To stand outside a school AM or PM

[Pecal]

There are two schools I am interested in sending our son to for secondary school. However I was unable to attend an open evening for one and the other school cancelled their open evening and neither school is offering an open morning or tour.
I was think of standing outside the school either in the morning or afternoon to see how the pupils behave and gauge their demeanour.

is the bonkers? is it best to do this is the morning or evening?

Not massively bonkers. You'll get a sense of what the kids are like but be aware that what they are like at the end of the day, largely unsupervised, isn't the same as what they are like in lessons.

Is there a bus stop, train station, park or shops near the school? If there's going to be bad behaviour, I would expect it at that kind of place since teachers won't be seeing the behaviour.

If most kids travel there by bus, take the bus at that time.

Can you not just phone and rearrange? Don't think you'll get a very good idea what it's like by standing outside at either of those times tbh

Up to you. Any decent school will allow you to book an appointment to look around in school hours - obviously take your DS with you, so I'd certainly do that.

I'm not sure you could gage as nothing from this. My son goes to an extremely good school, hot on behaviour, gets excellent results. At the end of the day you get a huge mix of children coming out, well behaved kids just chatting, others hitting each other, some causing trouble others standing around talking about homework etc. Even the best schools have trouble makers so it's not you best bet.

It's a hard one because teenagers have been in school all day doing lessons etc. They kind of let it out a bit when they leave school. They get loud over excited it looks bad in their groups and how big the kids are .. if I had watched how kids cone out my own kids would not be in school 🤣