I began this website in 2006 both as a service to parents and to promote my business. I consider the educational system is often stacked against parents who have problems with individual schools or the education service and began my consultancy in 2003 to try and alleviate this somewhat in Kent and Medway.
Very soon I established that the need was far greater than I thought and my role (I do have a life outside education) has become fuller and fuller, to the extent that I am now only able to focus professionally on School Admissions and Appeals across the two Local Authorities, but am also able to offer telephone advice on most issues of concern to parents. Currently I have supported over 600 successful secondary appeals to Kent and Medway schools, together with 30 successful primary school appeals and some 40 successful complaints to the Ombudsman and Young People's Learning Agency (for Academies), providing me with a wealth of local experience.
Back to the website. This began life with a few short pages that I was able to edit and update simply, but as time has gone on, the range of issues and the amount of material covered have spiralled almost out of control. Clearly, my main priority has to be to my professional clients and so the updating and adding of new items inevitably takes second place. The site was relaunched in a professional format in January 2011, but content revision is still ongoing. Please let me know where further revision is needed, together with any errors or omissions (especially faulty links!) and I will give that high priority in my work. I continue to maintain the pages outside my work on school admissions and appeals.
Sadly, I am having to withdraw my full professional consultancy from areas such as Special Educational Needs, as the extensive time both to keep up to date in a fast moving field and that would be taken up in any one case is out of all proportion to the time I have available. This does not take away from the fact that I consider this is by far the most important area where parents need help, and on the special needs and links pages of this website I provide links to some areas of support. As with all aspects of the website, I am happy to include such links to non commercial websites that support parents.
Peter J Read
B.Sc., M.Phil., M.A. Dip.Gen.
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