Nice people thread part 5 - nicely does it

silvercar

When DS2 was that age his first choice school operated "fair banding". So the number of places available to non-siblings depended on how many siblings within each band, something that is impossible to predict. So we looked at alternatives for safety and fell in love with a private school. He was then disappointed when he got a place and we had decided that he wasn't going there. (he was a non-sibling as his brother had got a place at a grammar school in the next borough.)

sss555s

You can pretty much get into any school around here but you do have to apply. There are 9 or more secondary schools between here and DD's school which is around 16 miles away. Travelling consists of a 4 mile car journey to the bus stop and a 12 mile bus ride. The school is always in the top 2 in my region and is brand new. Course being new may affect performance but I'm pretty pleased so far.

David Starkey, was he not in Starsky and Hutch then?

vivatifosi

sss555s wrote: »

David Starkey, was he not in Starsky and Hutch then?

:rotfl:in my mind he will now forever be the one in the wrapover cardigan. Something, I imagine, he'd absolutely hate.

sss555s

Contact lenses Went yesterday and got my eyes tested for the first time in around 18 years at D&A as I liked the sound of silvercar's deal. All went well and I left with lenses in.

These are monthly ones which they want me to use for a couple of weeks to get used to removing and inserting daily and then I can look at getting daily ones if all is ok. He says I'm long sighted which i knew and my prescription is R 1.25, L 1.0.
I had been using cheap glasses for reading and close work but they were starting to hurt a bit, they are 2 strength which would be too much I guess.

Are the daily's the ones to go for silvercar?

Also I'm not 100% sure I've got the right ones as when he was testing I could see slightly better than I can with these although they are pretty good. I will see how it goes for a couple of weeks.


Now I can read all those PM's I haven't got :eek:

sss555s

vivatifosi wrote: »

:rotfl:in my mind he will now forever be the one in the wrapover cardigan. Something, I imagine, he'd absolutely hate.

I'd forgotten about the cardigan LOL

It was the car that sprung to mind when I seen the name

vivatifosi

sss555s wrote: »

He says I'm long sighted which i knew and my prescription is R 1.25, L 1.0.

That's the same prescription as I have, in terms of the focal length anyway. I can't use the off the shelf glasses because they are all too strong and make the writing fuzzy. So hopefully you'll now be able to see really well.

The prescription you have is - I find - a frustrating one. It's not enough to make the need to produce cheap glasses high enough as a lot of people with that prescription wouldn't bother, but you do notice that you need them, especially when reading small print or when your eyes are tired and you are trying to read. Hopefully you'll be amazed at how well you see now.

LydiaJ

sss555s wrote: »

You can pretty much get into any school around here but you do have to apply. There are 9 or more secondary schools between here and DD's school which is around 16 miles away. Travelling consists of a 4 mile car journey to the bus stop and a 12 mile bus ride. The school is always in the top 2 in my region and is brand new. Course being new may affect performance but I'm pretty pleased so far.

Being brand new shouldn't, of itself, make performance go down (or up). It does bring application numbers down, though, as many families prefer to apply to somewhere with a known track record rather than take a gamble on somewhere untried, which may be how you were able to get your DD a place despite living so far away. It sounds as though the gamble has paid off for you, though, so well done on a wise choice. DS's school is not like that - if you don't live within a mile or so of the school and you haven't got a sibling there, you haven't a hope of getting a place.

When we applied for DS's primary place, we chose our closest school - it had a good reputation and seemed nice, and my friend was choosing it for her son too, so the two boys could have gone together and already had a friend.

It didn't work out that way. We both got places for our sons, but then my friend's husband got a job in another part of the country and they moved away, and our LLs gave us notice so we had to move to the other side of town. Fortunately that didn't bring DS's place into question because it's a C of E school so we got in on a faith category and our address didn't matter. I decided to stick with the place we'd got rather than try to get a place in a different school on the basis of a mere 6 month tenancy. Then LNE left, so I had enough on my plate, and didn't have enough space in my brain to consider moving either schools or houses for a while, by which time we were settled in the house and he was settled in the school.

So we spent five and a half years driving 2.5miles across town to get him (and then DD as well) to school every morning. When we bought our house last year, we chose on the basis of the secondary school we liked, so although we're closer we still drive (1.9 miles but much less traffic so about only about half the time it was before). DS is fed up with it, and one of his top criteria for a secondary school was being able to get there on foot or by bike, which he'll be able to do.

chewmylegoff

LydiaJ wrote: »

Yes, they got scrapped. There's no longer a national network of defined catchment areas, and living in a particular place doesn't give you an automatic right to go to a particular school. Every school can create its own admissions criteria, within certain rules.

For anyone who's interested and doesn't already know, here's how it works:

They're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of where you put them in your list of preferences, and the criteria have to be simple enough for everyone to understand. They can't select for ability (unless they're grammar schools in a county that still has them), although specialist academies can give 10% of places on the basis of aptitude for their specialism (and then argue till the cows come home about whether their testing arrangements are properly designed to identify intrinsic aptitude rather than current achievement). Schools can also have "fair banding" arrangements so they test all the children on some measure of ability or intelligence and then admit the same number of kids from each band of, for example, 20% of the kids. Faith schools can have faith criteria, and most schools give priority to siblings. There are also special cases that get priority: always children in care, but often children of armed forces personel returning to the UK from abroad, or something like that. But there aren't very many of them, so I'll ignore them from here on.

In practice, this means that the applicants for each school are put into categories. They could be really simple:
1) Siblings
2) Everyone else
or very complicated:
1) Catholics with siblings at the school
2) Catholics without siblings but who belong to St X's church
3) Other Catholics in the diocese of Y
4) Catholics from further afield
5) Anyone else with siblings at the school
6) Members of other churches
7) Everyone else
(I made that one up, but I've seen similar things.)

The school then has a fixed number of places. They give places to everyone in the first few categories until they get to a category where they haven't got enough places for everyone. Usually, those children are put in order of distance from the school, and the nearest ones get places until all the places have been used up. For a school with simple "siblings, then everyone else" criteria, this creates a de facto catchment area that is circular, centred on the school, and varies in size each year depending on how many children apply and how many have siblings.

So when I said we were "a long way inside the catchment area", that was a simplification of "a lot closer to the school than that circle has ever been in the history of the current admissions criteria". So we're not surprised that he got in.

thanks for explaining that - it makes sense to me. what went before it - just strict boundaries drawn on a map, and if you lived in that area they had to take you even if there were more pupils than places? and what happened to siblings if you moved out of the catchment area?

the school i went to had a stipulation left in the founder's will that it had to take at least 25 local boys. i'm not sure exactly how this worked legally, but in practice it was not as the crow flies - some doddery old bloke came out with one of those a measuring wheels on a stick that you push along, and the closest 25 on a door-to-door basis got in as day-pupils (and the rest of the places were boarding). i'm pretty sure that's what happened anyway!

LydiaJ

chewmylegoff wrote: »

thanks for explaining that - it makes sense to me. what went before it - just strict boundaries drawn on a map, and if you lived in that area they had to take you even if there were more pupils than places? and what happened to siblings if you moved out of the catchment area?

I'm afraid I don't know. I wasn't a parent back then, and I didn't go to a state school when I was a kid myself. Perhaps other NP may know.

chewmylegoff wrote: »

the school i went to had a stipulation left in the founder's will that it had to take at least 25 local boys. i'm not sure exactly how this worked legally, but in practice it was not as the crow flies - some doddery old bloke came out with one of those a measuring wheels on a stick that you push along, and the closest 25 on a door-to-door basis got in as day-pupils (and the rest of the places were boarding). i'm pretty sure that's what happened anyway!

I think there are some schools that measure walking distance. The schools round where I live all seem to do it as the crow flies, though. I expect it's easier for the LEA's computer to do it that way, and it eliminates arguments on the grounds that the computer hasn't chosen the shortest walking route. I love the idea of a doddery old bloke with a wheel, though.

sss555s

LydiaJ wrote: »

Being brand new shouldn't, of itself, make performance go down (or up). It does bring application numbers down, though, as many families prefer to apply to somewhere with a known track record rather than take a gamble on somewhere untried, which may be how you were able to get your DD a place despite living so far away. It sounds as though the gamble has paid off for you, though, so well done on a wise choice.

Sorry, I didn't explain that very well...

The school is very well established and they built the new one next to the old one and just moved next door IYSWIM.

The new school is bigger so takes more pupils though class sizes are between 16-19.

The primary school she previously attended was living on a old "good reputation".
Course a lot wanted to go there so the class sizes raise (30-32) and it becomes not so good.