7% at comps get AAB

[Judy1234]

Just looking at today's FT schools tables/reports. Only 7% of comprehensives get pupils with grades AAB at A level. 62% of pupils get that at the best 50 independent schools (about 70 such pupils a year per school) and about 31 from selective grammar schools.

However the top 10 comps have 31% getting AAB which isn't too bad and the bottom 50 comps have 1% of pupils getting AAB.

The best comperhensive - Watford Grammar gets 8 Oxbridge offers a year.

But then surely you'd expect that. If the school isn't selective, whether it's fee paying or not, you can't expect to get lots of high a level grades so why does the Government want more children proportionately from comprehensives and (new rule) whose parents didn't get to university? It's like saying I want people who aren't right for this given preference over those that are. That these really bright pupils from the state grammar school whose parents both went to univesrity will not be allowed in but these rather thick children who have left it too late to be brought up to an Oxbridge standard age 19 will get preference.
www.ft.com/cms/s/4037c7f2-ceae-11db-b5c8-000b5df10621.html

confused - I think that you have highlighted a critical issue - the self-selecting out of intellectual opportunity by people who lack social confidence. What do you think can be done to remedy this?

I certainly found the public school (especially boarding school and London day school) types at university very loud and sure of themselves and they tended to herd like crazy. I was lucky because I was really very good at my subject, so my confidence grew on that basis.

For places at Oxbridge/Russell Group universities (and there are more "elite" universities in the 1994 Group such as Warwick and Durham) there is a considerable overseas entry now. So the student from the infamous "Bog Standard" comprehensive is also competing against people from all over the world whose parents have invested a great deal in their children's future and see a UK degree as a passport to future success. And if these students come from outside the EU they pay much higher university fees than UK students

Pushy schools, which like to boast about its number of successful Oxbridge candidates, may also have a tendency to push its high achieving pupils into applying for Oxbridge.

I knew of a boy who wanted to study medicine and got pushed towards Oxford. A few months after being accepted, he listened to his inner voice and declined his place, took a GAP year and applied to study at one of the London Universities instead.

lilymaid - yes, the market for higher education is becoming truly global. There was an article in the FT a little while ago about how the middle classes in the Western world don't benefit from globalisation (in fact they get poorer, and so their opportunities in life decrease), but that the very educated/mobile global class is getting richer and richer. In the UK a whole bunch of universities will become globalised and really good, attracting the best students and teaching body from all over the world, and the rest will become national/local and very second rate.

So, for all of you who've got school age children, groom them to compete in the global education economy...

Too many generations of the class system in uk, the I know my place type person portrayed by Ronnie Corbett in a famous sketch in the Frost report in the seventies (?sixties).

I know I was like it with DD when she came home from school saying "I am top in maths, reading etc" in infant school saying she certainly wasn't top in being humble (a joke at the time) and the teacher didn't like her realising she was on top table (called it something silly like teddies or frogs but the kids had twigged)

Yes I did see it myself at university, students from the independents seemed very sure and knowledgable at first but by finals things had changed those of us from the "grotty comps" actually did better (maybe as daddy couldn't fund a resit year with no grant)

Re all this discussion about class...I remember when, after working hard to get A-levels and a good honours degree, having missed out on the "milk round" (to do PGCE but deciding against teaching), and desperately trying to break into the job market, someone (can't remember who) gently explained to me that the reason I wasn't getting the interviews was because I had not "gone to the right schools". They went on to explain that I was probably also overqualified for the entry-level jobs I was going for (office assistant/receptionist in publishing houses etc.) In other words, too clever and not plummy enough. I remember feeling completely outraged at such unfairness. Until that point, whether or not I spoke with the right accent or went to a certain school had never been an issue with me. Perhaps I was very naive, but it still came as a terrible shock! I'd like to think that things are better nowadays....?

Publishing was just horrible to get into, probably still is. My father was a publisher and he's still (ten years into retirement) absolutely maniacal about mastery of English, accent, spelling, grammar etc. All things that you have far more chance of mastering at private than state school.

to clarify of course I meant to ensure they DO attain good gcse and A level results.
I'm not sure we never kept the letter, it came via ds's school with a logo of some kind on it for some association or other.

I think a lot of promising students must fall behind in yrs 8 9 and 10 perhaps and this is to keep tabs on those who show potential.
I don't know
I'm pregnant btw so if I'm lost then you know why...

I wonder how many of those in selective schools have been tutored to get in so they may start falling behind in year 8 when they are not being tutored

I can inform you that in ds's class there are 5 boys out of 28 who have started struggling in this yr 8, all were tutored...
All are now being tutored again of course

A friend of a friend said when trying to get into an indep high pressured school

That tutoring was needed to get in but when asked about what happened when there she said it didn't matter

Getting in was all that was important

How short sighted and silly is that?

Need to correct a few misapprehensions. Lilymaid: universities are allowed to admit a quota of home/EU students each year, the international students are supernumary, so strictly speaking they're not competing with the home students.
Lambchopandchips: UCAS are indeed collecting data about whether applicants' parents went to university, but universities do not see this info when they are making admissions. UCAS have not decided whether they will release this info to universities even after the admissions round is over. I imagine it's being collected for the HE funding councils to see how their widening participation initiatives are going.

I'm glad to hear that the growing numbers of international students is not affecting the number of home students accepted. My DS's experience of fellow interviewees at Russell Group universities doing a very marketable and popular subject was that many had been jetted in from across the world and that most came from independent schools or grammar schools.

I did wonder when my oldest 3 were applying whether if they were doing badly I could "buy" an overseas place to get round the system and if not whether that would be anti competitive that someone from say the US could get in when a home student needed higher grades.

Yes, publishing, they did a survey fairly recently and it was one of the worst careers for fair entry as it didn't have such massive graduate schemes as other big companies do which can try to remove bias and a lot of people were getting publishing jobs because of contacts, not ability. Although in my area they ask if you have a contact and if you do you're discounted or counted down (because they don't want any nepotism) and plenty of anecdotal evidence that if you're black and went to English public school you're like gold dust. You have the accent, manners, skills and education and also you help raise the ethnic numbers too so a double gain all round. I jokingly suggested to my daughter yesterday who raised the subject, that she should try to drum up some ehtnicity (as I believe US college applicants to - if you can find you're one 16th black or hispanic you improve your chances of getting in).

Going back to your original post and your justification of it in response to another poster's qu, Xenia. I do find some of your reflections and what is implied by them quite problematic and revealing. For example,

'Another thing the FT found was that the schools getting better A levels were in the more prosperoius areas. Now why is that if IQ is consistent around the country - do we fail state school children so badly that there is such an impact on their A level results depending on how wealthy the area they are born in and did they not have better chances when the brightest got to go to grammar school?'

TBH, the link between poor academic achievement and poverty has been proven in many studies, it's not exactly a new discovery and it's pretty astoundingly obvious why there should be a link really. It therefore stands to reason that in deprived areas local schools are highly likely to be less academically successful and come way down the league tables. This situation is exacerbated by the league tables themselves so well-educated middle-class parents are likely to research the best performing schools in terms of academic results and head for them. Hence presumably why you and people like you (me included I have to say) have opted out of the system altogether and chosen private schooling although other parents might go for the faith school or city technology option or move out of the area.

The fact that poor children with poor, ill-educated parents who may also have English as a second language and many other disadvantages under-perform when grouped together in a school is also hardly surprising. No school or teacher can compensate for the disadvantages these children have since what happens or doesn't happen in the home is still the biggest influence of a child's motivation, literacy and eventual academic performance. What I resent is the implication that this is in some way the schools fault as I resent the implication that selective, fee-paying schools are automatically good schools and do something miraculous to ensure that their students achieve good A level results. It is almost self-evident that if 2 children have the same IQ but child A has parental support and well-educated parents and child B doesn't then child A will do better academically. It is also fairly likely that if you then put child A into a selective school with otehr children who have parental support and well-educated parents he or she will do better still and the converse is true with child B.

Yes, poor children are being failed as you put it but not by the individual schools although the education system as a whole must be largely to blame. They are failed by the fact that they are poor in the first place, have parents who are poor and ill-educated, live in a poor area, go to a school full of other kids in the same boat etc.

Thats why tertiary education is generational.

How many children starting uni courses are the first in their families to go to university? What courses/unis do they go to?
How many of the students getting better GCSE's and A levels with higher educational aspirations are from 2nd 3rd generation varsity goers.

Would be very interesting to break down some stats indeed.
Certainly it was hoped we'd (my brothers and I) go to university but it was not expected.
Mum went later in life to do her BA, my Dad did night school to gain his quantity surveyors and architecture degree quals.
We all went

bandwcat I strongly agree that fee-paying schools are not automatically good schools, I imagine that at DD's comprehensive school if you "creamed off" the brightest 50-60 pupils ensured they had superb support at home and removed all distractions in the classroom then results would be easily comparable to the best of the selective fee paying schools

I certain don't think it's the schools' fault at all. It's the system that is partly at fault . it's teaching disruptive children with those that aren't, very clever ones with ones who need a lot of help although I'm sure streaming and exclusions help. I have felt we got better teaching in private schools. My children in 15 years have never had a supply teacher for example. That may just be luck but we never had say a class teacher off for more than a day or two illness so you'd always get the same teacher right through the year. Obviously some go on maternity leave but never with any of the 5 children even had that. I suspect some state schools have higher staff turnover and less continuity for the children.

gosh xenia you have a charmed life

But a lot of private schools educate really quite low IQ children. They are not just private grammar equivalents. If you go to somewhere like Millfield you have children who really need a lot of help and the schools in the private sector are often very good at getting the best out of them.

Some tiny private schools set up in someone's home with very few facilities and poor organisation are much worse though than most state schools so you need to pick carefully.

Charmed.. not sure. A lot of the teachers seem to be beyond breeding age for some reason. Then young unmarried ones quite a few in the infants. But presumably a lot of luck too.

(Will probably have major issue with one now I've mentioned it...)

um, rather particular-to-the-general there, xenia.

I suspect your children's schools had low turnover not, primarily, because of being private, but because of being long-established with solid strong reputation - nothing makes it easier to recruit & retain than that - and of course lots of state schools have fantastic reputations.

My children's school (also private) has a very very high turnover, w/ lots of short-stay Antipodeans; it isn't long-established, and doesn't feature (eg) in the Good Schools Guide.

I do think you have a narrow veiw of society
People not in the private sector do receive excellent education - often far exceeding the private schools
our local primary school has a very high % of special needs children and has just received an ofsted rating of 'outstanding' in every single area
Private education is not everyones drug of choice. many people round us ( Including second in command at Britains second largest supermarket...CE of Next and Boots etc etc)choose the state system despite being MORE than able to afford the alternatives

Another issue is the same thing as tutoring to get into private school, but at one remove. We regularly have students failing their exams and being chucked out of medical school because their private schools have spoon-fed them to such an extent that they just don't cope when they're thrown in at the deep end and expected to think for themselves.

But it were as bad as that 50% of Oxbridge entrants would not come from the 10% of A level students at private schools. Oxbridge wouldn't want them because they'd consistently fail and the tutors would hate having thick spoon fed children when they could have bright as a button top of the range state school children surely? No good accent can mask lack of a brain beyond a few sentences.