I think your question is about the admission process for private schools rather than 11+ grammar.
We’ve just accepted the offer of a place at our local independent school for my daughter.
I think it may depend on the school.
The admission process for us was:
- interview
- exam
- assessment morning for specialist scholarship
- assessment afternoon for academic scholarship
My impression is that it was carried out in a manner to put the child most at ease. My daughter is at a state primary, and probably far less polished than children who have been at a prep school. She had nerves before going into the interview and the exam as these are experiences that she had never had before, but it sounds like she settled very quickly.
The things I thought were really good were:
Everybody that we came across each time we brought her in was warm and friendly and made her feel that they were interested in her.
For the interview, they had grouped the time slots consecutively for the very few children applying from her primary school. This meant that they saw familiar faces just before their interview.
They were also invited to bring something that was importantly to them that they would like to talk about, so essentially they had a prop as an ice-breaker to ease them into the interview. The admission staff in the waiting area were chatting to them, and asking them about their prop, so it helped warm them up for the interview itself, and distract them from their nerves waiting.
During both scholarship assessment sessions, there was a short talk to parents and children at the beginning. In these talks, they reiterated over and again what a great achievement it was to get to that stage of the process, regardless of the outcome. Whether true or not, it must give you confidence if someone keeps saying that you’ve done really well.
The academic scholarship assessment was framed as a series of tasks to solve an overarching problem, for which they worked in teams - in essence very much like an escape room. She said it was huge fun, and seemed to have forgotten that they were being observed.
I think it was really skilfully done, and I am very sure that the way they ran the process allowed my child to show the best of herself.
We only applied for the one private school, as we very much liked what it had to offer, my daughter loved it on the open day and taster morning, and it is very local to us. I don’t, therefore, have any experience of the process at other schools, nor what it would have been like if she was having to attend assessments for multiple schools.