First Conservative education secretary to send child to state secondary

[BananaChoccyPancake]

Of course, not your average run-of-the-mill state secondary ....

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10674662/Michael-Goves-daughter-wins-place-at-state-school.html

Lucky for them they weren't caught out by the adjudicators admissions ruling.

I wonder if that was one of the schools he was offering to show Simon Cowell round.

I remember Gillian Shephard very well, and that her dh was a head teacher. She was a good sort.
Someone said further down the thread that Grey Coat would not offer languages such as Russian, Mandarin etc, unlike independent schools. It does, as it is a Specialist Language College. I do think this is a contributory factor to its oversubscription, very few state schools offer access to a range of MFLs taught to A level.
What Mr Gove has not done is sent his daughter to Burlington Danes, an Outstanding C of E comprehensive much nearer where he lives. I don't expect Nancy Cameron will go to Burlington Danes either. Despite all the Government's brave talk about schools like Burlington Danes bucking the trend and offering a really good education to a mixed-ability and economically-challenged local community, none of them have chosen it for their children.

No it offers French, German, Spanish and Latin but not Chinese, Greek or Russian.

Latin is unusual for a cough splutter comprehensive, as is the choice of three MFLs.

But still not as many as one of the well-known London private schools.

And no Latin at A Level, so it still doesn't really prepare you to go off and do Classics at Oxbridge the way that a top private school would.

The reason for oversubscription is quite simple - it gets good (not necessarily value-added, but certainly absolute) results, by excluding boys and by excluding disadvantaged children. Good results mean more applicants.

Aga. You say Greycoat Excludes disadvantaged children, yet it has 14.3% FSM , which for a "Middle Class and Successful " Secondary School is "High".

I was positive it used to offer more choices than that, good though those are

The local average is 33%, though motown3000.

Hmm, I may have done down their private-school-lite credentials down a little too much.

Westminster School offers Grey Coat students free A Level Latin lessons, as a special privilege:

www.gch.org.uk/language-latin.aspx

Seems rather ridiculous that 'state school outreach' can amount to educating the Govette, who could well afford to go to Westminster in the first place, but maybe it does help some others who are not so wealthy.

And they offer Mandarin as an enrichment lesson, at sub-GCSE level

www.gch.org.uk/mfl-curriculum.aspx

It does look rather yummy, and certainly not repeatable in schools that lack their plurality of bright girls.

Not all the girls attending Grey Coat are well-to-do, or from pushy middle-class backgrounds. My dd and a friend both applied for church places with the same church criteria. She put the school first and as it happened we put it second, as we had a shot at a school closer to home. They got a place and they could not be more different from the Gove-Vine household if they tried.
The Latin thing will be possibly influenced by the crisis-level shortage of classics teachers in this country. Every year about 70 retire...and there are only 12 PGCE places for Latin & Greek, offered at only two universities now. I suspect that someone from Grey Coat retired and they have not been able to replace them.

Is this the educational equivalent of John Gummer's daughter eating a beef burger back in the 90s?