Introduction
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 on School Admissions and Appeals across the two Local Authorities. Currently I have supported over 400 successful secondary appeals in Kent and Medway and 12 primary, 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. I have just carried out a major revision of many pages in what has turnd out be a very short slack period at the start of the year. Please let me know where further revision is needed and I will give that high priority in my work. I will continue to maintain the pages outside school admissions and appeals.
Sadly, I am having to withdraw 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.
This website is curently being professionally redesigned and will be replaced in September. It will still offer the same combination of information and opinion but will be far more structured so that visitors can track down items of interest and relevance more easily.
Peter J Read