Paging Admission teams Folk

[11pluscurious]

I had a kind supportive answer from someone on the main secondary school board but I wanted to check this board for any other views

I’m after a bit of context about independent school admissions from the school side?
Does anyone know whether it’s true that independent schools have contextual offers for children from state primary backgrounds? Nothing to do with ability but rather expectations of children in the prep system to have greater familiarity with content. I’ve been told this but not sure whether it’s true? Also does anyone know whether registrations for 11+ are generally down for academic schools in London.

If it’s helpful to understand more about why I’m asking the question, DS is at state primary in north London and sat for 2 state 11+ grammar exams. Anecdotally it’s been particularly competitive this year (maybe independent school parents choosing state because of VAT?) so hard to judge whether he’ll end up with a place.
We have 2 independent school options that we actually prefer as they seem a bit less hot housey than the grammar schools we applied to and they are slightly better commute, but they are still competitive schools and I don’t want him to do much more preparation if I can help it. He’s a bright child but I’m not a fan of 10 year olds having to be so focused on studies at this age and it feels like it’s been going on forever.

What I’m trying to gauge is whether it’s worth trying for these schools on the basis he is bright and has already prepped for one type of exam as hopefully his potential will shine through or whether there’s not much point as he needs to prepare in a more targeted way for the schools in question.

Thanks so much anyone who can advise

If your DS is up for a few more exams and won’t be stressed out by them, I see no reason not to give it a go. These schools, and some parents, like to emphasise how competitive they are to get in to, but I’m not sure that’s always completely true.

My experience of doing 11+ from a state primary, although it’s now a few years old, was that prep for the super selective grammar and prep for the private school exams were similar. But that was partly because we had a DC who was reading widely by choice, was working at greater depth across the board and so it was really just learning the Y6 maths syllabus and exam technique. A couple of past papers for each school, continuing practice on weaker areas, plus some online practice for multiple choice VR/NVR was sufficient to build on what we’d done for the grammars.

One of our local private schools has bursary places for dc in state primaries and living in HA properties, another works with local primaries to provide enrichment activities. Both have a number of children applying from state schools each year regardless, but don't think their entrance test results are treated differently,

Anecdotally, this seems to be the case. I suspect it's true for the most elite private schools as well. These schools want to admit students from state backgrounds to avoid appearing too biased (bad PR) , especially when over 80% of their intakes come from private prep schools after bursaries places.

I think passing the exam and being able to pay are the key criteria - they don’t care which primary school they are from.

I have a friend who is Deputy Head Admissions as an independent senior school.

He says they do consider state school students differently to those from preps.

The entry exam scores of course still count, but they appreciate that compared to prep kids they will have potentially done a lot less practice.

Which is why school contacts primary teachers and references for scholarships etc.

He also says the state school kids' interviews are often much less robotic and more interesting as they're rarely been coached as to what to discuss.

It encouraged us to apply to independent schools from a state primary (got an offer from his but DD got a better offer from her #1 choice - we really valued his advice though.)

Thank you. I really appreciate you responding. 😊 In the end we have put DS in for a few exams but tried to keep it lowkey and relaxed. Our head is openly quite anti grammar school and anti private school so I’ve no idea what he’ll say in a reference but I hope DS gets interviews as he is nothing if not authentic (and opinionated!)

By the way it was a quite revealing to us how schools used their pupils at open days - there were some where the children were clearly delivering scripts written by adults and it had the opposite affect of making me think they would develop confident, polished, engaged young people. It reminds me a bit of perfume marketed for babies when the smell of a new baby is the best smell on earth! I love chatting to young people, clearly smart, but thinking about things anew and with all their potential to come.