Camp Hill Boys or Five Ways

[Sahara1]

why would you choose QM over CHB...?

[PamB]

why would you choose QM over CHB...?

Choice purely based on feeling and intuition of what would suit my DS. QM felt more comfortable - music, language choices and sport opportunities seemed more balanced. Head speech was inspiring, and felt that the value added was better than at CHB.

Having said that - I still think it's a fine line between them, and given distance, I did put QM lower than CHB. Were they equidistant, would have been the other way.

[Baker04]

he liked both of them and I have submitted the form now but I was not sure if he would get CHB as he scored the qualify mark...I was also wanted to know if QM was a good boys and how it compares to FW or CHB???

it has been a journey.

Hi, Just reading this thread with interest, but can't help noticing you say above that you have submitted the form "now", what date did you submit it? If it was late then that will impact greater on what school your dc goes to over any score they got!

B

[Sahara1]

I sent it on time before the dead line .

[Sahara1]

When I first posted on this forum, I banged on about how atrocious things were in state schools,largely because I felt I had an almost impossible task, in trying to overcome the odds, against the preps.

Yes, it is doable for a child to succeed at 11+ withouht going to a prep school.
However, knowing how the primary state schools are, I know that I will advise my children to place their DC in excellent private primary schools if they have the money for it. Why?
- to get the habit of regular daily HW
- to have high expectations and an emphasis on SPAG and grammar

I have never been to an open day to the great prep school in Birmingham ; they are horribly expensive but if they give a child the right habits and the desire to aim high, it is just great.

Years ago, I was often frustrated to feel that I have to 'row against the current'!! Thanks God, now, I am no more rowing against the current as expectations at CHB are really high, which is just great!!! What a relief! Up to DS to work hard and organise himself properly...

Well majority of the children who do go to pre schools also have tutors ..sometimes even 2...so it is not all done to the schools...the parents also work hard with them too.

[JaneEyre]

Well majority of the children who do go to pre schools also have tutors ..sometimes even 2...so it is not all done to the schools...the parents also work hard with them too.

Hi Aquacarey

I totally agree with you that the success of many children is not entirely down to the school, and I have also heard about private tuition even for the childfen who are already in prep schools! But I guess that having the right environment does help: motivated teachers teaching smaller groups and most importantly covering 11+ material (which is not covered in State schools) . But that does not mean that everything is perfect in a prep school nor that all teachers are great and that parents should not keep an eye and offer the support needed to their children.

Maybe Quasimodo could share with us his experience?

As I said, I have no experience of the good prep schools in Birmingham as my DS went to a very good primary in a leafy suburb of Birmingham. We didn't have the money to send him to a private school. However, I have focused most of my time on him while he was at primary school. I certainly enjoyed all the things we did together, but I often felt frustrated with the lack of HW from school (besides the reading, just one sheet of maths and one sheet of English per week and except when there is a project for 4 or 5 weeks).

The following view is not held by many of this forum, but personally I strongly believe that regular HW is important to reinforce what has been learnt during the day. This is what I have known in my childhood during which I still had the time to have many extra curricular activities (swimming twice a week, scouting, piano lessons with my daily 30 mn practise during all my primary years… and at secondary school I switched swimming to other sports , namely classical dance, horse riding and tennis, I added music theory to my piano lessons and kept scouting as it was marvellous and very formative). It is obvious that though I had plenty of school lessons to work on, I had also plenty of time to become an all-rounder. Having HW does not equate with spending all end of afternoons and evenings at a desk!!!
A child/ teenager can fit a lot in a day … though all children are different.

Furthermore, imho, a bit of memorisation is not a killer! In France, we are used to learn by heart poems in primary schools… Once my DS left his primary school well ranked by OFSTED, I have felt it to be so hard to teach him to sit down and learn something by heart. Now, DS is flying on his own but my DD, who has been in a different system during her primary school years, arrived in GB in year 7 knowing how to learn her lessons. Therefore, I just needed to send her learn her stuff and she would come back to me and recite it to me. It has been so much easier!

Recently, I have heard an examiner and joint author of maths books mentioning that unfortunately, at an international level, English children do badly at memorising the quadratic formula (one of the formulae which will be no longer given on the front page of a GCSE paper). Unfortunately, I do not have access to the articles he has access to so I cannot put the proof of what he said on here. For me, this fact is linked to the lack of habit of rote learning that should be taken during the primary years: not too much, but just a bit more than what is currently done.

What happens nowadays in state schools is this: parents who wishes their children to go into GS teaches their children at home by buying books to complete the work done at school. Moreover, they have to teach them (or hire a tutor) to cover the 11+ syllabus. All this is sad as it creates in the same classroom a system with children at different learning speed. I am convinced that many children whose parents do not help and teach them at home could achieve far more in their lives if they had to do a bit of consolidation of the new lessons each day. Homework at primary school is a cultural habit. Ask Italian primary school children about their HW. They have plenty as in many other countries.

In France, in the recent past, a certain president has banned homework ; the New-Yorker reported this fact in 2012 in those terms:
Here is something you probably didn’t know about France: its President has the power to abolish homework. In a recent speech at the Sorbonne, François Hollande announced his intention to do this for all primary- and middle-school students. He wants to reform French education in other ways, too: by shortening the school day and diverting more resources to schools in disadvantaged areas. France ranked twenty-fifth in a new evaluation of educational systems by the Economist Intelligence Unit (part of the company that publishes The Economist). To give you an idea how bad that is, the United States, whose citizens are accustomed to being told how poorly educated they are, ranked seventeenth.

The French President’s emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well—the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it—more educated and affluent parents, presumably—an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.

The last part of the text is essential to understand the reasons of the reforms in France. Of course, many parents oppose the numerous new reforms that the ministry of Education imposes as it pulls the level down. By contrast, I have to say that the merits of Mr Gove is to pull the level up!!!! I might not agree with some decisions he has made and with the high speed with which he (and his successor Ms Morgan) wants to impose his reforms, but at least, imho, the future of British pupils is brighter than for the French ones!!!

As a French philosopher (Alain FINKIELKRAUT) wrote this summer : in France, «L'école des savoirs cède sa place à l'école de la thérapie par le mensonge»





PS2: By the way, I translated word by word the French phrase (‘ramer contre le courant’ = 'rowing against the current') but the right English idioms is 'to swim against the tide'! Sometimes, I write my posts in a hurry with no time to verify… and in fact, often, afterwards, I am really shocked when spotting some of my grammatical mistakes or misplacement of adverbs ( I am a specialist at misplacing adverbs in English )… but I hope the persons who read my posts understand that I am just trying to put some ideas through!

[Petitpois]

If you gave me a chance of growing up in rural France I would mostly take it (only reservation, would be the narrow village mindsets that often exist).

To business though, the homework issue is easy to resolve yourself. My year four DD did two work sheets yesterday, under timed test conditions. Each paper contained 100 questions and I was really pleased that without any guidance she advised me, that she had come up a tactic to increase her speed. Once she had calculated the answer to a question, she would look at the next question, whilst writing the answer to current question, down.

Total time for 200 questions was around 6 minutes in total. What were we doing, speed multiplier worksheets of 100 timetables question. Nothing hard. Just raw brain training

It is great, why

1) additional homework on top of what school issues
2) Can be done in about 10-15 minutes (less if you only do one time sheet)
3) Massively improved mental processing speed
4) Supports mastery of KS2 skills
5) Why pay a tutor £20-30 an hour for much the same thing at this stage.
6) Starts the training process of being able to deal with exam pressure and not get sidelined by siblings, the cat, day dreaming etc.

Only caveat is that our big lesson learned from this year is that you must must get them reading and embedding vocabulary. This is far more important. School will do a lot as long as your 100% on top of homework.

NVR is on my list but not till Yr 5 at least.

Don't get too worried, people will tell you all about kids being tutored to death. Virtually no one talks about the parents that won't read or do homework with their kids. Probably a majority, based on the data I have seen.

This is a simple race and your job is to get over the line, before about 85% of the others do. That is how I see it

[JaneEyre]

the homework issue is easy to resolve yourself.

I agree but it would be so much better if ALL the pupils of a prminary class had daily HW to reinforce what they have done during the day. In France, there is a study time after school everyday of the week for the parents who wish so , not just a HW 'club' once a week only in year 6!
In England, parents have to teach their children themselves or make them do HW or Bond books (etc.) for them to succeed. It is not the case in France.

[JaneEyre]

quote PamB: Even if boys who are not doing well are not told to leave at CHB, it's possible to persuade them to leave (I certainly thought that was exactly what the headmaster implied in his speech when we were there - though his comment was in relation to over tutoring - that those boys would be managed out of the school).

I am extremely surprised by such an assertion! As KenR confirmed, no state school can persuade a child to leave. I have heard that prep school can do this but this is not the case in the state sector.

I will relate two cases I have seen at two different GS in Birmingham:
- At SCGSG where my DD has spent seven happy years due to the wonderful staff and great guidance given by the school, there was a girl in her class whose stepfather passed away one night (end of year 7 if I remember well, or year 8 ). The death had been sudden and as this pupil ( who I will call Cathy) had already lost her father, it has been another extremely harsh and unexpected second blow and the school has been extremely supportive for her and organised several meetings with a ‘circle of friends’. A member of staff even phoned me to ask if I could get in touch with the family and for our DDs to do things together.
It happened that my DD became a close friend of Cathy, not really because of their similar characters or outlook on life but rather because they were like chalk and cheese! Cathy was a very outspoken girl, a bit on the rough side and she had taken under her ‘wing’ my DD who had until then just learnt to be nice and helpful but who did not know how to defend herself. Cathy was standing up for her and actually taught her how to stand up for herself through year 7 and 8. The death of the step-father made the mum turn to alcohol to forget her sorrow so Cathy was not receiving from home the proper support she needed at her age (and she had younger siblings for whom she cared for while the mum was at work).
As a consequence, Cathy was not regularly doing her HW and in her GCSE years, a Spanish teacher discovered the special relation between Cathy and my DD and came into the dining room one day to talk to my DD to ask her to exhort Cathy to learn her Spanish vocabulary!
Never did SCGSG get rid of Cathy; on the contrary, the members of staff have done their best to give the support they could.

- At CHB, I have mentioned this little boy in my DS' class who has had difficulties for several years to do his HW though he has lived 5 or 10 mn walk from the school from day 1 in year 7. I know that the staff have done their best to support him. My DS tells me that now, he does do his HW. So hats off to CHB staff and the pastoral care provided there.

Imho, the belief that GS can show some pupils the door is a fallacy (unless – as mentioned previously- a grave offence have been committed like drug dealing).
Though I have not heard Mr G’s speech on the last open day, I am sure that he meant something else!

[Petitpois]

Nice warm stories to end the day on.

Schools can and do sometimes exaggerate issues. It happens.

It is nice when they support well and properly.

My DD1 is rules driven and conformist. Easy time from teachers. DD2 is less emotionally self regulated and more insecure. Much more energetic, harder to control. More likely to rebel.

Dd2 is the opposite.

Hope secondary school can accommodate both