Trying to choose a secondary school in SE London. Why do I feel there is no choice?

[spudmasher]

What is this awful process? It is an illusion of choice surely? One good school, one OK school, eight shite schools......
I KNOW that parenting is everything and my DD WILL do well (even if it kills me) wherever she goes but why should we have to put up with this????
Comments please.

Oooo Spudmasher, I could have written exactly the same a year ago (my 11 y.o. has just started at one of the schools you mention). It's beyond a joke - all of it - and I was incandescent with rage for most of the year. We looked at several independents because home edding was not an option for us but we felt we had to have some kind of back up plan should we not be offered anything we felt was, in the truest sense of the word, acceptable. I found that the hardest thing because a) it was never really an option for us financially, even with scholarship offers; b) I only ever wanted my children to be educated within the state sector and c) the disparity of resourcing, of opportunity, of staff:pupil ratios ... well that just made me want to cry.

In the end we fluked a place on distance. Going by the stats given in the booklet, we would never have got a place in the previous year. But we did in our year of application. Just one of those flukey things. You never know. Now she's there, I keep asking her 'and what primary did she go to' when she tells me about a new friend. My brain is still in overdrive: where do they live ... how did they get a place ... it's a kind of insanity. And most of the time the answer is 'I dunno'. LOL.

Tilly - is that CP you speak of?

Just at the b*llx of it all!

Monty, not thinking of any particular school, just that teachers in a generally lower acheiving school usually relish the prospect of teaching children who are bright and motivated.

I used to teach in a very low achieving school and our able pupils used to get an exceptional amount of attention partly because so many were not interested so if you ran an after school session there would only be a few there but also beause it made light relief from the uphill task elsewhere. In a similar way hard working but average children were made to feel special because they wanted to work in an environment where many did not. I did sometimes worry though that they left school thinking they were far cleverer than they actually were and the real world might be a shock.