Dear Readers
I have made this site to help you access the information you need to make better school choices for your child. If I can help you organise and understand the routes through school that are available to your child, and the activities around their schooling and so on, then I’ll be satisfied.
All the information on this site is available elsewhere, sometimes I am just providing the best link to the primary source of info that you’ll need. I’ve also tried to simplify the presentation so you read less and get to the point quicker.
My daughter was the first in our family to attend an independent school of any kind. Honestly, we stumbled into it and I applied late and it could have gone so wrong at that stage, but it worked out perfectly.
The school worked the children hard—but gently. As in, their academic teaching began immediately in Year 1—every morning till lunchtime. The afternoon’s weren’t lazy but other activities were scheduled and things needed to be fit in as they do in every school.
The children were tested (and ranked) frequently—spelling, vocabulary, maths, comprehension, and so on—and so competition ensued, among pupils and probably parents too, something we didn’t enjoy at all. Our daughter’s test results (and rank) steadily improved as she moved through the school—but it was never easy to be around those pupils who constantly scored top three.
However, she was learning loads at school, her academic confidence was growing and whatever we did outside of school helped to round her character and broaden horizons. Looking ahead, I didn’t want to slow her pace of learning and enjoyment of school, she loved it, so we began (early this time) to visit Secondary Schools to see what was out there.
Where some of her classmates applied for upto 12 schools, we applied to four independent Secondary Schools schools and one highly over-subscribed Grammar school. That felt like a balanced challenge for our daughter at 10 years old, and I expected to get an offer somewhere from that group.
What is to key to my learning as a parent at this stage was the way my daughter handled her 11+. How she took to it like a game, and a game that she liked to play simply because she felt prepared and informed. She had worked hard enough between Year 1 and 6 to know no stress during those processes—and her eventual reward was 8 scholarships from 4 schools.
I came to believe that the pre-prep school’s method was intrinsically responsible for the way these children stormed through the 11+ and acquired scholarships and bursaries at high achieving independent schools. But it also occurred to me that anyone could do this—between their school and time at home, given the support, if they wanted to. And if they knew how.