Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Private school

Connect with fellow parents here about private schooling. Parents seeking advice on boarding school can vist our dedicated forum.

Moving to different prep in year 4?

2 replies

Schoolmovedilemma · 02/03/2025 14:36

Hello everyone, after a bit of advice. I'll try not to make it too long! Basically my daughter is in a v friendly, v small prep. Been there since age 3. Now age 7. She has friends but due to some switching around of classes for logistical reasons she's not got a regular group of close friends and has been a bit adrift this year. Although has 1 person she always plays with. She does also have a relative in the year above who she's v close to. Those are her two ties to the school I'd say. She's generally happy.

Now the dilemma, a friend has decided to move her child to a different school, which happens to be where my partner works. We'd previously not considered it as we couldn't afford it as much more expensive than current prep. But they recently introduced staff discounts and so now we could. In fact we'd be sooo much better off a year and they have amazing facilities, whereas current prep has v v few facilities. Not entirely sure what we're paying for tbh. So I went to see the new prep a few weeks ago and really liked it. I mean it's small and friendly but facilities are just incomparable with current prep!

I am so scared to move her and find she has no friends, is miserable, blames us for moving her. She says she wants to look at the new school and she "wants to move there but also doesn't". Basically she's scared. Part of me feels like it's a no brainer. Of course she'll make friends. The opportunities she'll have are just way better and she'll be able to get involved in so much stuff for much less money! The other part of me thinks... Change is bad! Why rock the boat?! It's only 3 years left of primary. Whats the point?! But I can't shake the feeling that this could be a great move, if I were brave enough to take the leap. My partner just wants to move her as he sees no reason not to.

Help!! What would you all do in our position?!

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
tennissquare · 02/03/2025 16:12

Your dd is aged 7! Move her! She has no understanding of finance or logistics, of course she will make new friends. Give your notice to the current school asap. Life is full of change.

GravyBoatWars · 02/03/2025 19:23

Move her. Building resilient children includes helping them tackle changes and taking small leaps of faith. Keep talking to your DD - tell her that as her parents you believe this is the best choice for her but that it's ok for her to be nervous about starting somewhere new and a bit sad to leave her old school. Explain that even grown ups feel nervous about starting new things and then help her with some tools to tackle that. Talking to someone about our feelings, information gathering (does she have questions about what things will be like at her new school you can help her find answers to?), reminding ourselves of the exciting things that we're looking forward to, thinking about other times we did something a little scary and how great it felt to overcome that, etc.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page