As regular readers of this blog may already know, Mrs Fahrenheit and I are searching for a Primary School for our child. What we are finding as we tour the three schools that we are allowed to put our son’s name down for is that some are excellent and are headed by leaders who exude common sense and are willing to see parents as partners in a child’s education and not a potential problem. Others are  appallingly chaotic with a palpable culture of political correctness and would be the sort of school which we would be arguing with over something week in or week out. The third school we’ve looked at I would say fell somewhere between the two points of excellent and bloody awful.

This school, which I mistakenly believed at first was a Church of England school, turned out instead to be a community school but one with I believe a historical prior connection to the Church. There were aspects of this school that really really impressed us. There was a great emphasis on the learning of grammar and the school was prepared to disregard some minor Education Department edicts about not teaching historical timelines in favour of ‘what works’. This second bit of information impressed me as it seemed a common sense approach to the often dire advice of academic educational ‘experts’.

We took Laughing Boy on the school visit with us and he really seemed to enjoy being there. What impressed me was the behaviour of the other children in the classes we dropped in on. They were polite and seemed engaged with what they were learning. They treated Laughing Boy very well and one little girl, in a Year 4 class, remarked how cute LB looked (he was dressed, as he often is when formally on display, like a mini Jacob Rees-Mogg). Nobody, whether staff or pupil, batted an eyelid when Laughing Boy slipped my hand and sat down on the mat with some Reception class children. I think that LB could be happy at this school

The atmosphere and education at this school seemed quite acceptable, although not from what I could see, as good as the Academy that we had visited previously. Also as regards willingness to excuse LB from RE and the more controversial aspects of Sex and Relationships education, this school was similar in its policy to the Academy. The teacher showing us around readily accepted us exercising our legal rights but informed us that we would have to do this in writing, which is a fair comment.

I am a little concerned about a couple of aspects of the school. It is labyrinthine in layout and I’m worried about how long it will take LB to find his way around? There does seem an awful lot of naivety in the RE curriculum about Islam (how many times do people need to be told, it’s not a bloody ‘religion of peace’), so we are quite pleased that there is no resistance from the school to withdrawing LB from RE. This school also has a lot of entrances and exits and extensive grounds, which look to me like, as well as security risks, could be possible escape routes for a determined child. Although the teacher we spoke to assured us that the school was secure and they take special precautions with those children who are known to be liable to bolt and explore, we may ask the school further questions about this. It would be good to know both how they deal with potential security risks from intruders and their prevention of escape policy.

All in all this was an acceptable school, there was some politically correct guff around but not so much that it could not be counter-educated against. The standard of work on display and what I saw in the workbooks looked reasonable for the age group, and the standards of discipline also seemed high. We left there neither rampantly enthusiastic, as we were about the Academy, nor steaming with anger as we were when we visited the first school a politically correct nightmare, it was the least worst we have seen. Because of that we are putting the Academy first in our list of preference, this latest school in second place and we’ve told the council admissions authority that the politically correct hell hole is our least favoured school. We have informed the local authority that we did not feel that either the educational standards or the ethos of the school met our requirements and that we did not want to send our child to a school where we would be having weekly arguments over LB’s education with the headteacher.

We now have to wait until April next year to find out which school the local authority will decide LB will be attending next September. A lot will depend on which schools are oversubscribed and which are not. The Academy is really popular and just outside our catchment area so I suspect we may be bounced from that one, the third school we visited is less popular with parents due to a run of less than perfect Ofsted inspection results a few years ago, so it’s likely that LB may end up here. What particularly worries us is that the politically correct nightmare school is the closest one to us and we are worried that the council will dump LB there. This is why we are getting our written objections into any potential placement in this school in as early as possible. We don’t want to send our child to a school where kids are being ‘educated’ in a chaotic manner in corridors or one where the headteacher witters on about the wonders of ‘diversity’. We certainly don’t want LB at a school led by one who appears to have a vehement objection to us exercising our legal rights and who vacillates and avoids answering when asked about whether lunatic trans groups like Mermaids are allowed in the school.

LB is now in the bureaucracy known as the School Admissions System. We’ve exercised our, very limited, rights to a preference for a school for Laughing Boy and we shall wait and see what this process brings. If we find that the process for allotting places goes against us and we get the worst school of the bunch, then it is tempting to keep LB out of it and either appeal the decision or homeschool him whilst he is on the waiting list for a better school. If we cannot keep LB out of the worst school then this particular headteacher is going find that in order to secure my child a good education without political indoctrination, that I have the capacity to be the biggest pain in the arse parent she’s ever come across.