Choosing secondary school in Islington

[emilyinislington]

I'm concerned to hear that 1 in 10 children in Islington don't get into one of their first three choices of secondary school, and that a third miss out on the first choice. Looking for advice from anyone who's already gone through the process- is there anything that can be done if you can't get into one of your top choices?

The key thing (and this is easier said than done) is to make realistic choices at the application stage. It's no good putting down only massively oversubscribed schools unless you are very, very confident that you will get a high ranking using their oversubscription criteria - unlikely to be the case for more than one or two of them. Somewhere in your six choices (and six is a lot) you have to have at least one backstop - a school that may not be outstanding but looks OK. The alternative to that is to be faced with an allocation to a school you ruled out on sight, because those are the only ones with places left at this stage.

I feel obliged to mention at this point that we did that, but didn't take up the backstop place because my son had a place at an independent school. However, if that hadn't been an option the backstop school was definitely better than the ones with unfilled places on 1st March.

Agree with LondonMother. Good advice indeed.
We've been through it and were lucky in that we got our first choice (living near enough).
I'm pretty clued up regarding Islington secondaries so feel free to ask more id you want to or CAT me

Thanks to you both, great advice! Seems like there is a big variation in standards so I guess it's just a case of choosing very carefully.