Assessment time

A while ago, I posted about my dilemma over schools and whether to put Littleboy 1 down for any just in case our US plans fell through. Well so far, they haven't fallen through - unless anything untoward happens, we'll be moving in the summer - but I had after all filled in the form for a local private school, as well as applying for state ones via the council website. After all, nothing seems to be certain in these uncertain times....

So the day of Littleboy 1's 'assessment' at the private school arrived a few weeks ago, and off we went. The school that I had opted for is a very academic one, so they select children on 'academic potential'. How the hell they can do this with a bunch of three year olds beats me, but at any rate I didn't get to see how, because they take the children off for over an hour in order to achieve it.

Afer Littleboy 1 was led away by a kindly lady with a scary-looking clipboard, I was left to chat to the other parents, both prospective and those who currently had children at the school, over tea and biscuits.

And it was here that my half-arsed attempt to apply for schools let me down. "So what other schools are you applying to?" enquired one mother. "Oh, er, just this one actually. And the local state schools," I replied. She looked at me as if I were completely and utterly mad. "Well, haven't you thought about X Hall? Or Y prep? (she mentioned two other local prep schools). It's very academic here, you know, it doesn't suit everyone."

Not wanting to go into the details of my position as regards moving abroad, or the fact that I had only gone to one Open Day, I said, "Er, not really....I just liked the look of this one". I then (foolishly) added that I had failed to put his name down for any schools at year dot, and one good thing about this particular one was that you only had to apply a few months beforehand. (Which is true, because when Littleboy 1 was small, I assumed that we would have moved by now and would live near to a decent state school.) But she stared at me again as if I was the most irresponsible, clueless parent out, who had clearly not undertaken the required amounts of research, before swiftly moving on to talk to someone else.

I moved on to chat to another group of parents. They weren't talking about the school at all (thank God) but having a lovely natter about ski-ing, with everyone raving about how wonderful it is that you can fly from City Airport now to the Alps. (No signs of the economic crisis here, I noted.) I mentioned that we were thinking of driving down overnight with our two small children when we go ski-ing this spring. Oh dear- more incredulous looks...

Another Mummy got very over- excited when I mentioned that my son has a summer birthday. "Oh, but that's brilliant, because they get POINTS for being younger, he'll start off with TEN POINTS already in the assessment." (I had visions of Littleboy 1 donning the yellow jacket of the Tour de France or similar.)

Eventually we regrouped to collect our little treasures after their gruelling assessment. I have no idea how he fared, other than that he 'drew a beautiful picture and wrote his name' (Good boy - although with ten children competing for each place, my hopes are still not high...). We'll find out in a few weeks.

But I rather think that Mummy, on the other hand, scored nulle points....