The nightmare of getting your child into the "right" school is up there with childbirth. Nobody warns you what it's really like to go through, and until you do, you wonder what the fuss is about.
I have been at far too many dinner parties where the sole topic of conversation is education, education, education. Anyone not caught up in this maelstrom (or who has been through it) is bored stiff, but to those in its vortex it is an obsession. As your child approaches 11, the advantages of one school over another become painfully clear, especially if you look at the league tables. At secondary school, they will sit life-changing exams. They will go through puberty, make friends and enemies, and, at the end of it all, may not get to university or be employable.
Yet the strangest thing about all this anxiety is that, once your child is through school and blossoming, you look back on it and think: what was that all about? For no school is perfect. There are some, like those that do not address a culture of bullying or the absence of ambition in pupils, which are quite clearly not good.
Yet no school is fixed in stone. It changes, according to the teachers–and especially the head–who come and go. The school you believe to be brilliant, or disastrous, under one particular constellation of staff (and pupils) can change from one year to the next. You can't outwit luck. In the end, what matters is giving your child the maximum of support, stability, encouragement and resilience about their education. After all, it is they, not we, who have to go through it.
–The Telegraph