Dartford Grammar School (DGS) New Admission Criteria

Helpful post @MavisTheMonkey

I have a couple of friends who teach at DGS and my understanding (which is gossip and Chinese whispers based) is that the admissions was changed because the LA and KCC didn't see that the school was sufficiently serving Kent children and pressured the school to make the changes.

Also anecdotally apparently due to the high proportion of students commuting in from a wide distance there is a lack of community and parental support for extracurricular activities.

As a school that is located in and funded by Kent, I think it's reasonable that children in Kent wards are given priority, the same as Wilmington does - and I say this as someone based in Bexley who is geographically closer to Wilmington than I am to Bexley Grammar or Chis and Sid.

However, once the out of country goes the true superselective nature goes completely and the schools will drop down the league tables to be more like Bexley schools. At the top will remain the Wilsons/Olaves/Henrietta Barnet’s of this world. At Wilsons 61% of GCSE grades were 9s. A level results phenomenal as well. The top kids produce the top results.

Dartford Grammar does IB. IB is hard. They would be badly advised to let in siblings who have just passed the Kent test. They need to keep it superselective or those kids may struggle with the IB. Just because there is a lower superselective score for locals - well it is still superselective, just not based on top ranks overall. They can decide the score appropriate for children to be able to access what the school has to offer and they do need to bear in mind the IB.

Just to explain, if you drop 2 or 3 marks in Maths (out of 25 or 16) or 2 or 3 in English (out of 25 or 26) and more than 5 in reasoning (out of 80) you basically cannot get in. So you need to achieve near 100 per cent in Maths and English to get scores of 410 plus especially if you are autumn born.

Kent should either allow more OOC or just do away with OOC altogether. Under 20 at Judd now, no top scores at Skinners and only 45 at Dartford now makes the whole thing a waste of time for both the Council in terms of resources and the kids taking the test.

There is no point for OOC to do the Kent test anymore really as there are now such few places overall. It is a waste of a child’s time unless the parents tend to then move in by the December deadline (or before that).

You said to me several weeks ago that you would take a very sensible course of action to check your thinking, and (I assume) you have not done so. Or perhaps you did and found out the authorities agree with the posters on this thread.

Whether you feel uncomfortable or not, you aren’t going to resolve this situation without checking if the outcome you want ie a sibling preference IS allowable.

Up to you if you want to make that check or carry on tilting at windmills on MN.

Asking this again.

And I am not sure why you are being patronising and dismissive of the POV of others, insisting you are right in the face of patient explanations of the issues from many posters, But here we both are.

And lo! Here you are saying that YOU will check with the relevant authorities.

So why didn’t you?

Well no, I didn’t ask the school or the DfE myself, because I don’t live in Kent and am not impacted by this change. You are the one asking the question and being told by many posters who regularly post on the Code that you are wrong. Feels like more of a you problem to do the checking.

I don’t disagree that parents move for good schools. That happens in grammar and non grammar areas. But it’s nothing to do with commuting time, and never has been and never could be. 2 miles on foot is slower than on a bike which is slower than on the bike of a parent’s motorbike. So commuting time is not an objective measure and therefore - using your patronising parlance - was not a serious or practical argument to raise.

HTH.

Quoting to save you looking back a page!

You were told upthread and a month or two back why they cannot do that. I pasted the relevant section of the admissions code into my post and you said you were going to contact the authorities to check.

Did you do so?

You claimed the LA were saying what a reasonable commute was for a parent and pupil, when no LA has ever done any such thing, and you have the ovaries to ask me to be serious and practical?

Righty ho.

Please try not to be patronising in your replies. Thanks.

But it doesn’t sound like this grammar is trying to get the absolute brightest kids (based on test score) that it possibly could. It has never been a fully distance blind super selective.

It is trying for the brightest catchment children and leaving some spaces for the brightest OOC children - who on average will have a higher score than the IC cohort, although plenty in both groups will score above the OOC cut off.

Your concern was, I think, that the OOC allocation was getting smaller - but it was always there in principle.

As was said upthread, other grammars in the area have a pass mark after which criteria such as sibling and distance/catchment is applied. So they are looking for “bright enough” then normal school criteria.