Kingston Grammar School

[ohtobeanonymous]

Having a DD who seems keen to go to this school and being highly impressed by the website and promotional material, I was a little underwhelmed when we went to the Open Day yesterday.

Any current parents who could 'sell' it to me based on their own DDs experience? I am struggling to justify the huge fees for a school which doesn't actually seem to offer anything (other than the fact it is mixed, not single sex) more than DDs current indie (nowhere near as expensive as KGS).

Genuinely keen to get DD into the best school possible for her that we can afford, but she would need some significant scholarships to be able to go to KGS...

[notOnYrNelly]

they teach them to think critically and conduct research themselves from day one .... I should imagine all the other indys are similar in this regard

They don't teach the parents to think critically then ? Sorry - I have no reason to doubt that KGS is very good, but there are a lot of very poor quality independent schools out there. Parents should always "think critically and conduct research themselves" and not just automatically assume they will get what they pay for because they've gone down the independent route.

And for the record many good/outstanding state secondaries teach DCs "to think critically and conduct research themselves from day one and ... have high expectations of [them] based on their assessment of [their] capabilities" too. My DC's secondary certainly does anyway.

[Graceandfavour]

Wow that was unnecessarily rude and personal. I'm not saying that state schools don't do these things. But in my personal experience, just mine, KGS has introduced it in a more structured way than the state school my son attends. I was also trying to suggest that KGS is unlikely to be the only Indy to do that. You'd hope to get that for the money you're paying, but I don't have personal experience of all Indy schools, obviously. I certainly didn't mean to criticise state schools. But this thread is about KGS largely in the context of other independent schools, hence how I framed my comments.

[CountessDracula]

Blimey! That was a bit of an attack from nowhere