Shady exams practice- Is this the done thing?

[dylexicdementor11]

A famous private senior school in our city is known to engage in some practices that seem highly unethical.
The school forces children not expected to excel in their exams to take them independently. And they require under preforming students to enlist private tutors.
The schools exam results are outstanding. But this isn’t surprising if they only allow some children to take exams.

These practices seem to be an open secret. My question is- are these practices generally accepted? Are schools not required to disclose the number of children registered/paying fees at the school in addition to disclosing how many students sat exams?
If they are not, how can parents trust the results they report? Am I missing something?

Br Col by any chance?

No this is not general practice at academic schools. Yes it’s shady and obviously casts doubt on that school’s league table position. And can you imagine what it’s like for those poor kids who get told to go off and do their exam separately because the result won’t be up to scratch.

common practice.
All schools and colleges in England - Compare school and college performance data in England - GOV.UK
look at the different number of "entries" vs "students included"
most have a slight difference. Kings College Math 75 entries, 74 counted. St Pauls Girls 111 entries, 109 counted.

It definitely goes on. The other games that are played are to manage the pupil out (off-roll) before exam years, or to cull the herd after gcse and only let those with e.g. 6 x grade7 or above continue to A level and/or to dictate what subjects they can do. There are/were also a couple of schools run as 2 schools in one so if you're on track for good grades you take your exams in centre A (the results of which are marketed to pull in international students), but if your predicted results are not good you're moved across to centre B so as not to sully the brand. All widely known, yet the inspectorates don't seem to dig too deep.

This is really interesting, thank you

A difference of one or two could be a child who is ill at time of exams or repeating a year or similar. A difference of say 5+ looks more strategic.

Excellent grammar school near us encourages kids to drop a GCSE if they are not predicted a 7 (this usually seems to be a language). They would certainly be encouraged to get private tutors, but I think the parents would be doing that anyway if anything less than a 7 was predicted.

Thanks so much. That’s really helpful!

Meh. The DCs are at private school and we looked into DS dropping his language gcse because he was already doing plenty of subjects and was quite stressed, and it was his weakest and most difficult area. There’s probably flexibility to do this at private more than state. In the end, he didn’t, but the school talked it through with us openly and left it to us.

How many GCSEs would you expect your DC to do?

Ours is doing 9 as a GCSE was not possible due to timetabling.. 9 includes 3 sciences.. they are year 10 and I've just heard there is significant whittling down of who sits triple science GCSEs to only 20% of the cohort. If this was the case for our DC they would only sit 8 GCSEs. Is this a disaster? Would anyone notice?

DC is a capable student and expecting 8s and 9s so I'm a bit concerned the school is screwing things up for them.

8 GCSEs is fine and it’s quite common for triple science to be reserved for “top sets” with the rest sitting double science.

sheilafentiman this is the thing they are top set and want to do sciences for a level but just moved to set 2 so I am concerned they have been shunted out of triple science gcse

I would certainly have a word on this, as the school is rather shooting itself in the foot on A levels as those doing double science and then science A levels will start further behind. That's assuming the school has a sixth form?