What's God got to do with it?!

[Fruitflylady]

I'm a bit cross; choosing a secondary school for my yr 6 DS and our closest school (10-15 min walk) is judged outstanding, great exam results, amazing facilities (it has a swimming pool ffs!) etc., etc. The only problem is that it is a catholic school and as such we are right at the bottom of the admissions criteria, my son having the misfortune to have been born to atheist parents.
The next nearest school is a fairly bog standard comp, recently downgraded by ofsted to 'requires improvement'.
The next after that, actually in the town we live in, but a good 40min walk, has been 'requiring improvement' for the last goodness knows how many years, is undersubscribed, suffers a bad reputation, in the middle of a council estate, and is now undergoing a consultation with the local council to either academise it or merge with the nearby outstanding junior and infant schools to become a 4-16 through school. On the plus side, they have an amazing headteacher, who is full of enthusiasm and ambition, and on my visits to the school I have been impressed by how happy all the students and staff seem. Their exam results are appalling though!

What on earth should I do? How can I choose between these schools?!

"So, had my only viable choice been s faith school, I would not have been overly worried about that aspect."

But if it was an oversubscribed school you wouldn't get in even if you lived next door to it.

If one of the comps became a Grammar school you would see the Catholic school loses its ability to do any creaming.

True enough, Bertrand, but the principle still stands: faith or non-faith religion is not all about school. It's also about home environment and making an active commitment to taking responsibility for part of your child's education. And that children have their own opinions by Y7, and will make up their own minds.

Bertraind from your post of 09.26 It is the oversubscription followed by selection that makes the school perform better, not the faith."

further selection when oversubscribed (assuming it is oversubscribed with children meeting the faith criteria) is then based on DISTANCE. How is this selecting the most intelligent?

Yep BertrandRussell is talking bollocks. Our two local outstanding RC schools assess all applicants, divide them into three ability groups, then take 33 per cent from each.

But I'm sure she'd prefer to believe otherwise!

A faith school will take children who fulfill the faith criteria from increasingly far away. Only when there are no more faith applicants will they admit on distance alone.

Banding is an interesting one. Does the make up of the schools you mention reflect the local area, the national picture or the children who applied? And does the % of pupil premium pupils reflect the number in the local area?

Oh, and do the two schools you mention have no faith criterion at all?

What riverside describes is unusual, IME. Hereabouts its as bertrand describes. Except, the RC schools aren't that good by and large, so it applies mainly to (some of) the CofE. Exact details of admissions and how they play out in practise vary by area.

When we were first starting to look at schools admissions roughly 15 years ago, we were astonished at there being a rule that baptised catholic kids who went to an RC school were prioritized for the (not that good) RC secondaries and back of the queue for others. Which as secularists who believe in neither privilege nor discrimination based on religion appalled us. Glad to say that was got rid of