Secondary School Choice

The time has arrived when we have to make our 1st and 2nd choice of Secondary school.
We have chosen to remove Matthew from the bilingual Welsh school environment, for several reasons.

The first one being with his Speech and language problems we have decided that one language is quite enough to cope with, for him and for me. Although his Dad speaks Welsh he simply hasn't the time in the evening to help with the welsh reading/spelling and I have become increasing frustrated at reaching for the dictionary constantly. The welsh resources for reading schemes are non exsistent and Matthew is continualy bringing home books too hard for him (and me, although I have taken several welsh courses and do have a good understanding of grammar and vocabulary) even although I have asked the teachers to monitor the books.

The second reason is thet the secondary school we feed is a poor secondary school on the discipline front, we have alraady moved our older son from there to another welsh nedium school and we were hoping it had improved, apparently not. I also cannot find this years results printed anywhere (no surprise there). At the recent year 7 taster visit, 2 boys in the class were bullied at dinner time with not a teacher or 6th former in sight and the swearing on the yard was appauling.

The 3rd reason is that we have am English medium school which has for 4 years running been in the top 250 schools in the UK, their Estyn school report was all 1s and 2s. It always has open days for the parents to look around (none at the welsh comp.), we went along and it was clear to us that they were extremley proud of their record and were actively promoting and selling their school to us parents. The children calmly moved lessons around us. They admit they have their problems as do all secondary schools but are extremley strong on discipline and communicating with the parents. So hopefully we have made the best choice. The school is 10 mins walk away and Matthew's best and second best friends are also going there for the 2nd and 3rd reasons above, Matthew is extremely pleased about that. They went for the taster day last Friday and had a great day, even although they actually had 4 lessons on that day.