SW London girls independent/grammars 2020 PART 2

[ColaPip]

I'm not sure Autumn is around during the day, so starting a new thread to maintain our lifeline

Fantastic school. In the wrong direction for us, but blazing a trial for private education, in my opinion

We decided to go with JAGS over CLSG. Think DD would have been happy at either tbh so that made choosing easier. Does anyone on
here have DDs at JAGS? Anyway, I'm so happy it's over. Not looking forward to having to go through it all over again for DS in another year and a half! Thinking of everyone still waiting for WL places fingers crossed you get the school you want.

@over11plus - thanks re WHS. Wow, that must have been stressful when about to accept another offer! Hope all goes well for your DS at LU.

@Duckville sorry if I sounded harsh re SPGS! It’s a hugely personal thing, but I got quite a negative vibe at the open evening. I also asked a question about my daughter’s (I don’t want to say too much) big commitment to something every other school had said would be no problem and they were not in support. It just wasn’t the right fit at all for us, but I can see it’s an amazing school for the right child. Just not for us! G&L we decided not to sit her for as she was already doing 6 and it’s not super near, but I did really like it.

@ColaPip several of my DD’s friends are going to WHS in September and they are all lovely girls! Also I have friends with DDS there already and they absolutely love it. Also the STEAM building/project is going to be amazing! She will love WHS!

@Duckville

SPGS is a bit of a marmite school, and I say that with a DD who is exceptionally happy there and really thriving. It does seem to be love it or hate it and I personally suspect that may be because it does have a somewhat different culture and ethos from many of the others. I guess it is swings and roundabouts because I would have taken our state offer over Godolphin, LEH etc by absolutely miles.

Thanks Glaciferous.
That’s great that your DD is thriving there. In what way is the culture different? I’d love to hear some first hand positives.

I feel like the girls get a lot of freedom (in a good way) to follow their own ideas and I also feel that it's tons more liberal. There are no petty rules like the ones I hear about at other schools. The entirety of the rules basically boils down to 'don't be an idiot'.

I like that they don't get compared to each other with marks etc and are explicitly told to do their own best not worry about what other people's best is or how they are doing compared to anyone else. I like the emphasis on wellbeing (DD has had outstanding pastoral support on a personal basis from several members of staff).

It seems a very low pressure environment to me, which might sound odd to some but that's honestly been our experience of it and DD came from a state primary (masses more pressure eg around SATs). Maybe things will change higher up the school but so far it's been amazingly relaxed; there has not even been that much homework. They are at pains to stop children from doing too much (sometimes it is hard to stop them but at least they are trying). I also love the encouragement to just give things a go and not worry about being good at them (this is really helpful for clever girls with perfectionist tendencies and has suited DD down to the ground).

Some of the other schools I considered just seemed really traditional and hidebound and I did not get a good vibe from them.

I suspect it's very personal, and obviously what suits one child and family won't suit another. I just don't really recognise the school I hear discussed on here sometimes usually, I find, by those with no direct experience of it.

But then I don't have direct experience of eg Godolphin so perhaps it is nothing like it seems too!

That is so helpful, thank you Glaciferous.
Sounds fantastic and first hand experience too.

It really has been fantastic for us!

@Glaciferous that’s really nice to hear. I think it’s always worth saying that what works for one child/family isn’t right for another.

It's so good to hear your dd's experience @Glaciferous. I absolutely love Spgs if I'm honest, it's everything I am looking for. My instinct is that it's the perfect school for dd but what if we got it wrong? As ever with such a renowned school, we have all heard hearsay of girls falling apart and being destroyed by anxiety. We couldn't forgive ourselves if that were to happen to dd. @Glaciferous can you give any insight into the character of the sort of girls who thrive there? I imagine there are all sorts of personalities so it's probably hard to classify as such.

That wasn't all meant to be in bold!

I think much is speculated about the differences between these schools, but the reality is, they all have far, far more in common than they have differences. Look at Hammersmith - LU, G&L and SPGS. All draw pupils from the similar areas; from families with similar aspirations / outlooks / hopes for their children. Teachers are teachers at the end of the day. Some are going to be better than others, at least for your child. Ok, so one school might get 92% 9-7 at GCSE, one 98% and one 99% - but a few percent doesn’t really translate into any tangible diffetences in “pressure” within the atmosphere of the schools. None of these schools need to be “pressure cookers” - not in the early years at least. I can only speak for LU and G&L, but the atmosphere is anything but pressure, not until the build up to GCSEs. But that Sioux be the case in any school.

I think where the reputations of stressful environments come from is higher up the schools- particularly for those that go through the Oxbridge process. This can be very brutal and you have to bear in mind that these are not DC who are used to failure in their young lives. Imagine the pressure of receiving an Oxbridge conditional offer of AAA in the January, after possibly 3 days of interviews and aptitude texts before Xmas. Maybe 40 of your peers are all in the same boat and you all know that if you drop an A*, you lose your offer. It’s massive pressure on their shoulders. And if they go through the US applications system or medicine (and obviously a high proportion will be) it’s just as stressful, if not more so. It doesn’t matter how intelligent or talented they are at x,y,z. They will have times when they doubt themselves (sometimes massively so) and you have to be there to pick up the pieces.

But when you go to talks (as we did this evening) when young people who are a few years into their degrees come back and talk about their experiences (and some will have failed med school or Oxbridge first time and reapplied), its astonishing, it really is, to see 19/20 year olds with so much self- assurance and so many options at their feet. It’s incredibly inspiring (well it is to me st least) and you can hardly believe that will be your 16 year old in just a few years.

All these schools are a gift really and our DC are very lucky to even have a shot at them. No school is perfect and there no one size fits all. The main thing, by far, is their friends and this is random at any school. They will have their ups and downs, but the time flies by and they’re all very fortunate to have all the opportunities they will have..

I can't honestly say what kind of girl would thrive at SPGS because I can only speak from my own experience and there may be other types who would enjoy it just as much as mine, IYSWIM. Certainly there were a massive range of girls in her Y7 form and they were not a homogeneous type at all from what I could tell. They all seem to be happy so far.

But mine is relentlessly curious to the point of completely exhausting me even now she is 13 (it's like toddler questions that never end only on a higher level and I have found myself saying 'I'm not sure I care or want to know' at times which obv is not my finest parenting moment), really loves learning, very quick to pick up on things (I don't mean to learn things as such, more to make connections and extrapolate, sometimes too far which can end up in anxiety - which they have helped her with enormously). She's a bit of an odd child in many ways, very much an individual (which probably means a bit of a weirdo) with an iron sense of self-determination and a strong and active dislike of being put in a pigeonhole or complying with expectations that she cannot see the point of. She is very much a petition-starter and mini-activist and spent her entire primary schooling railing at what she saw as pointless rules and regulations. At the same time, she's extremely compliant with adult expectations, as long as she can see the point of them.

She's got a very strong sense of social justice, is v v engaged with politics and world issues, is extremely moral to the extent of pissing off nearly all her peers at primary but has found strong, nurturing and happy friendships at St Paul's despite being quite introverted and someone who has struggled with friendships on a number of levels previously.

I don't know what the Oxbridge process is like now. But I went through it myself and didn't notice any pressure particularly. It was all just 'oh, why not give it a go'. Things may well have changed in the intervening decades!

I agree, these are all good schools and they all have their good and bad points. But I thought DD would have been very unhappy at most of the other schools I looked at and was pretty sure she would love St Paul's. And she does. She really really does.

I didn't, by the way, really choose the school because of my aspirations for DD, though obviously I hope she does well and gets to do whatever she would love most in life. I chose it because I thought she would fit in and be happy there (as well as some specific curriculum stuff). She never really fitted in at primary school and was unhappy quite a bit of the time as a consequence. I felt like some of the other schools were perhaps more focused on looking for those children who fitted in more easily. That would not have worked for DD. She needs somewhere you can be different and it's still OK.

I do think A-levels have changed these days because, for a start, they’re all linear. Where As used to be enough at GCSE and A-level, now there’s 9s and A*s. But mainly, they’re expected to do so much else alongside the A-levels - service work; extra curricular achievements; societies; mentoring; EPQ and so on.

I think if you’re one of the only ones in a school going for Oxbridge etc, it’s maybe less pressure because the attitude is more likely to be “just give it a go.” If you have parents who have experienced this route, it’s probably less daunting too, but most won’t. It is different if half / most if your school are doing it because with the best will in the world, reality can get skewed. There are students who get all 9s. They are then predicted AAAA. They decide they want to do maths at Cambridge. They get through the interviews and are offered a conditional place in January. They work flat out until the summer, They get the required AAA* (or whatever it is for maths). Then they have to take the Cambridge STEP paper. A high proportion will not pass this and will not get the Cambridge place, despite stellar school performance. That’s hard to take for even the most resilient young person.

I really don’t think there is any particular “tupe” in any of the schools. Yes, there’s a different atmosphere according to whether a school is co-ed or single sex obviously, with pros and cons for both, but that’s about it.

When I look at DDs friends now, (G&L year 7) they just seem like lovely girls. We’ll see how things pan out as they go through the school When I look at DS’ peers now in the sixth form LU (as I was observing last night), they are anything from geeky introvert types; to non- binary, to some on the autistic spectrum; to super-confident, articulate speakers; to sporty / musical / drama types and everything inbetween. Some of them are like 16 going on 50 and some of them are absolutely bonkers. There’s been a few casualties along the way tbh. But they work out who they are and there’s space for everyone.

I did linear A Levels (I'm quite old) and about half my year went to Oxbridge. So I was comparing like with like as far as you can, given the gap of years. It was probably different in my day as most people got unconditional offers, for Oxford at least, so no pressure on exam results.

I was the first in my family to ever go to uni and so was DH. Oxbridge wasn’t on anyone’s radar where I came from. Which probably explains why I’m slightly more phased and in awe of them all for even giving it a go!

There are probably different types of pressure! If a lot of people are applying to Oxbridge and it's fairly normal to do so so you don't feel like you have to be a genius, perhaps it feels less pressured than if it's a highly unusual thing to do? On the other hand, if you are from a family where university isn't normal, but you get in it could feel less pressured in that you don't have to get in somewhere supposedly 'better' in order to feel successful?

Like all these things, different approaches might suit different personalities!

Yes there are different types of pressure, I agree. I personally think it’s not these schools in themselves that create a stressful environment (if anything they’re trying to achieve the opposite), but that it’s more dependent on family expectations and the particular peer group your DC find themselves in. I think I’ve said this before here, but I credit DS’ friends for his GCSE results more than the teachers. Most of the time they supported each other and any competition was positive, only occasionally did it all get a bit much. I do think if he’s been in a group where they were happy with 7s, that’s probably what he would have got too. But it is clear that some DC are under immense family pressure to get into Harvard or similar and it’s an eye-opener, frankly. I think it’s the friends that characterise their experience if the school and, as a teen, it’s your friends and family that influence you most. There’s only so much teachers can do.

I have had 5 children at 4 different private secondary schools (the twins went to the same one but even my daughters went to different ones - Habderdashers and North London Collegiate (we are North not South London)). The process is quite stressful at the time - my daughter went to Habs at 4 and ther other NLCS at 7 so the girls avoided 11+ except that they had to sit for the seniors at their own schools at 11 (both failed to get into their sister's school at 11 by the way - they had a go). My sons did 13+ after private prep.

At the end of the day as someone said above these schools are very similar. I was often asked about the Habs/NLCS differences but there were more things in common than differences. It was just a nuisance to have to get the girls to different places. (They are both now London lawyers by the way doing business law and got very similar exam / degree grades)

The biggest issue is often whether it is better to be a big fish in a small pond/top of your class in a not so academic private school or middle or even bottom in a very academic selective school.

None of my children felt pressure from the schools by the way. There will always be some teenagers in any school of any kind who put themselves under pressure or have Tiger mothers cracking the whip at home. My bigger issue has always been that my 5 are quite laid back so it was absence of pressure which was the bigger concern!

Anyway good luck to those applying for and accepting places at schools. it all tends to work out for the best in the end and is never as important as it feels at the time. With all 5 the only time when it felt difficult was when my second daughter didn't get into Habs at 5 and she was upset, not because of our pressure but she really wanted to go to school where her sister went and the decision made no sense as she was reading at 3 and clearly at that age much more interested in academic stuff than her sister who was already there but sometimes it is just luck on the day - I blame the 3 triplet girls who all won places in that year instead of her and now she says she is happy with NLCS where she went at 7 - best school for her. She is really pleased she did not get into Habs at 5.

it’s more dependent on family expectations and the particular peer group your DC find themselves in

Amen to this!

Dear Mums,

I will very much appreciate if you can give an insight/advice on which of the two schools you have experience in OP or WA. My DD is very bright and been offered scholarship by OP. Absolutely love OP but concerned that they are not academically ranked among top schools and hence concerned she may not perform as well when it comes to GCSE or will need tutoring etc. WAll is grammar and wherever she goes she will be proud she made it to grammar school and this will be considered highly when going to sixth form or university, hence will do well given that they generally do well going to uxbridge and Russel group universities . OP has more pastoral care and feel it is more suited for her shy personality, but may not help her as much academically.

any advice? many thanks to all you lovely mums in advance

Hi @Malak2020 - I'm afraid I've drawn a blank and can't work out which schools you're referring too?!
Let us know and hopefully someone will be able to help.

apologies Old palace or vs Wallington