7+ summer child

[GaliaK]

Hi all!

We are currently preparing for the 7+ assessments in North London schools - very competitive set up! My daughter's birthday is in early July and I think she might be disadvantaged, being a year younger than some of the other applicants with birthdays in Sep/Oct. Does anyone know if selective schools (SHHS, Highgate, City) take into account the child's date of birth for 7+ assessments? Thank you!

They do for the ones you mentioned. They group them together on the day according to birthdays. Also, on the final result they apply a formula to "normalise".

It’s called age standardisation. It’s used routinely for the 11+ exams too.

Yes they do, so it summer borns all show a trend of scoring lower, they will adjust to make it fair. Good luck to her

My ds is August born and got into two of the top schools. They do adjust for age. Good luck!

Independent schools say that they "take it into account" but, unlike selective state schools, they do not use a formula to standardise marks. My sense is that top independent schools would only consider it in borderline cases (see when a child is waitlisted) and only if flagged up by parents. On average, a summer born child will have more of a disadvantage the younger they sit a competitive entrance exam. Of course, if one's child is very bright from a young age, this would offset it.

This is anecdotal but DS has been in selective education since 4 as a summer born. There has always been an even distribution of birthdays throughout out the year. Without some normalisation these schools would all be September births.

I do believe that independents do inadvertently filter SEN students though.

@elij This is encouraging to hear. My own anecdotal evidence suggest the opposite, where Year 7 in a very sought-after school is full of November and December birthdays. So it may be that some schools are much better than others on this.

My son joined Year 7 of a very competitive London boys school after 11+. For this batch, surprisingly, there was a disproportionate proportion of summer-born boys. This may partly be due to the age advantage of autumn born was mostly eliminated, and partly because a lot of autumn born boys were already admitted in the 7+ and 8+ entry points.

In my son's class, there were 12 boys admitted earlier in 7+ and 8+. Of these, about 8-9 were born in Sep to Dec. About 2-3 in Jan to Mar. And only 1 in summer (June or July, forgot which month). The school did say in the 7+ and 8+ admission websites that it would age adjust the results. But whatever they say, they did things differently.

It certainly differ from school to school, so it is better for you to check with existing parents. I think you can try, but don't put too much hope on it.

It would depend entirely on your DC. How do you feel they are doing in maths, English and reading at school? I would have a chat with their teacher and gauge how your DC performs against the rest of the class.

My DS1 has dyspraxia and would not have been able to pass the 7+ despite being academically very able so I didn't put him through it. DS2 is August born but despite that he has a natural flair for numbers and wasn't too bad with reading, although you could see the difference in his standard of written work next to a September born child's work. The assessments are age adjusted if I remember correctly. We did some work on creative writing together between September and the assessments and this built up his confidence to write meaningful sentences/paragraphs etc. He did end up with offers from UCS, City and Highgate.

Have a go with some of the Bond books and Schofield and Sims workbooks and see how your DC gets on with them.

Also, forgot to mention they usually group the children by age for the assessments. So all the summer borns will sit the assessments at an allocated time/date and the older children would sit on another time slot or date.