What would you choose? Top private school or superselective grammar?

[goldieandthreebears]

Here is my dilema:
My very academic 10 year old DD (my eldest of 3) has just gone through the horror of 11+ and sailed through.
Back in September she got top marks in a super-selective grammar school so it is highly possible that she will get an offer from that school on 1st March.
Last week she sat a top academic girls private school and has been offered an academic scholarship (a reduction of the fees by 10%).
DH and I are both professionals working in the public sector,so although we are by no means struggling it would be quite difficult to send all 3 of our children to private secondary schools.
My DD is extremely hard workind and she would be fine in both schools. She is also very sporty and a good musician and both schools cater for these. However, the private school is a 10 minute bike ride from home whereas the grammar school would be a 45 minute journey.This worries me slightly as she is generally very busy in the evenings with her competitive sports club. What would you do?

[lovepathanalysis]

Hi amidaiwas,
Yes, I think this is the better choice and thanks again for giving me that mental push I desperately needed....

[lovepathanalysis]

Thanks, so much GRW, finally I feel like I am doing the right thing... DH was not very keen on the long commute and eventual move but I always felt that was the best for my DD.

[amidaiwas]

Honestly it's so important to get the right fit academically. Don't think the private school is automatically a better option just because it is fee paying. She needs a peer group at the same academic level - if you have that available take it. 45 mins is ok especially considering you can drop her off in the morning.

And yes i am sure it will be far easier to move from grammar to indie than vice versa. Many independents have a second intake at yr9 (13+). They also tend to have plenty of movement as families move due to work.

[GRW]

Lots of girls will travel long distances to the grammar school if it's superselective, so a 45 minute journey won't be unusual. I would take the grammar place over a less academic independent school.

[lovepathanalysis]

Hi amidaiwas,
Thanks for your response... I guess so although when you think of the move and the mess, I wish things were easier. We are going to try for a year as we can always put her to the local Indie but not a grammar

[amidaiwas]

it's one of the top grammars in the country whereas the private down the road is not well performing academically

this isn't a difficult choice then, surely? You'd hardly pay for a school which isn't very academic when your dd is highly academic?

[lovepathanalysis]

Thanks ittakes2. I agree as it is my gut feeling too. I did not realise that this thread was a dead one but my issue is very similar. However, the grammar which is on my way to work and I can drop my daughter daily is only 30 mins drive; it one of the top grammars in the country whereas the private down the road is not well performing academically. This is the dilemma. We are considering moving to the area but as we have a younger DD who will sit 11 plus next year, we want to be sure she also gets in before we make the move. such a dilemma and wish things were more straightforward in life...it is all about whether we want an easy life-is it the best for my DDs or can we sacrifice for a year and then hopefully move to the area to make life easier for all after a year of hard time. Basically selling/letting out our house and buying somewhere else is a nightmare we will have to deal with next year....

[ittakes2]

Definately the school 10mins away - makes a huge difference with their confidence as they can build friendships with local children, more time to study etc.

[DarlingOscar]

This is a zombie thread? OP's daughter has probably just sat her A levels!!

[lovepathanalysis]

Hi Goldie,
Just saw this post and wonder what you ended up deciding. I am in a very similar situation and although we have decided to take up the grammar offer, I am reconsidering the private school which is up our road. Life would be easier that way but I have a younger DD and slightly worried whether committing to pay huge sums for the DDs would be the best option in the end. Your DD sounds exactly like mine with regard to personality and academic abilities and it is a 45 minute journey for her grammar school.
My DH is still for the private which is why this conversation is still on.

[Yellowstone]

That was the case theta, but offers started coming through again last year. Very odd.

[thetasigmamum]

Yellowstone Exactly It was all downhill after us. Sad but true.

Am I right in thinking that there is an inexplicable black hole with the school we have in common and a particular Russell Group uni? DD1 was going on about about 'no point applying to X they never make offers to us' (not in relation to herself, as it happens, but talking about a friend's plans - since they are only in Y9 I think they have a little bit of time tbh but you know what girls can be like)

[Yellowstone]

Scatter I agree. Some very good non-Oxbridge universities do appear sometimes to 'take against' a particular school, for several years at a time. Goodness knows why.

[Yellowstone]

I think the dons are actually bigging up the Oxford/ Cambridge intake that thetasigmamum was in....

[Abitwobblynow]

Thetasigmamum: "wobbly I'm guessing you don't know much about Oxbridge."

I give you hard statistics, (proving my assertion, as I WAS ASKED TO) and you respond with anecdote to prove your putdown??????????????

What sort of university did you go to?! Or is it your comprehensive education coming through...

With that kind of academic rigour, hmmmmm, rather proves the Dons' point.

[ScatterChasse]

It is true though that some universities are biased against certain schools, or rather their pupils. Nobody from my school (academic private) has had an offer from one university for years, despite the same people getting offers from Oxbridge, Durham, Edinburgh: places that are easily on a par if not better.

I would say mine was a typical independent school, better academically than the vast majority, so why do their pupils get offers and ours don't?

We were told not to apply unless we really wanted to, as statistically, the chances of us getting an offer were so much lower than from other universities of the same calibre.

[thetasigmamum]

Dilys Same in Cambridge in most colleges (I had a 2 E offer) but I think there were a small number of colleges which allowed people to not do the entrance exam but to have a 3 A offer instead, this was because the private schools did the exam in the 7th term which many state schools believed gave them an advantage over people like me doing it in the 4th term. The point was though, it was a 3 A offer that was the alternative to doing the entrance exam. Not a 'low' offer. I always felt that it was possibly safer for a comprehensive person to give the entrance exam a go anyway because often there weren't correct answers, it was all about showing flair or a spark. So you could get a 2 E offer based on an interesting entrance exam showing, plus interview, rather than on getting the entrance exam 100%'right'.

[DilysPrice]

I assume Iain Martin attended Cambridge because "back in the late 1980s" nobody at Oxford would have discussed their offer - everyone got the same offer, which was 2 Es.

[thetasigmamum]

wobbly Iain Martin does not state which university he attended. When I was at Cambridge I didn't know anyone who hadn't got at least 3 As at A level and sometimes much more. And all my friends were comprehensive people, like me.

[thetasigmamum]

wobbly I'm guessing you don't know much about Oxbridge. To be fair, I only know aout Cambridge. Yellowstone should be an expert on Oxford by now ;) and we both know a bit about (one) super selective grammar school.

Does it not occur to you that the vast vast majority ->95% probably - of students going from state schools to Oxbridge will be 3 A (or more) candidates? Just because there are lots more in private schools doesn't mean that there aren't enough in state schools to fill the Oxbridge 'quota' you (mistakenly) talked about above. The A grade offer is currently an incredibly blunt instrument without interviews due to grade inflation (something which has been stoked by private schools as much as anything). The Oxbridge interviews do the fine sifting to distinguish the genuinely talented people from the exam factory products. Some people say that overly advantages kids from private schools since they are apparently less likely to be intimidated. I don't see that myself, having gone to Cambridge from a council flat/comprehensive background back in the day. But maybe there is some truth in it for others. Personally, I suspect that the interview system does disadvantage some private school people (the ones who have the great grades as a result of cramming and purchase power rather than genuine talent) and doesn't disadvantage others (the ones with genuine talent).

[Abitwobblynow]

Loved this article from The Economist:

In the Wall Street Journal, Iain Martin makes the perfectly reasonable point that it would be nice to hear a government with ideas for improving state education overall, rather than crudely jamming its thumb on the scales at the moment when comprehensive pupils try to get into top universities. In his words:

Of course there is a crisis in social mobility. Politics and the professions are becoming much more difficult for the poorest to penetrate. Look at the cabinet featuring Cameron (Eton), Osborne (St. Pauls) and Clegg (Westminster). Britain?s best universities are increasingly dominated, much more than they were in my day, by the products of those and other top schools.But the answer is not to water down entry requirements to the best universities. Or discriminate in favor of groups of children that government ministers might feel guilty about having let down by failing to supply them with a good enough education in the state system.The answer is to dramatically improve state education (will this idea ever really catch on?) so that far more children from poor and modest-earning backgrounds get the grades they need to go to a top university. Previous generations used grammar schools to help boost standards and to achieve this. They unleashed a wave of social mobility. The government is in favor of free schools, but will that reform alone be enough? I can?t see that it will be
Mr Martin also makes the good point that this is yet another example of a coalition leader coming over all bossy and dirigiste, while all the while pledging loyalty to the idea of bodies like universities being freed from central control.

Much of this is right. The gulf between Britain's best and worst schools is indefensible.

But there is also something deeply bogus about this fuss, from the spectacle of Mr Clegg banging his fist on the table and demanding that top universities stop being "closed" to poorer students, to right-wing attacks on dumbing-down entry standards.

Why? Well, because top universities including Oxford and Cambridge already make much lower offers to promising students from poorer backgrounds, difficult family circumstances or state schools where Oxbridge entrance is almost unknown. And what is more, they have been doing it for years. The country's best universities could fill all their places several times over with hard-working, expensively-trained but rather dull private school pupils who would all cruise smoothly to 2:1 degrees. But the thought of that fills dons with horror, and has for decades. Back in the late 1980s, when I applied to university, it was well known that it was harder to get in from private school, and that always seemed perfectly fair. In fresher's week, apart from making bad mugs of instant coffee and asking people about their GAP years, one of the more tragic topics of conversation revolved around what A-level offers people had been given, and what grades they had actually got. It was no secret at all, and nobody made a secret of it, that pupils from tough comprehensives had been made lower offers.

[Abitwobblynow]

Yellowstone believe me that is the bottomline reason. 'Privilege' is a diverting crock. The INDEPENDENCE of the private sector means that they are not strangled by centralised control, that they are not obliged to try the latest academic theory by the leftist education departments of this country. For instance, in our primary school, the children were being taught maths on the line theory - TWO YEARS AFTER it had been proved through research to be a worse way of teaching maths with more inaccuracies, and it did NOT help children grasp concepts of mathematics, as well as 'traditional' learning by rote - and that research written up as a paper.

Why? Because the department of Education as with all bureaucracies are slow and inefficient, and the Directive (state schools being centrally controlled) hadn't come through yet.
Private schools? Didn't even bother with such nonsense in the first place. They don't have to: they are INDEPENDENT. Geddit? Remember these are your children the left-wing ideologues are trying to Change the World with.

Butterfly: I agree with you about grammars. They only deal with the top... 5%? Its the top 50% we have to get to grips with. And that, IMO, would be brought about by adopting the Dutch/German model of 3 tier schooling: academic, technical, vocational. With free movement between them as the Dutch and the Germans have, depending on the determination/passivity achievements of the individual.

But the UK as a whole has to start confronting the stanglehold on education the LEAs and the Unions, and their ridiculous ideologies, have. All the squabbling about private 'privilege' and grammar schools are diversions from this point. Bottom line: the UK slides yearly down the international tables of attainment. It doesn't matter how inflated GCSEs and A levels are (they stopped using New Labour statistic because they were LIES and applied their own), or how many more students 'pass', UK education slides down the international benchmarks. It is a tragedy that academies had to be set up in the first place - it is a way of government (started by Labour, carried on by the Tories), bypassing the LEAs and the unions. Which is why they are screaming blue murder about it.

[Abitwobblynow]

Figures released March 2011:

Oxford is on course to have the highest ever proportion of state school pupils in its undergraduate intake this autumn, publishing figures on Friday showing that just 41.5% of offers were made to private school candidates.

State school pupils received 58.5% of offers. Based on previous years, the proportion of state school pupils accepted is likely to be around 1% lower than this figure. The increased share of offers reflects a rise in applications from state-educated children, which reached 64.3% for entry this autumn.

Universities in England have been told they could be stripped of the right to charge higher fees if they fail to attract a wider mix of students including state school pupils, ethnic minorities and teenagers from areas with no tradition of going on to higher education.

So, by my wobbly maths, thats - yup, discrimination against privately educated children.

[Abitwobblynow]

Figures released February 2010:

An analysis of exam results has revealed that 32.6 per cent of privately schooled A-level candidates gained three A grades last year, compared to 8.1 per cent in comprehensives.
The figures in 1997/08 were 16.9 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively.
Independent schools, which educate just seven per cent of the population, produced more than 11,500 straight-A pupils last summer, compared to 9, 725 sixth formers in comprehensives.

Oxbridge percentages to follow.

[Abitwobblynow]

It is a fact, Oxbridge are given quotas they must fulfil in order to get their funding. The guidelines are ?70% (could someone correct the actual figure) state to private school. This goes against the actual attainment results percentage where privately educated children although 7% of the school population achieve a disproportionate number of high results. Why? Not because they are superior, but because they have been rigorously and thoroughly educated. The only sector that the private schools dominate is in the sciences (physics etc) where the gap can't be hidden.

This makes interesting the bitching from Oxford Dons in the Telegraph today: well, folks, you can't have it both ways. You can Change the World, or you can select to high standards.
But they can't, because of their quota and because they are already perceived to be 'elitist' and the class warriors who blight state education, simply do not support their bright students in the way that they should.

Compare this to Exeter university, which appears to have a policy of snapping up the private school Oxbridge rejects (hotly denied I am sure). Tiny little Exeter is now 13th in the university listings and climbing.

So I stand by my contention that, comparative to their actual attainment, privately educated children are discriminated against.

(Of course, the true solution would be for the comprehensive system to be dismantled, and implementing the European 3 tier streaming, and rigorous education demanding discipline and achieving attainment potential, as is currently demanded in the private sector. [You have been assessed as bright? By God, you WILL deliver A*! Private school kids are worked like dogs. The bad grammar and sloppy thinking that the Dons complain about is not tolerated]. But that would mean taking on the left wing ideologues who dominate the the teacher training colleges the LEAS and the Unions. It is desperately sad that BOTH governments have to go via the Free Schools and Academies route in order to bypass the Unions and the LEA. Free Schools and academies are INDEPENDENT of the LEA. Geddit? Which is why, of course, they are screaming like stuck pigs about it. More power to Michael Gove, and huge thanks to Andrew Adonis.)

Listen: you can get angry about this and you can accuse privilege etc etc. But the unchanging benchmark is the international league tables of education. Which the UK slips down year upon year. Estonians now outperform our kids! Instead of hating the private schools, get angry at the real problem: the structure of the state schools, and the prevailing worldview of the teachers, which a little bit of real-life competition would swiftly cure.