Sunday Times Parent Power

[LaydeeC]

possibly a daft question, but does anyone have the Parent Power supplement from yesterday's Sunday Times.
I stupidly forgot to get it and don't know where to get a copy from
any ideas?

for what it's worth - don't bother! Just a list of A- level and GCSE grades, which tell you nothing about how the school works or how it would suit your children.

Where's Xenia when you need her?

thanks all!
ok, probably won't bother then if not much information.
Thanks again.

You can pay £1 for 24 hours access to the Times website it is on their.Just lists top 500 state schools and top 500 indie schools etc.

there

Agree that its not very useful - I am please to see eg the Perse School very high, but as we live nowhere near cambridge and don't want to move - not really relevat...
You'lll get much better intelligence on relative merits of your local schools from Mumsnet

I would agree so much about it not being useful. My daughter is at one of those schools on the list and it is a horrible, hard, cold institution. Results do not give the whole story. We are due to move her. I think it's sad that we as parents have become so obsessed with statistics. We all fall for it.

I may sound very cynical but we have had such a terrible time at her present school.

I have it (DS's school emailed us all as it is featured)

It lists top State & Independant Primary & Secondary schools.Secondary are ranked by combination of GCS & A level results.

All league tables need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. Of course St Paul's Girls school (not I seem to remember in the table) will do much better than the non-selective Lady Amelia's Academy because of the starting point of the intake. What you want to know is the value added (and even that may show odd results as presumably SPGS can't do greatly on value added as its intake is already half way to GCSE.) You need to try to see what the schools can achieve with the children they take, which is actually very difficult as very few schools that are open to any one individual family have comparable intakes. Your choice is normally between the school known for attracting bright and motivated children and the one which gets "the rest" - hence the scrum to get into the better schools witnessed annually.

So far as private schools go, apart from big cities there is normally only one very/reasonably academic school and the others are distinguishable by pastoral care/sport/music etc. Even in big cities, the "pecking order" ensures that intakes are rarely comaparable - talking to any Y6 parent will quickly give you a feel for which school is easier/harder to get into. Bear in mind that any child trailing along at the bottom of a highly academic school is likely to have a poor opinion of their cleverness, and in extreme cases, self worth, even if they are in fact pretty bright, as evidenced by the fact that they got in in the first place.