Anyone else waiting for Kent 11+ results today?

[ClarisseVonTrumpington]

KCC are serving a cruel and unusual punishment on those of us who have got into this awful system by making us wait until 4pm and then not even giving us the ruddy scores.

May the force be with you and your dc.

[Ladymuck]

School admissions seem to vary so much depending on your area. I have looked at all the schools within commuting distance, and despite having the luxury of up to 6 choices for my form, there is no school available to him that I can be reasonably certain he will get into. That may change if he gets a good grammar school score. But our local schools have admission policies which give priority to feeder schools, religious activities, aptitude tests etc. Even the school which has had the lowest results historically now requires Ds to sit an NVR test to put him into a band before choosing children from that band randomly! At least with the 11 plus I can understand the approach. I'm still struggling to explain to Ds why he needs to give up a Saturday morning to sit a banding test when he may still get rejected regardless of how he does

[MissStrawberry]

Yes, my question does show my naivety and luck I suppose that we have a lot of schools to choose from and most are good. Apologies for any offence

[wannaBe]

waiting here too.

at least we do get the results on the day, had to wait foor the post for Bexley/ST O's.

[PatoBanton]

No worries MissS, it's no problem

Maybe we should move to there!

[Ladymuck]

Well, we got the email. Now just a very long wait until March. Or beyond.

[Xoanon]

ladymuck Do you not get a reasonable indication of your chances?

[Ladymuck]

I do. This year he would have got a place in our preferred school from the waiting list at the end of April.....

[Xoanon]

Is this your most preferred school of all, or the most preferred of the schools you know about so far (I think you were going for the sutton schools as well?) Anyway - that's really good, the wait is horrible but it sounds as though he will be fine and as though he has done really well.

It is a horrible process though.

[ClarisseVonTrumpington]

A pass here too and a decent one so we can try for all the schools dd liked on the list. We are out of area though so who knows what will happen in March.

Hope everyone has got the news they were hoping for.

[tallulah]

"most importantly input from the school about the child" is how they did it in the 1990s. If the HT didn't want your child to go to grammar she could block your application by "recommending" them as suitable for High School. And there was not a damn thing you could do about that.

Also in those days you didn't find out whether they'd passed until you got the allocation letter, plus they operated a First preference system so that if you put the Grammar first and your nearest High School second then failed the Kent Test the High School would be full up with first preferences.

We had to put the High School first for DC4 then accept the place and appeal for the Grammar, and despite doing exactly as we were told by the LA and the Grammar, the High School rang on the first day of school to ask where DS was.

It is a much better system now.

[ClarisseVonTrumpington]

It shouldn't be within the power of the Headteacher to 'block' you but the evidence of (moderated) school assessment (voluntary SATS, work in books etc) SHOULD contribute to the decision.

This would
a) prevent children who are tutored to death, scrape a pass and then struggle to cope at grammar, getting a grammar place
b) help children who are bright and work hard but freeze up on an exam (aged 10 yrs old FFS) to get a place.

Honestly any experienced Yr6 teacher could pick out in 30 seconds the children who would thrive at grammar school. TBH I teach year 3/4 at the moment and I could probably already tell you now which children are suitable for grammar school. Of course, it couldn't be done like that, as I said before, there would need to be evidence.

[Ladymuck]

Xoanan, it would be our preferred state school. I suspect that ds will end up at an independent school, but there seems to be a surge in applications, and he isn't quite dazzling enough to allow complacency! And schools everywhere seem to have introduced random or restrictive admissions which may deprive us of a "local comp" option, let alone a "local good comp" option.

Congrats Clarisse!