Hi and welcome. I am usually someone who asks for advice as I don't feel that I have enough knowledge to give advice! We have just had to deal with the whole acceleration issue and our DS(7) has skipped two years and is currently in a class with children who are 9 turning 10. He still joins his age-mates for games, PE and Art and recess (as the school were not happy him playing soccer with the older children and he lost confidence to join them for recess). We are only 4 weeks into the year but our DS is the happiest he has ever been at school. He seems to take everything in his stride and has relished the additional responsibilities. He is enjoying the work so much more (although is starting to find Maths a bit repetitive!) and is enjoying being with the older children. They seem fairly accepting of him, although I have had some strange comments from parents.
My DH and I were so nervous about it, not helped by the fact that acceleration in the UK is a bit of an alien concept. The school have been great but also very nervous about it, but thankfully in our case it seems to have all worked out. The hard thing is that DS wants to do ALL subjects with the older children (Art etc) but the school don't want him to lose his links with his age-mates. DS can't see why it matters as they aren't the ones that he will be going off to the next school with, the older children are.
We were also able to let DS have a trial of some of the classes before he was accelerated so that he felt confident and already recognised some of the children. We also explained to him that it was something that we were going to trial to see if he enjoyed it (so that if it was a disaster he didn't feel that he had "failed").
I am not sure if this helps you at all, but as you can see from everyone's stories, all situations are different and there is no right or wrong answer. In our case it was trying to make the least wrong decision!
