Postby SWtastic » Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:43 pm
Good idea to visit during year 5 as it's not always easy to manage to get around them all in year 6.
I actually found the whole open morning/evening thing a bit staged and didn't give me a realistic feel for the schools I visited. I thought it was very telling that Southfields Academy, the one school which was happy for me to visit at any time, was the one that I felt really wanted to involve parents in the child's education. I was able to have a personal tour, time with the Head to ask some questions and was able to see whichever parts of the school I wanted to visit. I was very pleasantly surprised by the facilities there and also impressed with the enthusiasm of the Head and how well the students do. I did ask but other schools wouldn't allow an individual visit outside of the open events and, actually, some were downright unfriendly to deal with as a parent, which I think can be quite telling!
Someone pointed me to the Department for Education school comparison web page and that was very helpful and quite surprising. Schools where you'd expect children to do very well were making little additional progress with them (I think the new term is called progress 8), and others, like Southfields, were in the top 3. Harris was always going to be a lower preference for us because of distance, but when I read somewhere that they'd moved a number of the children who weren't going to get good GCSE results to another of their schools so that the results would look better, I didn't bother putting them on the list at all.
It's a very personal decision and you need to be sure the school has to be right for your child so ask to go and have a look round, perhaps now before open event season starts.