Hi, we wondered if anyone else has had similar problems to ours with the issue of Kingsdale school and scholarships for September 2010. Our son was offered a sports scholarship in October and we were told a letter confirming this would be sent shortly. We were also encouraged by the school to tell our son about this and we did so...obviously his friends and our friends got to know about it. We finally received a letter dated December 23rd 2009 from Kingsdale informing us that he had not in fact been offered a scholarship place but had been offered a place on the gifted and talented sports program ?IF? he were offered a place at the school. Prior to this it was not at any time made clear that there were in fact 3 types of "scholarship" on offer (the headteacher's talk on open day and the school's website also made no mention of this). Indeed, the overwhelming impression was that a scholarship guaranteed a place. We received 2 calls from the school offering our son a place on the "gifted and talented sports program" but there was no mention at this time that this was not a proper scholarship. We spoke to the school at this time and discussed the issue of informing our son of the ?scholarship? place, we were told by the school that we should inform him because he had preformed very well and should be proud of his achievement. Forward to March 2nd 2010 and our son was not offered a place at Kingsdale. More importantly, we've had to explain this to him when he said "But I thought I'd been offered a scholarship etc"...not very nice news to have to break. We think its a shame school involved the children in this process by encouraging parents to tell them about scholarship offers. We'd be interested to hear if anyone else on the forum has been affected and what their take on this is....sounds like a cynical ploy to persuade parents to put Kingsdale as first choice (presumably to improve standing for internal criteria)!
