Eltham college

[Savannah12345]

Hello, I need some advice. My son is very keen to accept his offer at Eltham college. He will be travelling from Canary Wharf - my question is whether most kids at Eltham live locally, and thus his opportunities for socialising with his peers will be difficult in the teenage years? Does anyone have any experience of this - there is a coach that travels to Eltham from Canary Wharf

Yes there’s a fair few who live north of the river in Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs etc. yes there is a school coach and you can find information about the route on the school website. If your dc is confident using public transport (or you support them to be) then they will have no problems socialising. Remember there is Saturday sport - so you need to get them to school on a Saturday and the matches will either be at school or they travel by coach to the away venue (and returned to school). Also after school clubs and training finishing at 5.30pm. It is a long day for the kids in canary wharf but the ones I know are super organised and very fit!

thank you- do all the kids have saturday sport every week? Or would they have to get chosen for specific teams?

thanks again

I’ve had 2 boys at Eltham and we live on the Isle of Dogs. The number of kids living here and travelling to EC has increased hugely over the last few years - when my eldest DS started, they ran a small minibus - now it’s a full-size coach. Saturday sport is only really for specific teams; if your DS is sporty, that might affect your weekends.
The public transport links are very pretty good - DLR to Lewisham and then the train to Mottingham - most of the 6th formers on the IoD tend to switch from the school coach to public transport because it suits their schedules better.
As far as teen socialising goes, it was never really a problem - many of of them seemed to live around Lee/Blackheath/Greenwich/Chislehurst/Bromley, so public transport (and the SL4 bus) did the trick, with the odd Uber thrown in for late nights.