Part 2: SW London Girl's Indies 11+ Pandemic Panic!

Hey everyone
Ex PHS student here. The school has some very good qualities and I know that most of my year really enjoyed it, however the social pool there (and at WHS) is very small and all composed of very much the same ‘type’ of girl from all the same background. It can be a very difficult place to be if you don’t fit into this, and I found it to be quite an isolating experience. I would really advise considering this when deciding which school to go to.
Good luck to everyone though! I remember the decision time well and it was all very strange, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult it may be this year

I also think it is just to figure out what the chances of acceptance are, it shouldn't work for or against you if you respond either way. They just want to have some more information on the candidates and the competition.

I guess also, for them ( and other ISEB schools), it’s actually trying to make sense of how to offer and likelihood of acceptance. Honestly I think it’s going to be a headache for them as much as us. In the end we didn’t increase the number of schools we sat, partly because of timing but also realistically distance to travel would simply not work for us.
Tough times......

@WarmAndco3y - It was in the form we filled in to sit the ISEB at JAGS, so I suspect it was purely procedural - but it did feel a bit odd giving them that information, especially if none of the other ISEB schools asked it.

Really @stellagibbons? Wow!! JAGS didn’t ask us about that question.
I guess because we didn’t do it with them, it would’ve been obvious we applied to at least one other ISEB school.
None of the 3 ISEB schools asked us that question

Did any of the other schools ask which other schools using ISEB this year you were applying to? JAGS did, and I've been wondering whether that will count for or against us - and whether applying to fewer or more other schools was an advantage or not.*

*I may have been overthinking this a lot.

Just to add to the mix above. WHS have said they hope to offer a place or waitlist space to everyone reaching second stage.. it sounds like there’s some uncertainty all round as to place take up ratios..

My son did them over a month, one subject per week. In retrospect it probably wasnt the best way as it dragged them out somewhat, but it did give him extra time to practise the reasoning questions as VR & NVR came last. I agree it's not a level playing field, and I really agree that you can improve your scores with practice. My son improved his VR scores hugely with a month of practice and simply figuring out how to tackle the different types of questions.

@mumsrule20 oh my goodness - 1500 candidates!!! That’s totally insane! It’s a total lottery..

Just logged into the LEH information session...apparently just over 500 sat the test and just over half are being interviewed. Everyone being interviewed has “passed” the entrance exam and after interview you either get an offer or a place on the waitlist....she wouldn’t divulge how many offers they make as this information is commercially sensitive but she did say that they over offer above the 60-70 places they have....it would be SO interesting to know though, bearing in mind that the top 10 percent of girls will probably have offers at other schools too and LEH may not be their first choice and could have between 2 and 9 other offers so the odds of securing them is something like 20%. So I reckon they probably have to offer around 120 -150 places?

I’m not questioning either the schools, just trying to understand what has happened so that we can pick ourselves up and move on in a positive way.

I was interested in the suggestion that the very first Atom test might give you the best information on your child’s abilities and that perhaps the repeated practice is a waste of time. In the space of just a few mock tests, our child’s score improved quite a bit, including on the weak area, but perhaps that didn’t make any meaningful difference to their ISEB score.

I’m not sure if our school has ever done CATS, but wish I’d had this sort of rich information when there was still time to act on it in relation to secondary schools.

There’s not a lot to add to what’s already been said accept perhaps that SW London is notoriously competitive at the best of times and this is a bulge year. I remember when DD started primary that the catchment nearly halved and she only got in as she was a sibling. Add to that the ISEB effect of more parents applying to more schools and it’s a big mess.

I really feel for those who have landed unexpected results and it’s definitely worth investigating.. I have a strong hunch there will be more occasional places than normal in the Autumn term.

Another interesting “insight” I learned along the way was that schools with a junior school tend to focus more on academic potential than schools that start at 11. Sometimes they are trying to bolster a weak academic junior school intake (as who can tell who is really smart at the age of 4 or 7?) and they may already have lots of great artists, sports people and musicians etc. At the co-ed schools that start at 11 they are more interested in the whole child as they are building their population from scratch ....this is why we stuck one co-ed into the mix as we thought they might appreciate DDs extra curricular achievements...

Sorry for all the typos - fat fingers and autocorrect!!

@matsikula I do not that some of the schools (whs and leh) have a “cut off” score for each area of the test and even if you get 100 percent in one area you still have to get above the threshold in all the others. This can sometimes account for some of the results and a few people fell could of this in previous years (and found this out when they sought feedback). I am not sure why these schools are so inflexible with the “cut off” across all areas but I guess if they have 1000 candidates they need to find some way of getting those numbers down.

Barging in because this is a fascinating discussion. I’ve just applied Yossahughes’ methodology to the very first time my child did a practice Atom test. Their average on their very first Atom mock (adding 8) worked out at 128 and still no ISEB success, including a knock back from a school traditionally seen as a banker. The score for one of the areas was very significantly lower than for the others. Coupled with what we know about them, I wonder if this is a possible indication of mild SEN. This is of course useful information to have. What’s upsetting though is that we didn’t spot this earlier; they’ve always been more than good enough for their state school and nobody ever really thought to consider why their strengths were so skewed- it tended to be put down to a lack of effort in certain areas. We’ve got a lot of work to do now to build up our child’s self esteem.

I think Atom can be misleading - the first time a child does the test you get a pretty good indication of how they are going to perform if you add 8 marks to their score....if you do it a lot the same questions keep coming up and it can be quite easy to then have over inflated scores that don’t reflect what the child is capable of when encountering something for the first time. I think it needs to be treated with caution as it can lull you into a false sense of security.

In regards to CAT scores I am not sure quite what to think. Statistically kids that are averaging 135+ are like gold dust and much as we like to think us Londoners are special 🤪 I am not sure I buy the fact that they are all concentrated in the SE....most of them seem to be on mumsnet too! 🤪 After the dust had settled from my elder DCs exams I remember talking about this to other parents and in reality barely any DCs had CATs which averaged over 130.....most were averaging just above 120 with people having the odd outlier high score in one of the areas. @eitel for this reason I would definitely investigate what has happened with your DD as something seems to have gone wrong and even if you can’t change the results of these exams it might be something that can help you DD in the future....I hope you manage to get to the bottom of it!

Re CAT scores, I agree with everything @LondonGirl83 says. Most importantly, CAT and ATOM scores are not interchangeable. CAT4 uses four 'batteries' to test: VR, NVR, spacial and quantitative; ATOM mock ISEBs tests in maths, English, VR and NVR. The simplest way to distinguish them is ATOM is more about attainment whereas CATs are more about intrinsic potential.

In theory, you can't tutor for CAT4 but I think scores can be improved on any computerized test with enough practice. However, I don't think it would be useful to attempt to increase a child's CAT score artificially, as one of the key purposes is to benchmark their score against under-achievement which can uncover things like SEN.

And despite the clever marketing, we shouldn't make the assumption that ATOM is directly comparable to ISEB. For DD, we used ATOM for a few weeks before she sat the real ISEB; however, after a while the same questions came up on ATOM which made DD's scores inflate beyond what she would have achieved in an unseen test. So that was the point to pull the plug!

I think the information up the thread about average SAS scores for those selective London girls' schools is probably about right. SAS scores for the intake in SW London independent schools will be above the national average for all kinds of reasons, but it's unrealistic that a whole year group would score above say 135 on CAT4 tests. There will be a range of ability.

Like others have said, I agree that there will be a lot of bright children this year who slipped through the cracks in the process which is desperately unfair. Hopefully there will be a shakeup with waitlists in the spring...

One thing that strikes me is the fundamentals of demand and supply for London independents haven't changed. i.e. there hasn't been a massive influx of extra children into London. If anything, due to the pandemic, many families have left London (although conversely, a few parents have moved their children to indies because of patchy provision in some state schools). Therefore the higher number of candidates this year must be primarily down to parents applying to multiple schools - and as we all know, they can only go to one school!

Sorry about the rant! There is so much mis-information on MN and other sites about the distribution of cognitive scores, so I just needed to unload that here...