Would like to put a few people straight here as getting a bit fed up with the endless "indie knocking" going on here by some posters!
We are not from another planet, do not have have horrible, rude children and are not rolling in funds.
Many of us have given up many other things, as we did not have good local primary schools near us, to fund our children through school as we felt providing a good education was more important. Yes we are lucky that we could manage it, but it is not without sacrifices in other quarters of our lives that some others may not have chosen to make!!!!!
But more especially for the record, not many independents that I have heard of and certainly not the one my DC went to, have taught VR from infants !?!
and indeed have only given token lessons through the end of year 5 and beginning of year 6 that in fact were not worth the time spent, as they did not focus on what really needed to be taught.
Yes, we enlisted the help of a tutor as well as a bit of DIYing, but we felt what we were able to manage to pay her would be an investment as we could not see we could pay for Senior School education. But we have not been tutoring since age 4 or 5 like some people suggest we may have been. We just put in plenty of time over the last couple of years researching this forum and other related sites for information, so that we were as prepared as we could be, well in advance and not leaving it to the last minute like some others, to give our DC as good a shot at the test as possible, since we consider that her education is very important and not something to be left to be looked into at the last minute and then rushed through in the last month or so.
Everyone knows their children will be changing from primary to secondary school and the information is out there readily available to everyone in this day and age, from many sources, so how people can say they didn't know about x,y or z in time to make decisions is beyond me!
Many people seem to spend more time and effort sorting out their holidays than some have bothered to do in looking into what is going to happen with changing from primary to secondary education, so it is no good whinging after the event that "we had no idea what was going to happen" or "only found out last week so couldn't prepare properly". I don't think that will wash with appeal boards when there are far more genuine cases requiring their assistance!
No gripe with genuine people who have tried hard to find out info well in time and tried hard to do their best for their children in preparing them. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope things go well for you.
But please can some of the posters on here stop taking a cheap swipe at "indie" people all the time. Our children do not deserve this tainting and it will not help all the children to gell together well when they start. I hope that it will be, as someone else put on here, that the children unlike some parents, take no notice of where they have all come from before and just want to get on and make friends!
End of rant!