Please advice me regarding appeal in Berks & Bucks

[hermanmunster]

It begs the obvious question: If your son has travel sickness on long journeys, what do you plan to do if your appeal succeeds and he is allocated a place at a school some distance away in Bucks?

OP has to be careful not to talk her way into a place at a very local school not requiring a long journey

[kenyancowgirl]

Agreed hermanmunster - Perhaps OP should rethink and actually apply to a local school where travel is not an issue at all, for the sake of her son's travel sickness...

[Amber]

If I were on an appeal panel and heard that a child was sick in the car I would recommend a local school close enough to walk or cycle to. I would hate to be responsible for making a child ill. And as a parent I am afraid I would feel the same. Vomiting every day on the way to or from school would be most unseemly.

[Tinkers]

I used to get very travel sick. When we were about to move house, I had to spend two weeks travelling about 20 mins to my new school on the bus until we moved. It would take about an hour after arriving at school before I felt remotely normal again. Same story going home, so it would be a while before I could eat or tackle homework. Taking travel sick tablets made me drowsy (though they seem to have improved these days, but I suspect daily usage is not recommended anyway).

I just about coped with it as I knew from the start it was two weeks, as the moving date had been set. There would have been no way I could have continued for much more than that though, so if he has this issue, please make sure he can avoid car/bus journeys to school. It really is awful. I’m just glad I grew out of it for the most part, I still suffer but not to the same extent.

[Etienne]

Do You think headteacher recommendation 2:2 that’s was the point of being unsuccessful?

There is the problem that one headteacher's 2:2 may not have the same value as another headteacher's, which raises concerns about the consistency of the review process.
A headteacher recommendation might be optimistic, realistic, or pessimistic.
However, within Bucks, a comparison between the school's total recommendations and its 11+ results could give some idea of how trustworthy the recommendations are.
Not that this would ever appear in the clerk's notes of a review. It's much too delicate a subject!

Outside of Bucks, especially if the school has only a few candidates, the problem is no one can be sure whether a 2:2 is optimistic, realistic, or pessimistic. No one knows if the non-Bucks primary school understands the standard required for entry to a Bucks grammar school.
Again, this is hardly likely to appear in the clerk's notes!

To answer your question, though, a 2:2 is meant to be a very positive recommendation for grammar school.
I think your review was unsuccessful for the reasons I've already suggested.