Donald wrote:My son secured a Presentation at least years year 7 intake, but fell at the last hurdle to get a place (he went to pieces overnight and failed his English paper). I was contacted in Feb and duly completed the forms for a place in year 8 from the waiting list.... Only to receive a letter last week telling me that he would not be given the opportunity to compete for a place. He is a scholarship boys at another school (we have had to move away from friends and family, far from ideal), he secured top grades for all academic subjects this half term, and his circumstances were considered difficult enough to warrant a Presentation. I simply don't understand.
I don't know about anyone else but I am seriously bothered when I read stories like this. We all know that competitive entry into secondary schools is a pressured and unpleasant business, with the risk of failure and its attendant heartbreak part and parcel of the whole business, BUT CH goes out of its way to solicit applications from the most vulnerable and needy families and surely it can do better than this by such children?
The application process that families go through for the school is one of the most intrusive I can think of - all your family's finances and failings laid bare for strangers to weigh-up against the problems and miseries of others. Just the very process of saying why this school and no other will do for your child forces you to realise that what you have on offer locally, be it educationally, at home or socially, is just not good enough, which adds to your desperation if the child doesn't gain a place. Applying for a Presentation adds yet another list of strangers to expose your desperation to. Unsuccessful applications for a Presentation receive no response at all ..... it's a bit like sending off a message in a bottle begging for help, but not knowing if it will even reach shore.
The child itself is shown this amazing glimpse of paradise (and believe me, for a child from an inner city estate, CH is paradise) on Open Days and at the residential assessment and told that this is a possibility if only it is 'good enough', or 'needy enough', or a mysterious combination of the two. You have to encourage your child to believe that a) this is the right school for them and b) that they have a chance of gaining a place in order to give them the confidence which the school will be looking for at the residential tests, while all the time wondering if you are just setting them up for an enormous fall.
Personally, given all this, I don't think that, for children who fail at the residential stage, a simple 'sorry you have not been offered a place' is enough. The application process for this unique school has been made very personal and I think that a personal statement to rejected families is called for, even if it is only so that they feel their circumstances have been acknowledged ( "I'm so sorry that we weren't able to offer Joe a place this year. Although your husband's health problems mean that he would clearly benefit from the boarding aspect of a place at CH his test results indicated very clearly that he would not cope with the academic side." or ".... although his test results were very impressive we decided that this year other children with similar results had a more pressing need for a place at the school."). Quite apart from that though, I think that someone in Donald's position should voluntarily be offered a proper explanation of what has gone on and why they are not being put forward for a Year 8 place, after the school approached them with the idea it might be possible. It goes without saying I think that if the headmaster of a primary school is motivated enough to write in support of a pupil that letter should be at least acknowledged.
I know that not everyone who applies to CH can be offered a place, and that the people who fail have to learn to live with that and move on, but how can they if a year later they are enticed into thinking it might all be possible again? This really does seem unkind in the extreme.
As a side note I did wonder if Donald's original post, saying that his child is a now a scholarship student and doing well academically, gives the clue to what has gone on here? Perhaps the school just thinks that he has a good school place now and they are keen to offer their Year 8 opportunities to people who have not been so lucky? I really hope this is the case!
Antinous
was originally 6. And I know that at least two of these girls did get in, leaving a maximum of 4. I was wondering if anyone would know why it might be that as many as 21 children were written to? Have there been a large number of children who have left in Year 7 this year? Or have the school decided to create some more places for the year?
