Need views - Holyrood Secondary vs Shawlands Academy

[addyN]

Wanted to check which one is better and in what way? I have heard about rugby association of Shawlands academy but if a child is not a lot into sports, but more academically driven - which school will you prefer?

Also if you all look at rankings of the secondary schools which websites do you usually look at or refer to, to base your judgement on?

What primary are they in? If you are changing sector - non denom to denom or vice versa then you need to put in a placing request. It's not as easy as just choosing.

Shawlands is good at look at their young people holistically so will celebrate artistic, musical, cooking and academic achievements as much as sporting ones. They don't sacrifice one for the other.

Ds was both sporty as well as academic so did well at Shawlands but he had friends who were into (for example) graphic design who also did extremely well academically.

Don't know enough about Holyrood to comment.

Oh - and I never used ranking websites. Very few of them take into account the demographics (the technical term is the "virtual comparator") and even if they do, the virtual comparator doesn't take into account the challenges of multiple languages spoken.

So the important thing is the added value that the school offers and how well they teach the young people to learn for themselves.

I believe that Shawlands achieves well on both criteria.

You need to live in the catchment for a start and be in the correct primary school in terms of catholic / non catholic, if you're not then you'll need to put in a placing request. Both are oversubscribed schools in terms of placing requests, statistically you are more likely to be refused than accepted.
Both are big schools with good and bad points, league tables aren't worth the paper they are written on.