Cheating the System

We come back to the crux of the problem - there are some bad schools; and who would want their child to go there just because it was their catchment school?

Raising the standards of all schools is the way to go. There would then be no need to "cheat." How to achieve this? - I have no idea; except more money might help for better facilities, better support of new teachers, smaller classes etc.

It is a shame that parents judge schools by their OfSted rating. This was a little political game that was introduced so that parents could judge the "market" (groan) when what is really needed is the sort of school inspectors that also had a role as school support. If they found a weakness it was also their job to find a way of helping the school to eliminate it. Not as now where a weakness is just a downgrade that reduces the number of pupils wishing to go to that school and sets up a negative spiral.

Bollocks to the market principle being applied inappropriately!

If the system wasn't discriminatory against British families who live within the catchment area by not placing that criteria at the top of the list for acceptance for a school place then I suspect many would not feel the need to 'cheat' The fact that travellers' children and 'looked after' children are set in the top two places is ridiculous. Travellers should travel and looked after children often just reside temporarily so locals should have priority, in my opinion,

I don’t think there are ‘bad’ schools; there are schools that struggle through weak leadership, high turnover of disillusioned teachers, intakes of children with poor English language skills who are in many cases not properly socialised (some who have never been in any formal school system!) so do not know how to behave, and very little support from parents who themselves may be poorly educated and who don’t think they have a role to play in their child’s education.

Unfortunately that list of ingredients does lead to a "bad" school that I would not wish my GC to be at.

Any school in that boat needs more resources to deal with its challenges, rather than just being downgraded so that parents avoid it like the plague if they can.

It's a reflection of the selfish society we live in. We all want to do the best for our children but to do it by lying and cheating totally wrong.

Exactly Luckygirl. we need solutions rather than problems! But what really makes a good school? My DS was very unhappy and bullied at his highly rated secondary school and eventually we got him moved to another LEA school further away. This was the saving of him.

His own children go to private schools because he cannot bear the thought of the same thing happening to them.

how do you know about this, icanhandthemback? I thought the system was confidential.

A Scottish Council recently reported the parents of a pupil to the Crown Office for possible criminal proceedings, after concerns that documents used by the family to prove where they lived were fraudulent.
I also knew of a case where parents desperate to gain admission to a high achieving secondary school for their child in a different local authority in Scotland from where they lived , rented a house in that area for a short period of time and furnished it to look as if they were living there. They were caught out, when the education department made a home visit after being tipped off.

During the reign of Mrs. T., I was a school governor. One of the things we had to do was to come up with an admissions policy as catchment areas were supposed to be a thing of the past! Seem they're back with a vengeance!

netflixfan, it was on another forum. The poster had been confided to by somebody who had cheated the system and didn't know what to do about it.

Don't assume that a school is good because they have a good OFSTED report or good exam results. Many schools are also good at 'cheating' the system and manipulating the data. How sad that I've had to write that but it's true.