Chelmsford high school for girls

[smartiejake]

I took my dd (in year 5 so secondary transfer in 2010) to see this school this evening as she would like to take the 11+. She has just started at kip mcgrath for extra tuition (primarily for the verbal reasoning as they don't do that at her primary)She is bright and I think a grammar would suit her.

We were very impressed with the school. It had a lovely feel to it but I want the heads up from parents of kids who actually go there.

Is it really the wonderful caring community it professes to be (and seems to be) or just a pressurised exam factory?

P.S For those too young to remember the actress Irene Handl, she was a comedy actress who was a ".. a specialist in London landladies with mewling voices, she could make quite insignificant phrases seem funny."
I remember her most vividly in Metal Mickey though

When were these girls at the school Kitty? My dd is in Y7 and this doesn't correspond at all to our experience of the school (or the girls) so far. The school's ethos is "educating the leaders of the future" which may sound a bit ott but it sums up their attitude and expectations. By the way - we are Guardian readers!!

I suppose they'd be in their early thirties now. They had good A-level grades but considered being someone's secretary to be a real career choice. It was a sort of 'women should know their place' ethos. Coming from West London it seemed an odd and limited point of view to me . They had incredibly detailed 5 and 10 year plans and wanted to 'get on in life' without spirit nor creativity. S-u-r-b-u-r-b-i-a personified. I thankfully only met them a max of 4/5 times. It sounds like a different progeny now. Have any of the girls become recognised 'leaders'?

Yes, I think the school does sound very different now. I don't know if any of the girls have gone onto become leaders. I think the idea is that they each have the potential to become a leader in whichever field they go into. Whether they do or not is another matter - they teach them to aim high.
I totally agree with you that the girls you knew had a very old fahioned attitude for people of that generation (being in my late thirties myself). Like you say that may just have been them rather than the school. I knew some girls of my age who went there and that certainly wasn't their attitude.