Considering an appeal from overseas - please help.
Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 12:36 am
Can anyone offer any advice on our situation please. Our son passed the 11+ but with a score too low to been given an automatic place in Berkshire. He is 12th on the waiting list and very unlikely to make it in without an appeal.
We are confident that we can provide evidence of his academic ability because he took his key stage 2 SATS one year early and passed with level 6 maths (top result in the school with 100% in one paper and 96% in the other) and a solid 5a for English, despite being one year younger than his contemporaries. The school that he attended moved him up a year for maths of their own accord when he was in year 4 because they could not cater to his needs in his year group. We did not ask them to. By the time his maths set were preparing for SATS it became clear that if he was to be entered for SATS he would have to sit both maths and english. No one expected him to do so well in English but he also got one of the top results for the school. We decided to remove him from the school for this academic year (since he has already completed it) and have been travelling with him to try to broaden his education that way. We are currently in Asia. Any appeal against the decision not to offer him a place at the grammar school must be lodged within the next two weeks and I just don't know what to do. He has been offered a place at the local school and more than anything we are worried that he will be bullied and attacked for his naturally academic ways. He does struggle with some social situations and that is another reason that we have tried to travel this year - to help his confidence that way.
For the last two years the school have not had a consistent head teacher - just a stream of temporary and supply teachers and the current temporary head has never met our son. I will therefore not be able to provide a letter from the school head to support any appeal we might make although I could contact his last maths teacher and ask her for a letter. I can also supply all his school reports and official SATS results documents but I don't know if this will be enough. We don't seem to have any extenuating circumstances so I worry that our appeal will fail in that he simply should have performed better in the test.
Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? Thank you in advance.
We are confident that we can provide evidence of his academic ability because he took his key stage 2 SATS one year early and passed with level 6 maths (top result in the school with 100% in one paper and 96% in the other) and a solid 5a for English, despite being one year younger than his contemporaries. The school that he attended moved him up a year for maths of their own accord when he was in year 4 because they could not cater to his needs in his year group. We did not ask them to. By the time his maths set were preparing for SATS it became clear that if he was to be entered for SATS he would have to sit both maths and english. No one expected him to do so well in English but he also got one of the top results for the school. We decided to remove him from the school for this academic year (since he has already completed it) and have been travelling with him to try to broaden his education that way. We are currently in Asia. Any appeal against the decision not to offer him a place at the grammar school must be lodged within the next two weeks and I just don't know what to do. He has been offered a place at the local school and more than anything we are worried that he will be bullied and attacked for his naturally academic ways. He does struggle with some social situations and that is another reason that we have tried to travel this year - to help his confidence that way.
For the last two years the school have not had a consistent head teacher - just a stream of temporary and supply teachers and the current temporary head has never met our son. I will therefore not be able to provide a letter from the school head to support any appeal we might make although I could contact his last maths teacher and ask her for a letter. I can also supply all his school reports and official SATS results documents but I don't know if this will be enough. We don't seem to have any extenuating circumstances so I worry that our appeal will fail in that he simply should have performed better in the test.
Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? Thank you in advance.