tomskip

Thanks for the heads up, OP.

I prefer to go in to town or somewhere else for nights out as I'm here in SE22 nearly all the time. Favourite and most visited SE22 restaurants at the moment are Il Mirto, The Palmerston and Yama Momo. With the children we go to GBK or Si Mangia (or Joannas or the Pizza place in Crystal Palace). I can't imagine being tempted in to Meat Liquor - the name puts me off completely! I used to love Franklins when it was the secret garden place on Camberwell New Road hundreds of years ago.

My husband is at London Bridge station with 2 coats and can't find the drop off! It would be so helpful if the information online could be a bit more specific re. the location of the collection points. London Bridge station is quite a big place. I can't find a phone number for the organisation either. Now he's got to carry round two heavy men's coats all day.

With cars it is so very much about status symbols.

Hi Sol, there are other messages about the school on this very recent thread: http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?29,1720953,1721511#msg-1721511

There's something going on at the junction of Upland Road and Goodrich Road (by the school). Road cordoned off and lots of police. Perhaps that stretch of Lordship Lane is closed to prevent people from driving down Upland Road? I don't know. Very worrying.

As a side note, why do people do that dropping charity donations off outside the shop? It's just plain lazy and amounts to fly tipping!

Redjam, in reply to your question, I've copied and pasted this comment below from an admissions expert on another (parenting) forum: "Academies and VA schools are in charge of their own admissions policy. The LA still runs the co-ordinated admissions scheme. Many (probably most) LAs that have a problem with renting run checks before passing applications on to schools. If they discover that parents are living in rented accommodation whilst owning a house in the area (information they can get from checking Council Tax records) many will just give the school the address of the house the parents own and ignore the rented address. They should also have a blacklist of addresses they know are let out for admissions purposes. Any application using one of those addresses will be investigated. If the LA discovers that an application is fraudulent during the admissions process they will use the correct address for the family. The parents are not generally informed of this so there are certainly parents out there who believe they got a place through renting but actually wasted their money. It isn't over once the child has a place. The offer can still be removed if the application is found to be fraudulent or deliberately misleading, even after the child has started at school. Many LAs will only remove the place during the first term but some have removed places even later. This happens far more than people think it does. I know of cases where parents would have got their child into a decent school if they had been honest, rented to get a place at an outstanding school and succeeded initially but were then found out. Their child's place at the outstanding school was removed and, because the decent school was full, they ended up with a place at the local sink school. Far from helping their child, their actions left their child in a worse situation than if they had been honest. As has been mentioned above, some schools and LAs only give sibling priority to those still living near the school in an effort to stop people getting their first child in then moving away. This is becoming more widespread. However, for academies this is up to the school, not the LA. People do rent to get places. Some of them succeed. I doubt that it will ever be possible to weed out all such applications. But most LAs that have a significant problem (and many that don't) are doing everything they can to clamp down on this."

Many over subscribed schools do a better job than the Charter school at keeping on top of dubious applications such as the one described in my post. The critical issue is owning another house nearby (but not quite near enough) and keeping hold of that to move back to after the temporary renting in catchment period. Many schools have this specific practice named as being unacceptable in their admissions literature. The lottery system at Kingsdale could be seen as unfair in this area because it exists in its own bubble. And the lottery element does not apply to siblings there either, for hard to understand reasons. Many secondary school age children in the area cannot go to the same school as their sibling (we have 5 single sex state schools in our immediate locality) so to hold the idea of sibling priority up as somehow necessary or a priority seems inconsistent at best.

Scruffy Mummy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The catchment to old Charter is still pretty small > - although with the new ED Charter last year > taking 120 children seemed to widen the > 'catchment' for Old Charter. I knew someone > living near Melbourne Grove who got a place at the > old Charter on a waiting list place. However if > you live the other side of Lordship Lane, you > really haven't got much of a chance and certainly > not in the first round. Unless you rent temporarily in the 'catchment', whilst keeping hold of the house you own outside of said catchment, get your first child into the school and then move back to your owned house after a year or two. And, yes, unbelievably the school does still allow this to happen.

I just can't stand the shrieking family from Brighton (with the UKIP dad). Why does the mum have to be so bloody loud? I ff through them, and I find the sisters from Liverpool a bit dull. Otherwise I like everyone, with the Siddiquis being my out and out favourites. Gogglebox seems to be the only programme I look out for on tv nowadays.

Dulwich Fox The op is looking for somewhere to "work on her computer" not "use as an office". I would have no problem with it as a cafe owner so long as the person with the laptop made some purchases and didn't block the table at a busy time. I know it's a long-running theme on the EDF about wifi workers taking advantage, but how unfriendly is it to dismiss this entirely reasonable question in the way you and Dog Duck have? Incredibly rude, prejudiced, unwelcoming and off putting! A simple search of the op's username reveals that English is not her first language.

Grumpy, cynical, miserable old codgers!

We need a new car and like this model. We went for a test drive on the far side of Croydon but didn't have our teenagers with us and I thought it looked doubtful for leg room in the back. My husband is very tall so needs his seat pushed well back, whether driving or in the front passenger seat. Do you think two adult-sized teens can sit comfortably in the back with one of the front seats pushed well back? If anyone has this car locally and could let us come and have another quick look before heading back out to Croydon, there's a good bottle of wine in it for you! Thanks.

My top pre Christmas prep tips are simply: 1. keep Christmas in perspective 2. don't let it start taking over your life in September 3. don't buy lots of consumables (including drink) in advance - you will simply consume them all and have to re-buy (which is of course what the manufacturers want you to do hence all the special offers months in advance)

What a shame someone at Kings could not have advised him!

Perhaps the Haberdashers distance measurement will expand a bit for local people, now that they've done away with the absurd 6th Form sibling link. I've seen that many (if not all?) of the Lewisham schools are no longer using the fair banding method. What are the arguments in favour of this, does anyone know?

Hello there, does anyone have a spare or unwanted prefect jumper (the lighter blue one) for Sydenham Girls School that I could buy tonight? My daughter has already lost hers and the school uniform shop is closed today and she says she will be in big trouble tomorrow if she goes in in her regular uniform. Just asking the Family Room on the off-chance! Thanks.

There is a wonderful local rescue and rehoming charity for small pets - GBH Rescue, based in Beckenham.

Yes, my daughter loves her school. She is about to start Year 11 and will almost certainly stay on for 6th Form (always a mark of a good school, I think).

I think the Dulwich park cafe has been ok if not fine since it was last refurbished in the early 2000s (?) The CanYouPlease and CanYouPleaseNot laminated notices all over the place were amusing and some of them made perfect sense re. bringing pushchairs in, blocking toilets, making the children's play corner area all muddy due to not taking wellies off. Prices could be absurd though! Am interested to see who takes over. I also like Crystal Palace park cafe. A lot less pretentious.

Seems so wrong to flush mineral water down the loo! I guess I was hoping there was some sort of communal water tap elsewhere in ED, or a bowser in the affected area. I wonder how long we have to be without water before TW are obliged to provide the bowsers? I do remember the great drought of 2003 (whoever asked earlier) but I went off to Kings to have my baby after the first 24 hours, so my memory of how long it lasted and when the bowsers appeared is a bit blurry.

Any thoughts/ideas on toilet flushing? Or where can I go to get some buckets of non-drinking water?

Just had a look at the Thames Water website ... about as useful as a chocolate teapot!

I've got no water at all now. Lordship Lane end of Upland Road.