Private school pupils penalised

[Cortina]

school

Thoughts on this? Has this been happening anyway? Interesting.

goinggetstough Judging against the performance of their peers at the same school sounds a good way to start.

sue52 Judging against the performance of their peers at the same school would show attainment not potential surely?

ARgggh so many people still talking about this being state vs private and how this gives state grammar school kids unfair advantage etc. It's not. It's about comparing a pupils performance with those in the school generally. Therefore it will also 'penalise', if that's the word you want to use, kids from high-performing grammar schools or comps in affluent areas. And it may 'assist' kids from crap private schools (of which there are a few, mine for starters). 4 As at Eton is not as much an achievement as 4As from a school that has 20% getting 5 GSCES. It self-evidently isn't. You can't send your children to a school because of its marvellous results and then complain about the fact that a university admissions might take this fact into account.

goinggetstough Tricky to judge. However anyone achieving very good grades in a poorly performing comprehensive where education is not valued by the majority of students will probably be a highly motivated self starter and should be given every opportunity to excel. Coming out with 10 A*/As at a grammar is good but not exceptional.

I think many admissions tutors view grammars in the same light as independent schools.

In my opinion it's not so much the grades that give private school pupils the advantage, but the inside knowledge, expert preparation and the crafting of eye-catching personal statements.

I think that universities should have the lee-way to be able to offer perhaps lower grades to an applicant who in person clearly shows potential but may not be experiencing the greatest teaching, but judging on paper seems fraught with inequality both for the advantaged and the not so.

ElaineReece, I don't understand your comment! Why is it strange that people would pay for the experience rather than the grades? Surely, if grades were all that mattered I would have sent them to the primary school round the corner which ofsted salivated over due to their exceptionally high sats results

Well good - you got the experience, which I'm sure was very nice! However just for once the advantage might not be with the private school pupils, which I'm sure you'll agree is a fair and refreshing change!

They are getting the experience, yes!

I said early on in the thread that I was more than happy for disadvantaged children to have other factors taken into account. However, as I went on to post, not all children at state school are disadvataged. Many are leading just an advantaged life as their next door neighbour at the local indie school.

Perhaps.

Anyway, i don't see that it's really anything much more than all the ways universities always could, if they wanted to, take educational/social background into account, basically put into a spreadsheet for easy comparison. I don't think anyone's going to be made to use it, or that it will be much more than a way to deal with and differentiate between the increasing number of straight-A students.

Sorry. I see the story, but don't understand how this means that private schools are penalised.

Why are they penalised?

I don't think the kids at the Very Nice comprehensive in their middle class enclave (where most of the kids do very well anyway) are going to benefit enormously from this. They're likely to be treated very similarly to the kids at the local private school which gets broadly similar results.

It's the kid who goes to an absolutely dire sink estate school who manages to get 3Bs despite everything that will benefit.

Bonsoir - I would have thought that idea is that the hypothetical child in your example could still get into university even if his parents were unable or unwilling to scrape together the money to go private.

Cortina that's what the SAT (standardised aptitude test for reasoning) is, in theory. The SAT IIs are an attempt to have subject specific tests which everyone applying to the university takes, which we already have here in the UK (A-levels).

In practice, some kids are drilled for it and do hundreds of practice tests which you can buy online, do courses at school or with Kaplan or the Princeton Review or one of the many other for-profit test-prep outfits. I'm speaking from intimate personal experience here...god, the hours of practicing timings for the reading comprehension section, the test techniques (skim read paragraph, read the questions, go back and read again and underline points relevant to the questions, if you can't answer a question make a guess and move on after precisely 40 seconds etc etc etc)

Finally the SATs are expensive and you pay for each sitting in cold hard cash - so some kids can only afford one shot, and other kids can afford to take them more than once to improve their score.

Again - there's absolutely no way you can winnow out the kids that have parents willing to go to any lengths to give them a leg up. What we as a society should be doing is making sure that even kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are getting a great education at school and not trying to massage the criteria to make it appear that a student getting AAB is the same as one getting BBC because they're doing better relative to their peers at their school.

It's not penalising private school children, it's giving able students from poorly performing schools a leg up. That benefits society surely.

The claim that comprehensive children with lower grades outperform the independently educated at degree level is generally misreported in the media since it refers to a composite of all degrees from all universities.
www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/teachers/presentations/key_issues_v2.pdf

From the report above you will also see that Cambridge offer holders from Comps did as well as offer holders from the independent sector in the number of A* achieved.

7% of all children are privately educated but about 16% of sixth formers are. this difference is due to the larger proportion of state educated 16 year olds who choose to leave school at 16, so the differential in performance is less than it might seem.

It is insulting and untrue to say that teachers of A level in state schools are less able than those in independent schools. Most media reporting about education is tosh.

However, parents do not pay large sums to private schools if they think they can get a similar experience (grades) from the state sector and to claim it is "for the experience and extras only" is disingenuous.

And regarding the discussion about US SATS, there is a battery of tests available to Uk universities to ascertain aptitude. LNAT for Law, or Cambridge Law Test; TSA (Thinking skills) HAT (History) LAT (languages) BMAT (medicine) ELAT (English)...the list goes on...

A quick look at google tells me you can pay for tutoring in those tests.

I'm not sure why you see my reasoning as disingeneous, electra44 ?

Why is it ok to pay for results and not for the 'extras'? Surely if results were what I wanted I would not have paid at 4 but rather sent them to the very high performing state school around the corner?

I really don't understand what the problem is with accepting that people pay for a whole host of reasons not all of which are to avoid the general population or 'buy' higher grades.

I fully appreciate it's a luxury not everyone can afford but that doesn't mean my reasons for paying change.

This does happen at the moment, as I think it should.

My inner city London comp has more than 99% of its kids from ethnic minorities. Almost half the kids are on free school meals and are off the scale using any measure of deprivation.

To get an C at GCSE, they will have had to cope with coming from a background in which English is at least the second language, if not the seven or eighth (in a fair few cases). They will also have parents who are not well-educated, or may not have been educated at all. They have also rarely left this suburb of London, so have no idea what the outside world is like. In terms of practicalities, they may also struggle to do their homework as there is rarely any personal space in which to do it and they may have to cook/ look after younger siblings.

Their C is NOT the same as a C grade from somebody whose background represents the kind of privilege that means they can afford to pay for an education.

This year we have two children going to study medicine who have not achieved straight As at A-level. We have also been told by Oxford that any child from our school who applies has a very high chance of attaining an interview irrespective of their grades (never fear, nobody has yet applied as many of them don't even know why they would want to).

Sorry, and to reply to another post:

Teachers in state schools are just as good as teachers in independent schools, if not better. Believe me, it is hard to help a bright student gain a D in English when they are from a poor background, have never seen their parents read a book, know anybody who has a job, have never been to the theatre or watched art films, think university is an alien concept and don't own books themselves. Helping an average student whose parents are paying for their education get a B grade? Much easier because the parents will also pay for the theatre/ cinema/ books/ set revision time and know how to encourage.

Tortu, it's right that children from your comp should be viewed within their wider context. I am certainly not arguing that bright children from deprived backgrounds should be encouraged or helped up.

All I was saying is that there is a vast difference between the children you are talking about and the children who go to state school in very affluent areas. They are really not disadvantaged or lagging behind their literal next door neighbours at private school. In fact the gap between those kids and their privately educated neighbour is probably far, far less than between them and the kids you are talking about. Which just shows it isn't a private/state debate at all.

I think another point about the SATs (I did them in England as a sort of pre-LNAT to indicate where my flaws were) is that, as I understand it, America doesn't have a national curriculum, so the tests can't really be ones that you can prep for. If you think about GCSEs and A Levels, each teacher will have a syllabus and they KNOW that the questions will be on that. They may also know that there is generally a 10 mark question on, for example, evolution, and a 2 mark question on blood. So they will focus on evolution in classes. American teachers can't do that. (Americans correct me if I am wrong here).

We were told that to get into Ivy League people nearly always take tests a few times and boost their scores each time. Also, although you can't exactly prepare for them in the same way as GCSEs and A Levels, there are systems and ways to approach them. One thing I think is good about them is the negative marking in the maths paper. In the UK you are taught to have a guess, because you may be right and you might get marks for your working out. Not on the SATs - you guess and you risk losing marks. It's not worth it. So in that respect they don't show potential, because a genius way of tackling a tricky problem that just goes a bit wrong wouldn't get any marks. I think our system would possibly reward an attempt at a more difficult problem if the approach was correct.

Tortu I agree there are very good teachers in both sectors. If it is difficult to teach a bright student from a poor background to the D standard by an excellent teacher, how therefore will these students survive at university where they need to be self starters.

Helping an average student whose parents are paying for their education get a B grade? Much easier because the parents will also pay for the theatre/ cinema/ books/ set revision time and know how to encourage.