below average. That's what an average is. You need to look at results in line with intake demographic and see how they compare. Also, bear in mind that good results may be down to Year 6 being spent drilling children in how to do well in SATS. There is more to education than doing well in an exam.