Early registration advantages for Wimbledon Common Prep School?

[BBU]

Hi everyone

We are currently looking at early registration / waitlist registrations for schools for our son - as we are both ex pats, neither of us have any first hand experience with English schools. We have been told by colleagues that for highly competitive schools, we should look to register our son as soon as possible after birth. We have looked at good prep schools in our area and can see that for non-selective schools, this may be advantageous.

What we are not sure about is how this works for selective schools - one of the ones we are looking at is Wimbledon Common Prep School which based on our research is selective from 4+ but their website seems to encourage you to register as soon as a birth certificate is available. Is it that case that they only send assessment invitations if you are the first [x] number of registrations? Or if everyone who registers gets to go to the assessment, what is the advantage of registering early?

Given that each registration seems to cost £150 (!) we wanted to not spend this unless we have to but also don't want him to miss out due to our ignorance.

Many thanks in advanced!

No experience specifically of Squirrels OP but nearby The Study (non-selective, all girls), for example, guarantees a place if you register by a certain date.

I’d email them and ask in your position - Admissions Officers are generally quite helpful on specifics like this. You might also want to ask how different applications for Sept ‘24 compared to previous years has been, due to the VAT issues etc.

My elder one goes to Squirrels and younger one is due to start in September. I don’t think there are any advantages as such to registering early. All kids go through the assessment day for 4+ which is held 18m in advance. As long as you register in time, you’ll be fine.

Thank you! Very helpful - we might leave it a couple of years and register him when he’s 2 years out then.

They will have space even later, as few boys leave the school before year 2.

Indeed - I think they struggled to fill all the places last year (they’d changed the admission timescales which didn’t work out) and it meant that we had new kids joining at the end of the first term and again in Year 1 as well.