Houses

fc123

I was thinking about this thread today.....as you do....and, apologies to Cleaver for hijacking his thread.......
But, I was so excited when we relocated due to a few fab state schools that would suddenly be in our location. The LEA blatantly lied to me about the selection process but we based our moving date and to where based on what 'the lady from the council' told me on the 'phone.
It was all Govt. 'rheotoric'......the actuality was that the 3 good schools were way oversubscribed and she never stood a chance of getting in them even if we had lived in a tent on the roof.

DD had no school place 3 weeks into start of secondary and we would have had to send her to sink school miles away and them go through an appeals process. We didn't bother. And the rest is history.


Her bestie mate at the weekend are from a local state school that she would have thrived in....and they do some great subjects too in addition to the standard ones.

On the plus side, she has had a very varied education and one can't go back in time and wonder ''what if?''.
Also, the £££ we spent on fees wouldn't neccessarily be sitting in our bank account either. We funded them by having no P/T staff (so one of us worked every day instead) and no hols.


Warning...our area ran a pilot scheme for a lottery on school places and is was seen as a massive success and, as far as I am aware, it is going to be implemented nationwide. When or how long it takes? I don't know about these things but buying now for catchments in a few years time may not turn out to be a good move.

fc123

dopester wrote: »

So in the new world private schools all around the UK are going to be full of foreign students with wealthy parents taking advantage of the falling pound.

Other regular parents around the UK who are hit with severely changed financial circumstances will somehow have to find the same fee level as before or remove their kids.

Private school fees aren't being reduced in any of the private schools around the UK, and there will be no movement to create new and affordable private/independent schools. Nor will public funding drop to the very good state schools.

KK - I got it. :rolleyes:

There are a lot of theories on why some areas have great schools and others don't. The main one in our London borough was that it bordered a borough with Grammars.
The results of their schools compared to ours weren't because the population were vastly more 'intelligent' than ours but, because, all the more academic kids did the 11+ and those that passed went to school in the next door borough. A lot of kids also went private if they wanted to be be nearer a school.
Consequently, many primaries were very anti 11+ as they saw it as a way of making 'their' secondaries marks much lower.

They claimed that if all the kids went to only the nearby schools the standards would go up as there would be a bigger mix of puils of all abilities.

I knew of kids with 90 min journeys to school each way as they went out of borough...not healthy really at such a young age.

Just a thought.

lostinrates

fc123 wrote: »

I knew of kids with 90 min journeys to school each way as they went out of borough...not healthy really at such a young age.

Just a thought.

My dad did that as a kid. Went to a grammar on the other side of London when his parents moved. I think the local option was not as good but he loved his school.

dopester

Michael Gove ushers free schools into shops and houses

Education secretary says planning laws were being rewritten to allow 'imaginative' use of small spaces

Jessica Shepherd
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 June 2010 12.50 BST

Planning laws are being torn up so that hundreds of parents can set up their own schools in shops and houses, the education secretary announced today.

Michael Gove said at least 750 groups of teachers, parents and charities had expressed an interest in establishing new schools that will be run as academies. Applications open today for any interested parties.

Handing parents the power to start their own schools is a flagship Tory education policy, modelled on Sweden's free schools and charter schools found in the United States.

Gove said planning laws and regulations were being rewritten to make it far easier for the new schools to be established. At the moment, parents would have to wade through hundreds of pages of "ridiculous, bureaucratic nonsense" before they could start a school. Before a brick could be laid, they had to answer detailed questions on cycle racks, he added.

"We don't need to have the degree of prescription that has governed school buildings for so long," he said. "It has been a tragedy that so much money has been swallowed up by bureaucracy." Soon residential and commercial properties would be able to be converted into schools quickly, he added.

continues...

dopester wrote: »

It always surprises me the premium some people are still willing to pay for a house in a good school catchment area.

The boom party years are over. I have my doubts as to whether the funding will remain for many a 'good school' to support what people still expect them to provide. Pressures on funding - bigger classroom sizes ect.

There is no doubt in my mind private school fees will fall significantly during the next few years. Even now I'd bet parents could push for a discount on the published fees at many a private school, and get it.

I'm just expecting many more private schools will open in many a town around the UK - even if they are smaller sized schools - providing high quality education, at lower costs, and taking a lot of the funding burden away from the state.

There will be a tremendous growth in private educational services, including for profit and non profit schools.

It is more likely than most people now imagine that public schools in the United States will more or less disappear.

Educational entrepreneurs will enjoy a rare opportunity to compete in providing effective elementary and secondary education to children.

LydiaJ wrote: »

Small schools (the sort that will fit into a big old house) are reasonably viable at primary level. Lots of primary schools (both state and private) have only one class per year group, or sometimes shared classes with two year groups in them. Primary education lends itself to this sort of structure. Each class only needs one teacher (with maybe a swap for music or PE or something) and all the children in each class learn all the same things very nearly all the time.

It's much harder at secondary level. To compete with bigger schools, you have to be able to offer a choice of subjects at GCSE (and at A-level if you have a 6th form which small schools usually don't). This means that the minority subjects have very small class sizes that are really not economically viable unless you push the fees up a long way. You also have to find staff for these minority subjects who are either part time or able to teach more than one subject, as there aren't enough kids to make a whole timetable of Spanish, or food technology, or whatever it is. Small secondary schools also have difficulties in the economics of facilities: even if you only have enough kids to occupy your laboratory/studio etc for half the time, you still need a whole room for it and all the kit to equip it. Furthermore, it's much more disruptive for kids if the school goes bust half way through their GCSE courses than for primary kids for whom the precise details of the curriculum are much more fluid.

But I entirely agree that in fee paying schools you don't get parents who don't care about education, and that that's an advantage to the school. In free schools you get many parents who do care very much about education, but if you have a small minority who don't, they can make life difficult for everyone.

ETA Perhaps I should say what point of view I'm writing from. I was educated at an independent school myself, and I now teach part time in a large independent secondary school. As a single parent working part time, I am unlikely ever to be able to afford to send my kids to fee paying schools. The cheapest of the independent secondary schools in my town would set me back over £150k at today's prices for two kids over 7 years - that's not possible for me. I'm aiming to live in the catchment of a good comprehensive to get the best education for my kids that I can realistically afford.

Minority subjects could be taken by correspondence / internet courses. It shouldn't be the state paying up for some cuisine hopeful wanting to do food-tech at school, or Spanish. Let them do that elsewhere if the school doesn't have the facilities, although with many more small schools, one of the small schools may be very suitable for those ambitions.

I'm not sure about the competition aspect - too much focus on competing with other schools in my opinion and time and money wasted on trying to benchmark it. Small schools could be run in teaching basic subjects to a high standard. For students who could excel they can do it by paying for University.

Anyway, time to get used to many smaller private enterprise, or partially subsidised schools. It's all part of the simplest education that so many find hard to grasp; when there is little or no money left, grand ideas of further big boom spending on what students should have, facilities, special this that and the other, are out the window. That is not to say many more small independent schools can't bring out the best in kids either.

silvercar

fc123 wrote: »

Warning...our area ran a pilot scheme for a lottery on school places and is was seen as a massive success and, as far as I am aware, it is going to be implemented nationwide. When or how long it takes? I don't know about these things but buying now for catchments in a few years time may not turn out to be a good move.

Our area has changed the admission criteria from "nearest by safe walking route" to "nearest as the crow flies". Much howling around.

MyLastFiver

Have a look at Hebden Bridge, Cleaver. Lovely rural market town, cheap houses, fast train into Manchester Victoria every 15 minutes.

fc123

MyLastFiver wrote: »

Have a look at Hebden Bridge, Cleaver. Lovely rural market town, cheap houses, fast train into Manchester Victoria every 15 minutes.

I agree....it's the only place up north I know well as we used to buy tonnes of textile waste from Mytholmroyd during the 90's.

I don't know if Cleaver is around to reply himself tonight but he did buy a house a few months back.


Schools? DD left on Friday. :j

The school she attended for her final year was a place that PLU's (people like us) don't send their kids to...unless they are a total genius and get a 100% bursary.

I would say that they had similar problems with teen girls that you would get in any school in Any place but it was very very very nice (from my point of view as a parent)....and the furniture was to die for.

She wasn't crazy over it but adapted well. I don't think she will see the good things it taught her until she is early 20's....the main thing being able to talk to anyone (from any background) with confidence.

michaels

I thought the whole point of paying so much money was to avoid your little darlings have to talk to people from 'any' background...

chucky

michaels wrote: »

I thought the whole point of paying so much money was to avoid your little darlings have to talk to people from 'any' background...

this has some truth - a freind who's family was in Nigeria (while he's working here) has brought them to the UK so that his children can be educated in a private school instead of attending a Nigerian school.

when i say it has 'some truth' in it i always think that people that say these things usually have massive chips on their shoulders

fc123

michaels wrote: »

I thought the whole point of paying so much money was to avoid your little darlings have to talk to people from 'any' background...

Absolute total rubbish...