Any early signs that a child will be capable of passing 11+?

[NumptyNu]

Potentially a question for teachers really, but feel free to chip in mums and dads with any useful info and experiences. My question is, does it follow that if your child is doing well in year one or two, that you can extrapolate out a few years and assume they will be 11+ candidate? Or vice versa, would a slow reader at age 5 result in a lower potential for passing the 11+?

Is this a classic case of primary schooling being a marathon rather than a sprint? Or is there a clear correlation between bright kids at age 6 going on to 11+ success?

Yes. My girls are at a suoerselective and have never done a CATS test.

Look for the ones who have brown bread sandwiches, Boden-type clothes and talk cheerfully about them coming from charity shops,own a bell tent, say they never go to Mcadonalds, have an organic vegetable box, eat lots of hummus, are called things like Oliver and Helen, go to Tuscany or Cornwall for their holidays, are always faux modest about their child's achievements, have a living room not a lounge and have very dirty cars.

Hakluyt

I thought you knew me until you mentioned the dirty car. We don't have a car.

Sorry- that should have read "very dirty car. Or no car at all"

I am my own meme.

Brown bread sandwiches? Nope. My kids don't like sandwiches. They take in pots of pasta or rice.
Boden? Nope. Never.
Bell tent? Nope. But we have a camper van does that count?
Macdonalds? My kids have never set foot inside. Vegetarians.
Veg box? Nope. There is an organic van parks in our road at the weekends but we don't use it, they sell fish too so we boycott.
Hummus? Kids won't touch it (I love it)
Names like Oliver and Helen? Nope. My kids do not have names like Oliver and Helen
Tuscany? Nope. Cornwall? YES. Always. For practical reasons.
Modest? Faux or otherwise? Difficult to say. My kids say I'm negative and pessimistic. I say I'm realistic.
Living room? Yep. Nobody where I was growing up had a lounge. Posh people have lounges. The might be a regional thing.

Dirty car? We don't have a car. Our van is filthy though. :(

Hakluyt: I don't know whether to laugh or hide, I'm (almost fully) your cliché!! Except in the faux modesty - whilst my children are academically able, I don't think that that's anything to boast about IRL. Really

But to contribute to the thread, my twins are at a fairly selective grammar (massive catchment not in a grammar county). They too were "free readers" in year 1 and have always been "above national average" according to the old curriculum levels.

But they have always been inquisitive children and very keen to learn. I don't feel that we have ever had to push them with regards to schooling, with the 11+ they only did it because they wanted to try. We were all well aware of the high number of candidates.

Re the poster upthread about children in reception who are bright vs well prepared: what is a "well prepared" 4 year old???

"Posh people have lounges."

I'm amazed your children passed the 11+ if you think that............

"Posh people have lounges."

Er, no they don't!

But seriously. Yes, you can look at a Reception class and make a pretty accurate prediction about who will pass the 11+ and who won't- unless you are talking about a super selective, where the numbers taking the test compared to the number of places means that there has to be a bit of a lottery element. If it's a "traditional" 25:75ish split, then the engaged, interested supported 4 year old is probably going to be an engaged, interested supported 10 year old. You have to be clever to pass, but parental support is at least, if not more, important. Not fair, but true.

Where I grew up yes they did. As I said, it's probably a regional thing.

We actually have a 'livvy' not a living room. That's regional too. Not the region we live in now I hasten to add. Here it's all front rooms. And one person I know has a sitting room. It's like sofa/settee/couch or toilet/loo - different terms have completely different connotations in different parts of the country.

"It's like sofa/settee/couch or toilet/loo - different terms have completely different connotations in different parts of the country."

They don't, you know!

But anyway. Back to the thread. I am sorry I derailed it, OP.

You can extrapolate very broadly- as I said, bright and supported in a Reception usually means bright and supported in year 6. But there will be bright but unsupported children in reception who will not archive their potential, and will be easily outstripped by possibly less bright but supported children. That is why (sorry-another potential derail) why selective education is so socially divisive.

Off-topic, probably, but as there seems to be a sub-text developing about access to/support with 11+ help possibly being a class issue, how people refer to such rooms is historically more a class thing than a regional one. And being money-rich doesn't mean being posh.
So, lounge/living room = lower middle class (even if monied) whereas sitting room/drawing room = higher classes, even if broke.

Bit like the serviette/napkin debate.

Anyway, as you were...

Not to mention "pardon vs what!"

They definitely do. Influenced by the people who have always lived there, but also the incomers. So, where you have for example a large (or at least a cohesive) immigrant community a word or a way of pronouncing a word that used to denote one thing can come to denote something completely different. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this. I

I think you're mixing up money/class.

Clam - I certainly agree with you that being money rich doesn't make you posh. Some of the more impoverished people I have known in real terms have been technically the poshest. Class and financial resources (and indeed class and education) are often not aligned. Although they often are - it's just not something you can construct a useful rule of thumb for even if you ignore the impact of mobile populations (whatever we think about social mobility there has been a huge amount of geographical mobility in the last 150 years or so). That's only one of the reasons why I think assuming that using a traditional english word for something, or eating traditionally 'worthy' english food denotes anything these days. The 'tells' are things like access to books, music lessons etc, not linguistic tags or dietary preference.

Clam - I'm really not. Quite the reverse.

A personal anecdote but I think it is more complex than doing well at school in year 1 and 2. DD1 was put on a table with the SN kids in reception because she was very anxious and nervous about school and her speech was quite poor. The kids who were on the top tables were those who had been taught to read and write at nursery.

She was seen by a speech therapy centre later that year who IQ tested her and thought she had a very high IQ indeed. This turned out to be the case but it wasn't evident at school until she was around 7 or 8. She did go to a super-selective and got A/A* at GCSE and A level.

I still know 6 kids who were top table in reception and they did fine but not brilliantly despite going on to private schools and good comps (we do not live in a grammar school area and DD1 commuted quite a way).

Some 'SN kids' are the ones on the top table. They really aren't automatically discrete groupings with no overlap, you know. It's not unheard of for kids with SEN issues to have been taught to read and write at nursery, either (in fact for some SEN issues learning how to do stuff like that early on is a good pathway into developing automatic coping strategies which will stand them in good stead later on. Not all, obviously. But some).

"Some 'SN kids' are the ones on the top table."

Absolutely. For some strange reason they don't (with notable exceptions of course) tend to pass the 11+ though.

I've read somewhere reliable that the best indicator of future academic success is the number of words the child knows/understands/uses in reception.

And the level of education of the mother. And not being poor.

(As usual, there are many exceptions to these generalisations)

At DS's school they've been in sets (1,2,3) for Maths and English since year 3 with largely the children who achieved level 3 in Yr2 in group 1. The 11+ here is pretty much Maths and English (very small amount of VR and NVR) and, largely the children in group 1 all passed, maybe 50% of group 2 did. There's been a little movement between groups but 90% are in the same group in yr6 as they were in yr3.

So I would say in our school it must've been fairly clear in infant school which children would/would not pass.

I've been able to predict pretty accurately who was going to get into Grammar based on who were given the largest speaking parts in the KS1 Nativity Play!