It’s that time of year when my thoughts unfortunately have to turn to school applications. I have three children with only 4 school years between them so I’ve had at least one school to apply for almost every year recently. We live in an area where the schools are almost all oversubscribed, so there isn’t much parental choice involved in Infant and Junior school selection. However, my eldest is currenltly in Y5, so this time next year I will be doing his Secondary school application which is a pretty terrifying prospect if I’m honest. We don’t have a huge amount of choice at the stage either, as we are in catchment for one very large Secondary school, but I am sort of dreaming about sending him privately which is where School Reviewer has been immensely helpful. I can type in the name of any school and School Reviewer tells me catchment areas, number of children on the roll, academic results and links to the most recent Ofstead report. It’s the most amazing resource for someone in my position.
Choosing the right school for your child is so important and such a huge decision, anything that reduces the stressfulness of the process is a winner with me.
We considered moving house earlier in the year and one of the reasons we chose to stay put was that finding school information for an area was so difficult, but School Reviewer makes the process so much easier. I searched for Oldham ( where I grew up ) and list of schools came up. If you knew exactly where you wanted to move to, you can also search by a post code.
I would’ve found this incredibly helpful 6 months ago and it would have saved me hours of searching on the internet. I am really impressed. Results can be filtered by primary or secondary school, a nursery or even a college or university. You can also adjust the search results to cover a different part of the area, the type of school and schools that provide Special Needs support.
To see more details about each individual school just click on the name of the school. The catchment area section is especially useful. A ‘heat map’ shows where most of the children that went to the school the year before lived, which is a great indicator in these times of oversubscribed schools.
Each school also has an area for reviews that people have written about them which I think is really helpful to read.
School Reviewer also has a great blog with informative posts about education and growing up and you can download GCSE math’s, SATs and 11+ papers, some are even free. As I have a child who will take his end of KS 2 SATs next year this is another really helpful resource with each question clearly explained, including what working out is needed to get full marks.
Coming soon is a feature where you can search for a tutor locally, so don’t forget to tell any tutors you know about the service, which is completely free.
I am very impressed overall with School Reviewer and know it will be a hugely useful and time saving resource for thousands of parents when deciding on a school for their child.
In association with School Reviewer
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