Poor languages for scholarship papers

[AliasNemo]

Have just read on another thread that apparently prep school children are known to have problems with French and Latin in the most selective scholarship exams (Eton KS and WC Election for example). Why is that? We are looking at preps partly because we want DCs to have strong groundings in Latin, Greek and MFLs so am quite surprised...

Depends whether they stream the dc later or these subjects. At dc prep they teach the top academics to take higher level CE/CAS and Scholarship exams, maybe not all do. However you will find that no school offers a full breadth fo choice in Classics and MFL

There are prep schools who offer full breadth but that means nothing if the quality of teaching is poor. If you are aiming for certain schools like Eton or Winchester then an 'unofficial' chat with classics / MFL teachers at those schools during a visit would be helpful as they will know which prep schools consistently deliver well taught pupils for these subjects (assuming it is not from additional tutoring!)

Thank you, will need to do that, though at this stage we would rather avoid boarding schools if we can.

Problem is we need to commit to preps over the next few months but was not planning on visiting senior schools quite yet (DS is 3). Maybe we should though.

If you really like a school for other important reasons then the language teaching may not be the deal breaker and in any case may change by the time it becomes relevant. If you can't choose or would consider state otherwise, then others might offer an opinion if you are able to name the schools of interest.

Entry expectations and funding may well change over the next 10 years. Maybe your ds won't be eligible for those particular scholarships in which case it is a moot point.

We are not looking at the scholarships as such, what we are looking for is a good rounded classical education with strong MFL. So far it had seemed to us that a prep school with a good record of scholarships such as KS would probably fit the bill. The other thread seemed to suggest otherwise- hence the question.

You'd be OK for Eton as the only compulsory KS papers are English, maths (A), science and general (1), plus any three others. They will also award scholarships to those who are brilliant in what they describe as ol,y a "limited" field. So as long as DS is going to turn in a good solid CE performance across the board, it doesn't matter if he cannot demonstrate the 'extra' required for French/Latin/Greek. (It helps that Eton takes a lot of international students who may have studied other languages).

Scaevola: many thanks. We are actually interested in the language learning more than the scholarships. It is way too early to know whether DS can be a scholar, but we need to commit to a prep school soon.

Sometimes it's because the boys who sit the scholarship papers are not very good linguists but are strong in e.g. maths and science. They're clever but not gifted at languages and the scholarship is too much for them.

Sometimes it's because the school is unable to timetable extra scholarship classes. The French and Latin scholarship syllabus requires an awful lot of extra grammar and vocabulary to be covered, as opposed to a subject such as History, where the exam tests analytical skills rather than subject knowledge.

Sometimes it's because the teaching isn't very good!

Sometimes, too, prep schools (especially smaller schools) are unable to properly set/stream the boys, which makes differentiation to scholarship level difficult - especially when parents don't let the school know that their child is entering for a particular scholarship until midway through year 8.

Language scholarship papers are HARD. However, boys who are talented linguists do them well. And even schools which don't have a strong record at scholarship are usually preparing their pupils well. Schools such as Eton demand 70% at Level 3 Latin of all their candidates: a boy who achieves that is a strong and well-taught Latinist.

I would think your best way of knowing whether the language teaching was good (rather than the scholarships being based on non language subjects or outside tutoring) in your possible prep school choices would be to start another thread with specific question on which prep schools in your area of interest are good at MFL, classics teaching.