A note from School Gates
Every school has
another story.
We like the one that doesn’t fit in the prospectus.
A century-old grudge. A parent pretending not to help. A beautiful school whose one drawback is getting there on Tuesday. These are the things we want to talk about.
Notes from the School Gates is Eleven Plus Diary’s school-culture column: curious about institutions, fond of their peculiarities, and firmly on the side of families trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes a school’s personality comes through more clearly in an old newspaper clipping than in twenty pages of brochure.
The voice, and what’s behind it
We write as School Gates, with opinions, a sense of humour, and research behind the stories. We haven’t secretly toured every campus or interviewed every parent. History stays history, lore stays lore, and a joke doesn’t become a new fact. Every story ends with a list of the published sources it draws on; our fuller research notes live in our editorial records.
Occasionally we bring together real public comments into a constructed parent voice. Those passages are labelled “Composite” beside the text. They capture a viewpoint, not a quotation or an interview with an invented person. Our illustrations are imagined scenes, too.
For the dates, requirements, and practical decisions, each story points back to the relevant Eleven Plus Diary guides. For everything that makes schools such fascinating places to choose between, pull up a chair.