Should I push my CAT4 138 DD to SPGS open day?

A significant number of girls in schools like this are from wealthy international backgrounds and (as referred to above) are encouraged to play to their strengths at A level and presumably have relative freedom about choosing uni courses on account of this (disagree about “gaming the system courses” though, show me a teenager who cares that much about Oxbridge they will work very hard for 3-4 years on a niche degree they really aren’t interested in. Instead you’ll find young women without pressure of debt with freedom to make choices). Tiffin has a very different demographic and the sciences are pushed hard in many families as the only acceptable path with the girls steered firmly towards them.

Are these concerns also atrificially constructed by me?

Yes. But as you are not planning to send her to SPGS I'm not sure why it matters to you.

Almost the entire year take A level maths. Given that, its hard to argue the school is tilted towards the humanities, but I would agree it has excellent humanities and language teaching, and clearly values those subjects as much as STEM. I think OP will be happier with a school that prioritises STEM.

At GCSE they have to study English and a modern language. The other four options are open - girls can avoid arts / humanities to a great extent. What I’ve seen happen is girls who are strongly encouraged into STEM by parents who have pushed maths from an early age, discovering through their fourth choice GCSE a love for music, or history of art, or drama. It’s part of the breadth the school offers, which is greatest in the first three years when they’re unconstrained by the GCSE syllabus (you end up in the silly situation that they study much more interesting and complex stuff in Y9, before GCSEs) but which they try to retain right through.

At A level, I’ve observed some girls whose parents would prefer them to do pure STEM A levels arguing to retain one art subject. And the school’s advice is to choose the subjects you love at A level. Which explains why there are quite a few doing arts and humanities degrees, without assuming it’s to ‘game the system’. If you’re taught well, and in an environment which values arts and humanitities as much as STEM subjects, then its not surprising you might choose to study them further.

@swdd

I am not sure what you mean by SPGS's unnecessary focus on humanities at GSCE level, and going well beyond national curriculum. They don't.
Westminster does that with their boys - where they don't bother with the GSCE text for the 1st year of GSCE - they read and analyse whatever their teachers deem useful. And then cover the GSCE's English lit text in the 2nd year....
At SPGS - they do the curriculum, and practice for 2 years. And they have bright kids - hence the results.

Truth is - GSCEs are not that difficult for the bright kids. Mine are all STEM and hate humanities. Would rather do pages of maths problems than write an essay. But with practice - and this is what SPGS does - they learn what they need to do to ace those exams.

As to the languages - there is NO special or innovative language teaching at SPGS. It's average to poor, in my expedience. But given the generally low quality of language teaching in the UK - the level SPGS has is good enough for top grades.

Are more of SPGS leavers go to study humanities - yes. It's a structural issue in the UK with girls. It's not different for any other school - private of state, except maybe the Kings Maths School ...and I wonder what their % of girls is.

But my kids at SPGS were always STEM focused and not sporty. There is no one type of SPGS girl. And there were plenty of girls like them - going off to do engineering, physics, chemistry and medicine at Unis. Nor many went to do pure maths, true. But, again, that is not unusual for women in maths overall.

You don't need to force your DD to apply to SPGS, or convince yourself of anything. And there are plenty of things I don't like about the school as a parent who's been around it for many years now.

But some sport of extra pressure on humanities that would somehow distract your DD from STEM is a really artificially constructed idea, that is simply wrong...

Yes, if we're talking about languages, it's everywhere else. I think it's common knowledge that the quality of teaching languages is notoriously poor in the UK and it's mainly rote learning without deeper understanding of how a language actually functions, even for European languages, let alone other linguistic groups. That's why British school children struggle so much with German for example - it's really hard to rote learn German if you don't understand its deeper structure, and it's simply not being taught the right way.
Latin can help a bit but not with Asian languages or Arabic. You have to approach languages as systems/structures to gain transferrable linguistic skills. Then you would be able to learn Albanian, Hungarian that are in a world of their own, or artificial languages that don't have "conversational topics" at all, and understanding of artificial languages opens up comp sci and AI, or behavioural sciences as they're interconnected with the language, or emerging interdisciplinary fields and so on...
Studying languages is not about going on a holiday and being able to maintain a basic chat with the locals.

That's a strange question. I don't know every single school in the UK obviously (I doubt even specialist consultants know all of them).
I'm able to compare with some top schools in London that are accidentally also among the top schools nationally so roughly in the same league as SPGS.

This I have no knowledge of as you can only live it to fully understand, but comparing homework and projects across a few London schools it is clear to me SPGS does many things differently and in many cases deeper than others. I don't necessarily agree with everything they do to structure knowledge in literature, for example, but I can understand what they're doing and why, and I find it very interesting even in earlier years. Even if I disagree on some points, I still find this type of education better for developing a well rounded and truly knowledgeable (not just exam-drilled) person.

Sorry but this is madness. You wouldn’t accept if offered but seem to have terrible FOMO? Let your DD walk away. It’s just a school. There are dozens of schools she’ll love and do well at. Why force her towards one just because of some prep test?

That actually confirms what I thought would be the case, thank you for the link. History, MML, Classics, Theology have ~50-60% acceptance rate. No maths at Cambridge and only one plus one comp sci at Oxford, surprisingly (girls school? mathsy girls leaving for Westminster? SPGS is big on maths though so still surprised). Med is tough of course but I would've been surprised if SPGS had none, five accepted is a good result. Nat Sci is not easy either.
A few "game the system" courses at Oxford too, but I guess it's inevitable even at SPGS.

Anyway, SPGS has some really good ideas in how they do humanities and languages e.g approaching language studies from a structural linguistics point of view allows much deeper understanding than the usual rote learning done everywhere else, in this respect I think it is actually a special school, but you could only get the benefits of such education if you join at 11+. 6th form is probably too late.

Agree with this. It's not only the linguistics content. It's a different educational style from most other similarly profiled schools and there is a different culture in the school and a different relationship to peers and teachers, if you are someone who is able to take advantage of this.

And here are leavers' destinations and courses for 2024 (took 30 seconds on google): https://spgs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/University-Destinations-2024.pdf

Some courses at Oxbridge have acceptance rates in the region of 50-60%. I would expect e.g quite a few MML in the actual unpublished data (I may be wrong of course).

Anyway, SPGS has some really good ideas in how they do humanities and languages e.g approaching language studies from a structural linguistics point of view allows much deeper understanding than the usual rote learning done everywhere else, in this respect I think it is actually a special school, but you could only get the benefits of such education if you join at 11+. 6th form is probably too late.

Oh, don't be silly. GCSEs are not that tricky for children capable of getting into these highly selective schools.

The creative subjects are all on the school-directed courses info (these courses are very different to and designed to be more challenging than GCSEs).

If you want to know what girls go on to study, I'd suggest you ask the school.

But since you don't want your daughter to go there anyway, I'm not quite sure why all the angsting as it obviously is irrelevant to you.

You seem to have commented negatively about SPGS on a number of threads without any actual experience of the school. It's a sadly predictable pattern of behaviour for those of us who do have experience with the school.

If your DD gets a offer from SPGS that means she has ability to get those grades, OP! This applies to every school. If a child is not expected to achieve the required grades, they will not receive an offer from that school.

Interestingly, SPGS doesn't publish leaver's courses :)
spgs.org/academic/results/