Child still not feeling great about SS place

[Claxonia]

We accepted a place for our 11 year old at a SS that is highly rated, very academic and my husband and I are happy with. Unfortunately our child has never had a good feeling about the school from the first visit a year ago. We were hoping this would turn around after the open day last week but they are still saying they don’t feel good about it.

There are not many good options where we live so we felt lucky to have this place (the school is very oversubscribed) and were hoping that things would improve but this doesn’t seem to be happening.

Has anyone else experienced this and how worried should we be? Should we trust that the school will be able to turn the negativity around in September? Or should we be frantically ringing round waiting lists?

@Claxonia Sh. So Dc has felt something others didn’t seem to. Hopefully it is just a wobble about change.

@ThickSkinnedSoWhat we went round all the schools with Dd2 but in the end her favorite and ours were slightly different. It's hard to decide but we went for our favourite which was the more established, academic school that is harder to get into. We've told her to try it for a year and if after that she thinks we've made a mistake, she can change. The one she liked was undersubscribed, so it's easy to change that way but would have been very difficult to change in the other direction.

As others say, at 10/11 it's hard for them to focus on the bigger picture.

i Am having this with my ds. He just doesn’t want to go to the very good selective school he has an offer for. He wants to go to the local school because that is where his friends are going. I am tempted to take his lead but at the same time he is too young to really understand what is at stake?

Yes. He is too young. It’s very natural to want to stay with friends and not see the bigger picture. However friends find new friends as will he. Are there clubs where he can keep in touch with friends? Sport etc? I think you do have to be the parent but have a get out strategy if he’s unhappy after a term or two.