KS1 SATS and private school scholarship

[trying29]

Hi - I am interested in getting my son into private secondary school. I just wondered about the competitiveness of interviewing at 11+. Do they take KS1 SAT results into consideration?

They will be much more interested in their own exam results.

@trying29 , also be aware that academic scholarships are often around 10% of fees, if you want financial assistance a bursary is a better avenue.

No they are irrelevant. Most private schools opt out of SATS. Performance in the specific exam and interview will be important.

No, SATS are for measuring the school not the pupil anyway. They’ll have their own exams and the 11+. Have you spoken to any schools about admissions criteria?

Go and see the school. Find out their scholarship process. Likely it will be 10-15% reduction.

SATs are of no interest, but school reports and a reference from the current Headteacher will be important to the new school.

Your child will probably get offered a taster day which is a test to see how well they perform in class, behaviour and ability etc. After the taster you might get offer of a place.

It will depend on where you live- none of the schools around us in London offer taster days- they have 100s of children applying.

Scholarships very rarely offer much financial benefit. If you can't afford fees then apply for a bursary, round here 100k is usually the income cut off i think.
They won't care about sats only internal assessments however you would be expecting a scholarship child to be scoring full marks in SATS.

And find a good tutor.

Even if he got full marks in the sats? Thanks for everyones advice

It depends what sort of schools you're looking at- lots and lots of children at the very selective schools would have got full marks in ks1 sats.

One of mine got full marks in his ks1 sats and almost full marks in his ks2 sats. He wouldn't have got into the top Lonfon private schools let alone a scholarship.

The OP didn’t say she was looking at “Top London” schools, whatever that means.

Its perfectly possible to gain a scholarship from a Primary School without paying for a tutor. If you have a bright child who works hard and gets results I’d definitely ask for the scholarship requirements.

A handful of my Y6 pupils apply to various different private secondaries each year. They always ask for current exam results (based on old SATs) and predicted SAT results as part of their reference request so it does inform them but not for scholarships.

In the last 6 years, roughly half of those applying from my Y6 classes have been offered academic scholarships but these have been based more on their performance in the school entrance exams. In one year, two children did get full fee scholarships but that was highly unusual, in my experience. They were also told that if they shared that information with their cohort, the scholarship would be withdrawn. As such, it may happen without most students being aware. We only knew as we were informed directly by the school.

thank you everyone for your insights. lots to think about!

There's a service (based in Bristol I think) called Spotlight Education who are a group of headteachers who provide support and an online discussion to help you make those first few steps. They'll even help you see if going through the application process is right for your child, its cool and I know a few mums who are raving about simply not getting that kind of feedback from their kids' current school. Worth a check?

No secondary school will really look at the results they got age 7. It'll all be on their own entrance exams.

Full marks in SATs at 7 is a good sign but not necessarily a guarantee of a scholarship at 11.

New rules mean that max scholarships don't go above 50% and more commonly they are around 10-20%.