Am late to this but thought I should post anyway. 3 DSs at CCS - confirmed Academy status, so soon to become just Chiswick School.
Am very happy with this school. Last year's A Level results were outstanding, my lazy but fairly bright DS was pushed and got to uni to do the course he wanted.
DS2, who is not so academic has had the best time, he was at the very high achieving Belmont PS before where, frankly he felt "stupid". At Chiswick he has soared and found his confidence, he's had some fantastic teachers - as well as some rubbish ones (as in any school) - and has flourished. He's now about to take GCSEs with good predictions of mainly Bs with a smattering of As - this is something I never would have envisaged at Primary.
New head Tony Ryan is excellent and fully committed to further improving standards both pastorally and academically. DS3 has had some slight issues with his behaviour (mainly just showing off!) which they have dealt with extremely well and have clamped down on hard. Most of all it's a lovely school to walk into, its got a good feeling. The staff for the most part are very good, the head of English is particularly fantastic. Maths is very well taught as are languages, science and music. Just to clear this up - they do what is called Opening Minds during year 7 which is a combination of humanities subjects - history, geography and RS (I think) but not English which is taught separately. This was trialled during my DS2s first year and was found to be extremely successful for the transition to secondary education, so was rolled out the following year.
The school certainly suffers from the prejudice inherent in a very middle class area where a large proportion of children go to private schools. The comments about behaviour on buses are indicative of this, most schools (including the nearby Latimer Upper) would not be proud of the way large numbers of their pupils behave on buses at chucking out time - this is largely the general boisterousness of large groups of teenagers released from the school day.
Many local parents are extremely dismissive of Chiswick and comments like the one above of it being the "fallback option if everything else fails" are common, but as parents who actually CHOSE it above private schools for our children (shock horror!) because we wanted them to have a rounded education that wasn't just about pushing them to get the highest grades, but to do so in a real environment indicative of the richly cosmopolitan city in which they live, we frankly couldn't be happier. I also have to say my DS1 and every one of his friends, who have come out the other side, are a fantastic testament to our choice.