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...

We live close to the border between three local authorities, and there are also some grammar schools within reach, so children from DD’s state primary tend to go to a variety of secondaries. In her year, 30 children went to 13 different secondary schools!

I was careful not to criticise any school in front of DD. She took the 11 plus, but unlike @karmi2010's DD she really wanted to go to grammar school – she found the pace at primary rather slow at times, and she could see that grammar would suit her. However, we kept our options very much open, and we visited and liked the local comprehensive schools, so it wasn’t difficult to reinforce the message that there were several good choices locally.

DD commented that factions formed in the playground between the children going to the three local comprehensives as soon as the school allocations were released.

it's not a one off thing though, you notice children behaving in antisocial ways from day one and attribute it to school xyz when they are clearly in school uniform or being rowdy in a clump in the park. schools that don't maintain their property with garbage overflowing etc. comments a friend makes about an older child struggling in front of your 7-8 year old etc. being on a bus with a group who smell of body odor because the uniforms are unwashable and retain odors. stories in the news. schools don't solely get bad reputations because parents "talk" in year 6.

It's not just the parents though. In my town growing up, there were two secondaries. Everyone knew which one was rough AF (and inadequate) and which one was a top 100 school in the league tables. You could tell just by looking at the kids walking in. I genuinely didn't want to go to the super strict RC top 100 school but I also didn't want to go to the "anything goes" inadequate school either. Schools just have a reputation and it's not necessarily coming from the parents of applicants. Year 5 and 6 kids aren't blind or stupid, they can see some things for themselves and build impressions of places. Additionally, they're likely to know who from their school in previous years went on to which schools and that will also accompany some impression of the quality of the school.

I'd avoid 'slagging off' anything or anyone, but 'a disadvantage of that school is.....'. 'there seems to be a lot of bad behaviour at....' 'people in the village seem to associate this school with this; I wonder how true it is?' 'A concern about the school might be..... I don't know how true it is though, because people tend to inflate negative talk....' etc etc is all fair game.

Children should be allowed to compare gossip with the reality; think about how much experience of something a speaker has before deciding whether to trust them; to perhaps repeat the rumour to the head as a question, in order to see how much truth there is an what is being done about it

Vital life skill

@timetorise why do you say lucky enough to avoid that in itself is convaying a negative perception of a school, the very concept you say is insensitive and has knock on effects?

Absolutely.
We said things like 'both good, but we think you are better suited to X'.
Now in our case it was true and we were a shoe in for X, but I think it is a good policy anyway.

I made an effort not to be critical about any schools when my children were at that point. But lots of parents do it! I remember coming back from a secondary school open morning with my DC and as I dropped them off at their primary school I bumped into a mum who told us how their own DC (who was older than mine) had also visited the school but hated it! My child immediately said they didn’t want to go there. Thing is it was a really great school but hearing that an older child was talking down about I had a big impact.

However, I think even if you do make an effort not to be negative about schools when kids are going through the process they come to understand the schools their parents talk up are the more sought after ones.

I always phrased it that I felt it wasn’t right for my daughter. Unlike the person I know who spent several years slagging it off and saying how bad it was only for her daughter to go there………

Yes. Unfortunately others don’t.

YES
My youngest is in Y7 now, both go to a selective school. We didn't look seriously at the local comprehensive and told the children that the other schools were better suited to them, but comprehensive was good for X, Y and Z (which they weren't into,). Most of their friends went to the comprehensive and as far as I know, no bitching about it occurred.
The parents though are something else, I'm basically seen a a pushy Tiger mom for tutoring my kids for an hour a week and entering them for a few selective exams.

I’m a Year 6 teacher and we specifically ask our parents to be as positive as they can about all the schools. There’s nothing worse than Johnny coming in on March 3rd saying,”I got in to St Custard’s!” and Jimmy saying, “My mum says that’s a rubbish school.”

I was very careful not to slag off any schools, not least because I knew there was a non zero chance my DSs might be going to one of the schools with a poor reputation. I did make it clear that some schools were harder to get into than others because I wanted them to understand that they might not get their first choices but like pp I framed it in terms of "Well, this school is better for sport and that one is better for music so it depends what you're into."
Two of our most popular local schools use a lottery system and are very oversubscribed. My DS's teacher told the children she knew which school they were all going to, so they didn't need to tell her, and please not to talk about it straight away because some of their friends were likely to be disappointed with their allocations.
One family in our parents WhatsApp group deliberately chose one of the less favoured schools, because they actively didn't want a religious, grammar or single sex school, which ruled out most of the other options. They posted "We got X school" with a smiley emoji on allocation day in the class WhatsApp group. I think that really helped parents avoid slagging off other schools.