Grammar school entrance exams are the most important exams your children will take up to this point in their life. Your children may not realise it, but you certainly do. You want what is best for them, even if they don't seem that interested. If you are lucky, they are alreadt passionate about their educational career and are looking for the best opportunities to further their education.
For those children coming through Key Stage 2, preparing for the Autumn exams, you will be aware that a very important decision needs to be made as to you childs future educational progression. Will your child stay in the mainstream school system and trust that you get your first choice of schools? Or, do you look to get your child into a Grammar school? If we, as parents, had any choice, Grammar school would be our first choice. Wouldn't it? There is a problem with gaining access to a Grammar school however. Only a few of the places are chosen with some of the schools. All the others are based solely on entrance exam results.
We are based in Croydon and as such have good access to some of the best performing Grammar schools in the whole of the country.
- Wilsons
- Wallington Boys
- Wallington Girls
- Riddlesdown
As most of the entrant places are based on exam results, the bar is set that much higher. For example, Wilsons School was in the top 5 schools in the whole of the United Kingdom. Most of us would give an arm or a leg to get our children into a school like this. Here are a few statistics for you to mull over:
Number of places available for year 7 at Wilsons 180
Number of children who sat the exam last year 1,253
This is one time when when a quart won't go into a pint glass.It isn't like your children are under any pressure to perform in exams already but with these entrance exams, they are now going upo against perhaps some of the smartest and most intelligent in the country.
What can we do as Parents?
So, what can you do to help? Your children revising every hour there is will not be good enough (Alot of the time, this can be very detrimental - look at Australia, they don't set any homework!). We do what we can and we hope we are doing the best we can in the right way. Until we know better, the best we can do, is just that, the best we can do. That's all we can do because most of the time we don't know there could be something more we can do.
For years, our son complained of aches and pains all the time. It always seemed to be when he had been ask ed to do something he wasn't that exited about, so we just told him to get on with whatever he was doing.
How do you think we felt when a few years after this began, we took him to a dietician for a completely unrelated matter, only to find out that he was alergic to a few thinks, sugar being the main one and it was causing him arthritic inflamation and a great deal of pain. How did we feel? Like the worst parents in the world. We changed his diet immediatley. He has been pain free ever since. If only we had known earlier we could have made a massive difference to his life. This is the same with exam preperation.
We now know that we can always do better. Whatever we think we are, we are always more. Whatever we think we can do, we can always do more. We can help you achieve this as well.
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