Do you avoid criticising secondary schools in front of your children?

[timetorise]

I'm involved in school appeals and have been in so many where parents talk about their child's anxiety about an offered school being increased by insensitive comments in the playground. Year 6 children who are happy with their own offers are routinely telling other children that their offered school is bad. They are presumably absorbing these labels from their parents.

Do you make a conscious effort to avoid slagging off schools in front of your children? Or do you scoff the schools you are lucky enough to avoid without considering the knock-on effects?

Does your child's primary school do anything to discourage children from making insensitive comments to each other about their offered schools?

I do make this effort. But it's clear other y6 parents do not. We live near a large comprehensive so the vast majority of kids go there. On offer day one of the kids loudly announced that her mum had said she'd rather home school than send her child to that school in front of loads of other kids who will be going there.

It is an interesting one. I do make an effort of trying not to criticize any schools, but we live in an area with super-selective grammars, a couple of good state comps where you can get in from a distance you get into a higher ability band by taking their banding test and a couple of other local comps that I would not be happy sending my DD to. DD goes to a tutor once a week who sets quite a lot of homework and it is not that easy to make DD do that homework every day of a n hour or two for the whole year, instead of playing /reading/doing art etc. So the way I motivate her is by saying that she has to do the homework to get into one of these schools which are much better than the other schools. The problem then arises when she comes home from school and says that most of her friends are not doing any tuition and are jus going to go to other of these local catchment schools, without an exam...