If you are a parent you will know that it is around this time of year that you are required to take part in an important, painful and mostly futile exercise in consumerism. I am talking about choosing a secondary school for your child (some of this also applies to primary education but I am trying to stay focued).
If you are looking at private or grammar schools you may have already invested quite a bit of time, money and energy coaching your child to pass the entrance exams. These seem to me designed totally to weed out those kids who have a nasty habit of ruining a schools position in the oh-so important league tables by not going on to get 10 A* GCSEs. The higher the “status” of the school the more weeding the school needs to do because, surprise surprise, these schools attract a lot of applicants.
My own experience is in the state system. It starts with a form where you have to choose your top 3 preferences. So far so simple. I wanted to insert the catchment school and leave the other 2 fields blank but the voice in my head was saying “your grandparents fought in the war to give you the right to choose your child’s school - you will be an ungrateful grandson and a terrible parent if you do not insert 3 names.”
Resisting the temptation to pick two other names out of a hat the next step is to request a brochure. This is a bit like picking a holiday “ooh that looks nice” with the addition of the chance to read an OFSTED report. Both these documents (multiplied by about 6 in our case - one for each school) take a lot of reading and generate as many answers as questions. But help is at hand because schools have an open day when, rather than learn pythagoras, pupils of said school escort parents round the premises showing other children in various learning environments. If you don’t know what this is like imagine being shown around a zoo by one of the animals.
The open day seals it and we were able to make our 1,2,3 choice without adding to our 42 hours of effort. The form completed it is time to spend 4 months anxiously thinking about our choice, wondering if we made the right one, whether we should have done more research and if life wouldn’t be so bad after all in a communist state.
March arrives and on the designated day (the whole process is designed with military precision) my child is offered a place at her catchment school because…….you guessed it, the other two schools were over subscribed. As we get over the amazing insight that, given a choice, virtually all parents opt for the best school available, we realise we are back to we started. only now we don’t want to go to the catchment school because it no longer seems good enough.
Helpfully at this point there are forms to go on two waiting lists and forms to invoke 2 appeals procedures. I want to throw them away along with the 6 brochures, 6 OFSTED reports and various other detritus but that voice in my head is back “Margaret Thatcher didn’t risk our safety winning back the Falklands just so that you can squander the choices you now have as a result of her sacrifice”
I won’t dwell on this, save to say the appeals procedure is excrutiating and the waiting list largely stationary. By now it is June, 9 months after the whole pantimime started, parents are stressed, children disappointed and schools are struggling to cope with the buruearatic chaos when they should be educating our children….and all in the name of choice.
In case you are interested my child got into their first choice in the end (waiting list not appeal) but it has left me more convinced than ever that the system is not working. In our area people travel to Winchester schools, Andover children travel to our area and Basingstoke children choose Andover. And, as far as I know, Basingstoke schools, and some Andover, struggle to fill places. Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned, not least the environment, if a children went to their local school and we all invested all our time, energy and money in making sure every school is seen as a desireable place to learn?
Finally a tale from the private sector. Firends of ours chose a private primary/secondary school for their son. after 7 years of taking their hard-earned cash he was asked to leave because he failed the seondary entrance exam. In my opinion this is exclusion on the grounds of ability and is immoral.
Rant over
