Another two schools

Our search for a school for Boy H continues. On Tuesday we went to see a second school and today we visited our third. The second school was our favourite when we made our shortlist of local schools. It’s a Church of England school and it’s very similar in size to the one that Boy H attends at the moment. It has good SATs scores and a good reputation. It’s also a short drive from our house. When we got there the headmistress looked really stressed. I thought there must have been some sort of emergency going on, but then it dawned on us that that’s her permanent state. She whizzed us around the school, talking more about their plans to expand the building than about what they do or their achievements. As we walked around, the kids seemed to be completely bored, and the atmosphere felt quite chaotic. At one point, whilst talking to us, the headmistress started telling a kid off, who just ignored her and kept on walking as she spoke. We weren’t introduced to any of the teachers, and she made a point of telling us that the school was full. Should we choose that school, Boy H could be force allocated to it as he’s a looked-after child, and she stressed that other parents would be against it as it would take their class size for his year to over 30 students. When we asked how the school would support Boy H in case there were any issues with him having two dads, she replied that some of the parents in the school hold “certain views” and it would probably be best not to advertise it. We smiled, thanked her for her time, walked out, looked at one another, and agreed that would be the last school we would want to send our son to. The whole thing was awful, and we didn’t know whether she was just useless or actually trying to put us off. She never actually asked us a single question about H: not the type of school he’s currently at, how he’s progressing there, not even his name! She just kept referring to him as “the child”.

The third school we visited today was a much larger school with over 400 students. It’s a 10-minute walk from our house, which is a big plus! We met the deputy head as the headmaster was showing someone else around. She was very nice and showed us the facilities and the classrooms. It was break time, so we didn’t get to see how engaged the kids were with their classroom activities, but they seemed to be well-behaved and the atmosphere was nice. They currently have a looked-after child in the school and one of the kids in the older groups has two mums. This has led to some confrontations (but she told us these were always in response to this child being aggressive and the other kids answering back), and he’s never been bullied because of it. She was happy for the social workers to get in touch if necessary and seemed to have a good idea of the kind of support they could offer H. We felt the school was certainly an option, but nowhere near as nice as the first school we visited last week.

We have one more school to visit tomorrow and we’re also going to Boy H’s current school, where we’ll be able to find out a lot more about his school needs. We’ll be attending the meeting with his social worker and foster carer, so we’re really looking forward to finding out more about him.

In other news, we’ve been trying to find the time to put all the furniture together for his bedroom so we can take pictures of it and add them to the introductions book, which is half-done. We haven’t stated on the DVD because Glen woke up with a huge cold sore on his lip the other day and he doesn’t really want to be filmed looking like he’s got three lips!

Miranda rang to let us know that the panel medical advisor had received our medical reports and all was good. We’ve received the invitation to attend panel and we confirmed that we would straight away. Less than a week to go now! We’ve managed to stay very calm so far, so let’s hope we can keep it that way until Wednesday.