Does anyone have any experience - good or bad - with sacred heart high school in Hammersmith? I’m specifically curious about how your kids coped with the commute in Y7…thank you

Thanks! We have applied to Catholic schools so fingers crossed we get our choices!

Hello!

I may be a bit late to add my two cents to your process, but I would consider one more factor in ranking your schools.

Unless you know for certain that you are going private at the secondary level, then it is wise to bump the Catholic option up. If you do, your choices for secondary multiply, and some of the best secondary schools in the region are Catholic. It may seem like light years away, but trust me, you will be there soon!

The requirements for secondary Catholics are hurdles, and the best (London Oratory, Cardinal Vaughan, Sacred Heart, etc) are even tougher. They want to see evidence of a firm commitment to Catholic education.

My kids are at a local Catholic and I couldn't be happier...and even more so with the secondary options.

Best of luck!

As well as very good budgeting on the schools behalf, the Parents Association does a brilliant job at fund raising. Only a few months ago they funded 40 odd ipads for the kids and had a few K left over!
They also help to subsidise school trips to make it more affordable to all kids!

Grant expenditure report:
http://www.connectedup.com/stboniface/page100.html

Just wanted to round off on the tooting primary school uniform issue. It looks like this has been discussed on twitter by actual parents and all items can be bought in a supermarket apart from the pricey pinafore which needs to be bought from the shop linked to previously.

Papinian, I am not querying your point about TAs, I am sure you are right about the fact that they don't add much value (although it must, surely, help a little with discipline when you have so many small kids in one class). However I don't know whether it's the answer to LauraBrown's question about budget allocation since tomsmum2008 mentioned earlier in the thread that St Boniface do have TAs in the smaller classes.

Papinian: I almost hazarded a guess in the TA direction as obviously staff costs are such a big proportion of a primary budget, it's hard to see how they could save enough money elsewhere. However, parents these days are pretty accustomed to seeing that there is a teacher and TA in every class so I'd be interested in schools that were bold enough to say they did this and be clear about the reasons why... I also need to go away and understand more about the pros/cons/appropriate usage of TAs etc etc as it's not something I've looked into much apart from seeing your posts...

Erin: thanks for the link - I guess my friend must have misunderstood at the open day! I do like the dress but deffo a bit steep!

[quote="LauraBrown"]And a question on St B: anyone know how they manage to have smaller class sizes? I know they are 1.5 FE but how do they manage the budget for more staff when they still (I presume) get funded per pupil. I've always wondered...[/quote]

By spending money on proper teachers, not teaching assistants.

I apologise for repeating this on every thread where this comes up, but every study done shows that teaching assistants have no positive educational value and in fact can be more negative for children than having no teaching assistant at all.

Teaching assistants were a way for the Labour Party to create jobs for mothers that would fit with their children's school day. It was a massive job creation exercise at the taxpayer's expense. The Labour Party is now complaining about free schools being able to hire teachers who don't have teaching qualifications, while for a decade they were quite happy to have teaching outsourced to those who didn't even have A-levels, never mind a degree.

Laura, here's the uniform link:

http://www.unismart.co.uk/acatalog/Tooting_Primary_School.html

There is no blazer (rumour) but the jumper and dresses and skirts are rather bespoke and it all adds up to somewhere between £150-200...

Cool, thanks Cloud. I guess it had to be that - I wonder what they choose to have less of. Interesting.

LauraBrown: regarding class sizes, I haven't asked the question of St B, but I recently looked around Trinity St Mary's who also have smaller class sizes and was told by the headteacher that they have the same budget as other schools, it is just the way she manages her budget and prioritises teaching costs. I assume the same goes for St B.

And a question on St B: anyone know how they manage to have smaller class sizes? I know they are 1.5 FE but how do they manage the budget for more staff when they still (I presume) get funded per pupil. I've always wondered...

Erin: has the TPS uniform changed? My friend went to the open day in the last few weeks and thought that the head made a point about it being affordable and found in all major supermarkets which seems inconsistent with the tootingonline chat about how bespoke and expensive it is - compulsory tartan pinafore costing more than 30 quid! So difficult to verify the facts on schools round here sometimes...

Good point Papinian! It seems that the beat advice is always to put down at least one school you know you will get into, relatively near to home (even if you don't like it that much) or you end up at risk of being shipped to the other side of the Borough.

Thank you to everyone for your responses.

tomsmum2008: it is great to hear from a parent of a child currently at the school. It sounds like the small class sizes allow the teachers to focus on the kids' strengths and weaknesses. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.

I am aware we have only a small chance of getting in, however our child is a baptised Catholic and we hopefully will have the reference from our local priest. In the past few years, children from other parishes have been admitted to St Boniface so it is not completely unrealistic.

And yes, LauraBrown: the schools don't find out about the order of application, so it should reflect true preference.

erinisle22: interesting what you say about TPS too, now you have confused matters for us - not sure whether to put it down as a choice! I guess with the free schools you just have to accept an element of risk.

And papinian, thank you also - I guess there is no science to the catchment area. Perhaps because St Anselms is smaller, it never seems to admit children from other parishes, whereas St Boniface does (although the catchment for baptised Catholics in other parishes is shrinking). Apologies, my initial comment about this was misleading.

[quote="erinisle22"]I also noticed that the catchment area for this school shrunk dramatically last year, whereas the St Anselms one grew. Is that because St Boniface is performing better than St Anselms at KS2? Or is this just a coincidence?[/quote]

I think catchment areas vary quite a bit for both schools from year-to-year. The is because:
- they both have relatively small intakes (30 in St Anselm's and 45 in St. Boniface's)
- often over half the intake is siblings (those Catholics and their big families)
- after siblings, priority is based on Mass attendance on Sundays and holy days of obligation before distance gets factored in

I know people involved with both schools and I think St Boniface's has caught up with St Anselm's and maybe even gone slightly ahead of it. However, I don't think that one school is significantly better than the other. I would be happy for my children to get admitted to either.

It will be interesting to see the number of siblings and distances this year when they are published.

Laura Brown: Re your comment about there being no downside to putting St Boniface's down as number one even if you don't think you have much chance of getting in as it has no affect on the likelihood of getting into your second choice. You are correct re likelihood of getting second choice, but I would caution that it does mean that one of the six (?) choices is then used up. I have heard of cases of people being very unrealistic in the six schools and ending up with none of them - and then having to go to the nearest school with free places. Based on many many years of data it is a waste of time for someone who is not at least a baptised Catholic (ignoring when baptised and Mass attendance) to put down St. Boniface's as a choice.