I am logging out to post this, because who I am should be irrelevant. I was very proud that my daughter was able to say what she had to say in a clear and articulate way, and that she managed to show others a lot more respect than she was given herself.

Here is an article about single-sex state schools in Britain:

Girls' state schools

To be honest, the type of school Daisybell attends shouldn't really be relevant to this discussion, and it feels like Lizzie is moving the goalposts. Daisybell wanted to present the perspective of herself and her friends: their experience of state school in 2009 as a place where not everything is sunshine and daffodils, but neither is it the nightmare world that Lizzie would have us believe.

So, to recap (and to refute some of Lizzie's more snide implications):

YES, Daisybell is a real person, and her words were completely her own. Several Mudcatters have met her.

YES, she is taking 13 GCSEs. If Lizzie understood the current school system a bit better than she seems to, she might know that some GCSEs combine study, so a single foundation with added bits going in two different directions can lead to two different GCSEs - for example, RE and Sociology. So taking 13 exams isn't as difficult to manage as it might seem.

YES, Daisybell combines a healthy social life with getting very good grades. She is given the freedom and the privileges that she has BECAUSE she works hard. That's the deal. I would not have it any other way, because I think a healthy social life and learning to get on with others and navigate difficult social situations is one of the most important things you learn at school, and it would not happen if she was cloistered away studying every evening and weekend. Life has to have a balance. But that balance may have to change somewhat when she gets to 6th Form, which will be much more challenging.

YES, she goes to a good school. As she said in her first post, we moved house so that we could be closer to this school. I would point out that we moved from a very affluent area to one that is significantly less so. Ironically, the state schools in some affluent areas (and certainly where we came from) are quite mediocre, because all of the bright kids end up going private. There also wasn't a proper state 6th Form in the area, which would have been no good when Daisybell wanted to do A Levels. So we moved.

Lizzie seems to want us to believe that the majority of schools in the UK are places of abuse, where children are terrorised, taught to have anal sex, sleep around with anybody and everybody, that they are so depressed that they self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, and that any caring parent would whip their child out of there asap to avoid them going into meltdown. As Daisybell said, there are certainly schools with problems, but there are also plenty of young people who are doing just fine. If parents choose to home school that is certainly their right, but to paint all other children as sevelrely disadvantaged and abused just because their parents have not made the same choices as you is plain wrong.