I have no direct experience of EM but I've taken a bit of an interest in discussions of it in various places... It sounds to me as though the problems with EM are mostly with it being used by teachers who don't really understand enough maths or enough maths pedagogy themselves to be able to make it do what it's trying to do in the way of encouraging mathematical understanding in the children, or to feel confident adapting it to the needs of individual children. If this school has good teachers using EM in a flexible way, I think it might be fine, maybe even more than fine. But I'm sure this will be a controversial question!
