Is it worth switching from independent to state for A level if applying for a highly competitive subject?

[rougheredges]

DS is in yr 10 in an independent school. He’s really happy there- we’re pleased with the academics and he’s got a lovely group of friends. He’s currently predicted grade 8/9 in 9 of his GCSEs (and a 7 in DT which he’s doing because he loves if!) He’s managing this pretty effortlessly.

Currently he’s thinking he’d like to study Economics at one of the tougher universities to get an offer from. He knows he’ll need lots of extra/ super curriculars as well, but his friend’s dad told him today that he might find it harder applying from an independent school. Apparently there’s less wiggle room and the bar is higher.

I’ve looked online and there’s a lot of conflicting information. Most of what’s out there seems to refer to contextual offers which isn’t relevant. I’ve read that it does matter/ it doesn’t matter/ they take where you did GCSEs into account so it’s too late/ they prioritise state schools/ it’s all about grades and PS.

I fear the answer may lie somewhere in the middle of all that but is there anyone who could give more guidance? His current school are keen to keep him (he’s currently an academic scholar with a princely 5% bursary!) so I’m not convinced they’d give unbiased advice.

(Local state school is great. He’d have gone there but it’s C of E and we didn’t qualify being disorganised atheists who figured it out too late. They remove the church attendance requirement at A level.)

Does anyone have any info?

Not once have I said social class should dictate entry requirements. I think innate academic ability is what counts - my core belief, as you call it.

Your are being quite unpleasant when you say 'this is gold', as if I am some sort of halfwit. I am not. The references to the NHS and female suffrage are examples of the progressivism I mostly espouse and provide historical context. One of my great, great grandmothers signed her marriage certificate with a cross because she could not write. I have a degree, because society changed in the 100 years between her marriage and my birth, thanks to people who looked at the status quo and thought it was wrong.

Your understanding of the term identity politics is flawed. Widening participation in higher education is a mainstream view across political parties and has been for about two decades. Lest you should run away with the idea that I am a devotee of social engineering in education, I'll mention that I disagree with VAT being applied to school fees and with suggestions from Labour that children from deprived backgrounds should be bussed to schools in more affluent areas.

Not once have I said social class should dictate entry requirements.

Back to the beginning of the loop we go…..

Out of curiosity I must ask @Jeantheoldbean whether she carries on like this in spoken conversations? Barges into someone else's request for help and dominates the conversation by repeatedly derailing?

At the risk of disagreeing with you and therefore not being a decent person. Each lower offer comes at the expense of someone else who could meet the original offer and at scale lowers the standards and devalues the degree for others who did meet the requirements.

It absolutely does not. Some of those pupils at state school may have got A rather than B grades if they'd been privately educated. If you then argue that this is not the case then why on earth do parents pay tens of thousands of pounds for a private education if it's not to support their children to get the highest possible grades?

You are going back to the beginning of the original loop by persisting in assigning to me a view I do not hold: that social class should dictate diary requirements (it shouldn't). I have made the loop larger by introducing new elements which you find risible and which you cast aside rather than engage with.

This is exactly what I mean when I say identity politics and social engineering should be kept out of education.

I think we agree that the aim is that the most potentially able - ie those who have the ability to do best on the selective course - should be admitted. That is not social engineering or identity politics, it’s educational.

The difficulty is that an ‘achieved grades only’ admissions procedure does not achieve the admission of the most potentially able.

Didn’t you say the evidence you saw was that state school kids got the same or better degree results as private educated kids when they started with the same A level results? Why would that suggest they should have got in with lower a level grades?

I’m not arguing anything about private schools, but a major reason would be for a good education to get good grades.., you’re right,

That is a fallacy. The intent if contextual offers is that students of equal ability, but from educational backgrounds that have not translated these into precisely equal grades, should be admitted.

Yes, this does mean that some students with higher grades but potentially lower ability are not admitted - and the identification of these is imperfect. But admitting on grades only us equally imperfect, as it excludes those of equal or higher ability whose attained grades to date may be lower due to circumstances beyond their control.

The motives of the poster I was discussing this with are definitely social engineering, they want make a perfect world and linked it to giving women a vote.
Sure it’s not perfect, but there has to be a cut off at some point when you’re ready to be assessed in a quantitive way and A levels seem the best.Reading about how Labour shutdown the grammar schools and it was much the same arguments . People are so easily persuaded to give things away by a little bit of envy poking.

You are comparing apples with pears, @Jeantheoldbean. 93% of children are state educated. Of those, around 50% go to university and of that 50%, around 20% of applicants are given contextual offers, a very small number of whom may be from independent schools.

Unwittingly, you have just argued the case for contextual offers with your acknowledgement that parents pay for the chance of better grades.

How are you assessing these people with ‘higher grades but potentially lower ability’ who lose their place to someone with lower grades but a poor postcode?

Except it doesn’t. You keep on repeating that someone being offered a place with a contextual offer means someone hasn’t been made a non-contextual offer. HE has expanded. There are enough places for all. No one is losing out to make room for those with contextual offers. Similarly no-one is losing out to make room for international students. There is room for all.

As others have posted, there is no correlation in degree outcomes and entry grades.

If you have some evidence the above is not true please post it.

Its 16% to 20% of Alevel students go private schools and about 7% grammar, these are generally selective to highly selective and a high proportion will go into university.

Unwittingly, you have just argued the case for contextual offers with your acknowledgement that parents pay for the chance of better grade

In what way? Surely that would only be if you believe contextual offers were a form
of discrimination for non tax payer funded educated children progressing to UK universities? Surely that can’t be the case?

No stay in your private school. Leave the state 6th forms for the state Sch kids ffs!

Can you send me a link to one course that has unlimited places? It doesn’t even have to be a highly sought after course.

As others have posted, there is no correlation in degree outcomes and entry grades.
What?

That’s the difficult bit - absolutely worthwhile, to avoid the ‘simple but wrong’ grades-only approach, but difficult.

It is easy to see retrospectively that, statistically, some advantaged students (through previous education and background) did less well than some disadvantaged pupils with lower entry grades.

Exactly identifying who should therefore be admitted, at an individual level, is hard. All the mechanisms of postcode quintile; school; first generation for university etc are imperfect, and would, one hopes, gradually be refined with further data.

An alternative approach to levelling the playing field is the foundation course / bridging course / summer school type, where organisations like the Sutton Trust or the universities themselves run courses to ‘top up’ educational provision (and potentially add further opportunities for assessment of underlying ability).

Or maybe some exams and coursework ?

Performance in (standard) exams and coursework are dependent on school and home background, and thus not a reliable single indicator of ability.

Whereas performance in a residential setting most closely allied to the university course of choice may give further information.

No measure is perfect. It’s interesting, for example, that the musicians admitted to conservatoire and to orchestral jobs are different depending on whether the audition is behind screens or performed in view of the selectors. It shows that truly unbiased selection on merit / ability alone is - though am ideal to be striven for - very hard to achieve. Equally, the students admitted to Ixbridge in the Covid-era remote interviews were different in terms of cohort characteristics - though not of different ability iirc - from those admitted via previous in person interviews.

Exam result-only selection is demonstrably imperfect. Isn’t it right that we strive for something less imperfect?

And by less perfect we’ve come up with post code, number of kids in your school on free school meals and parents salary when you were 14? I think a transparent exam system is much fairer and less open to political social engineering scope creep.

Look at the proliferation of spaces in clearing. Hell look at unis still advertising places now, after the January deadline. Look at the growth in UGs.

Unis don’t advertise they have ‘unlimited’ places (in practical terms this simply means they have room for all who accept their offer), but the evidence above, plus my own and others who work in the sector’s knowledge tells me that no one is turning down an applicant who is privately educated and hits the requirements, in favour of a contextual or international applicant.

You made the assertion - it’s on you to provide evidence.

What did you mean by ‘what’ - did you find that sentence difficult to understand?

The question is, are those students being admitted via contextual offers doing statistically worse than their peers once at university?

We know that privately educated students do statistically marginally worse than their state-educated peers once at university. In universities where contextual measures are taken into account, does this gap narrow (ie are we admitting a more closely balanced set of students as a result of using contextual information )?

Can you point me at any recent data?

@Jeantheoldbean
Contextual offers are usually based on an analysis of multiple contextual flags. Normally (but not always) you have to have to have at least two flags. One of these may be attending a school with a lower performing cohort. Most people would recognise that it is harder to attain high grades where educational resources are more limited, staff retention is more difficult and there is more disruptive and challenging behaviour amongst peers. You may think that the schools that young people attend do not influence their grades in any way, but I and many others think that the school environment can influence outcomes. As has been highlighted previously on the thread other aspects of the environment can also be an influence.
Contextual offers recognise that environmental factors influence academic outcomes. They enable young people who have achieved strong grades in challenging circumstances to access highly selective courses. So for example a student that had received FSMs and attended a low achieving state school may be offered AAB whereas a student who had not received FSMs snd attended a higher achieving private or state school will be offered AAA. Both students can access the course if they achieve the offers. No one is excluded based on their school. The former student has a lower offer because the university recognises that their current environment makes attaining higher grades more challenging. However, it is arguable they will flourish once some (but not all) of these barriers are removed at university.
I understand you may disagree with this system, but I think the underpinning reasoning is clear.

An exam system can be ‘equal’ but not ‘equitable’.

An exam taken after lower numbers of teaching hours by lower quality teachers; with poorer equipment; in a larger class with more disruptive behaviour , a much wider ability range and more SEN pupils; and by a pupil who has no computer and no study space at home is the same EXAM, but attaining the same mark might well be more difficult. HOW MUCH more difficult is definitely up for debate, but it being more difficult is surely incontrovertible?

https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/admissions-in-context-access-gap/#:~:text=There%20is%20little%20evidence%20to,of%2050%25%20on%20current%20numbers.

Its a few years old, I doubt there’ll be anything more recent as we need the Covid effect to work itself out of the data.