Is Westminster School the best school on Earth?

[statesmom]

Just looking at their website and they have 97 places for their students at Oxford and Cambridge this year?!

We have an 8 year old son and want to focus on getting him into this place, just next to the Palace of Westminster. It looks amazing! Any thought on parents with children at the school very welcome indeed, especially any thoughts on the application process. Thank you for someone new to London.

You think it's a social phenomenon that they pass 86% of their GCSEs at A? And 97% at A/A?

It is not uncommon for families with one child at Westminster to decide it is not the right school for DS2. Private schools have the advantage that they can select DC who will thrive in the learning environments they have created. They can also look for a mix. All quirky genius' and it might be unmanageable. A few solid team players, a couple of potential leaders etc.

DS was offered a place at Westminster, but was five marks/100 places off Tiffin. He would probably managed those five marks with a bit of practice/tutoring. (We naively believed their website about not tutoring.) He would probably have got as good results there as at Westminster, and made as many nice friends. Would he have enjoyed his education as much, felt as stretched etc? Probably not. Is the difference worth the amount we have spent? I am not sure. We never had the choice to make, but suspect it would have been very hard to turn down the chance of a top education without fees.

'86% of their GCSEs at A? And 97% at A/A?'
Plenty of students in other schools, state or not do that. My DC in grammar school is set to get that, but I am in no illusion of the limited significance of this.

No grammar school gets 86% A*.

babyB I hope you are wrong. DS failed to get into Tiffin (not enough tutoring, natch) and waiting to hear on Westminster as I write!

I would imagine Tiffin is harder in some ways because it's do or die.

W has more hoops. So if you do less well on one hoop and better in another, you might live to fight another day IYSWIM.

Hilarious thread. I was at Westminster (there seem to be quite a lot of us), and boarded. As others have said, the teaching was (mostly) incredibly good and delivered disproportionately by talented teachers who themselves had doctorates, the atmosphere was genuinely intellectual, the pastoral care shoddy, the food inedible (v. irresponsible if you have any girl boarders in my opinion) and the drug-taking absolutely prodigious. I had an amazing time but it was rough and tumble. I have a baby son and would absolutely NOT send him to Westminster - even if we could afford it - unless I was very confident that he was a good fit for it. It's an unusual sort of school and I knew lots of boys, in particular, who seemed unhappy. The setting is amazing though and stays with you.

As for Oxford, overrated at the moment in my opinion sweeping generalisation alert I would put Cambridge, Imperial and UCL clearly ahead of it in the humanities subjects I know about, but of course it all depends on degree course - and, in Oxford especially, also on particular college/tutor. Am an academic btw.

that should say - Cambridge and UCL for the humanities subjects I know about, Imperial obviously isn't humanities.

Aga I agree that Westminster has an extra layer of economic selection (although to listen to some of the alpha mothers around here it is going down to the streets of Brixton and the Old Kent Road and picking up any "urchin" who can read a page of Shakespeare and offering them bursary places over their hothoused offspring) but that pool is really very large. Whilst there were rich families at my DDs school there were also many families who were stretching themselves to educate a bright child, many from Eastern European and Asian immigrant backgrounds, as well as some bursaries and I gather the same is true at Westminster.

I also gather that LEH, who use decent reasoning tests in their selection, and subsequently for monitoring, say the vast majority of girls score above the 95th percentile. Tiffin say to be successful in selection you have to be above the 97th. I think given the quality of the Tiffin tests you would pushed to say one or other had the brightest cohort.

kalidasa I think you can safely say you were not making an entirely unfounded sweeping generalisation since according to the QS world rankings the world's academics have the same opinion, with UCL and Imperial above Oxford.

Ah thanks shootings I haven't looked at them very recently. I am not surprised though. I have found the atmosphere in Oxford surprisingly v. different - in terms of outward-looking research etc - from both Cambridge and London, though of course you only ever get a view of a small slice of what is going on in your particular disciplines. I was at Oxford as an undergraduate myself and was well-taught, but I would not necessarily recommend it to current applicants.

Joining in the sweeping generalisations, I would say that Oxbridge possibly correlates with further academic success for those who wish to pursue academic careers but not life success apart from future bragging rights

Ouch!

(And no alpha-mums in Brixton......?)

Not sure about that one . I'm as guilty as the next person in saying what a wonderful academic environment Oxbridge has been / is but one should n't forget that just like schools such as Westminster, the education is for academia and research not a simple equation to being at the top of an other career path.

Zero Not of the same breed as in South West London, not enough Farrow & Ball outlets in Brixton and it doesn't have quite the same bubble of complacency to protect you from people unlike you.......

Maybe the OP isn't posting because she's at work????

"Oh my. For the first time ever I truly want to know just how many lurkers are now staring, open-mouthed, at their screens."

Guilty as charged, Zero,

Shootingatpigeons, my DS scored 85th (VR - 1 in 7) and 99th (NVR - 1 in 100) percentile on school testing (done for assessment purposes, not admissions prep).

After some prep, in which both scores improved, he came out around the 50th percentile within the population of children sitting the test for both subjects when the results came from Tiffin.

So I would say it's nonsense that they are looking at the 97th percentile.

He got into LEH's brother school (Hampton), and they do do these tests as well, so I think you are right that the vast majority of successful girls at LEH WILL score beyond the 95th percentile, but that is 95th percentile based on a cohort consisting of the whole population of 10 year olds PRIOR to doing prep, which certainly all prep schools would prep for prior to sending any girl along to testing at LEH or other school conducting such a test.

So it is deeply misleading to compare Tiffin, where the top candidates will score in the top 0.001% or whatever of a population of random completely uncoached children, but only perhaps in the top 10% of the population of those sitting the test with a bland statement about the scores that LEH gets.

Private schools do not generally have better versions of the tests than Tiffin does. What they do have is the freedom to interpret them how they wish, i.e. the kids who do poorly get disregarded entirely, and those at the top are identified.

What Tiffin and others do, which is absurd, is to disregard the fact that the tests aren't really capable of discriminating beyond around the 99th percentile, yet they get 500 kids all scoring 97th percentile or above based on national standards, and they try and rebase those 500, every one of whom deserves a grammar school education, based on a almost random stack rank (ok it's not random in that it's based on which child did best, but the tests WEREN'T designed to discriminate between so many high performing kids), within the essentially arbitrary context of the kids sitting the test.

The grammar school will say a kid on the 97.6th percentile for some set of silly tests is better than the one on the 97.5th percentile, and reject the second one. The private school will look at reports, interview the child, and say 'actually the second child is really gifted, and the first one has prepped to within an inch of his life'

The private schools have the entrance test and from those few they pick then an interview. Do state grammars do that? Boys going at 13+ also have a school report which is a good thing because some parents think their little horrors are brilliant but a good Headmaster who has spent 30 years observing children usually gives a much better objective picture which is useful information in addition to a written test plus interview.

If the good (not all of them are good) state grammars take brighter pupils than say North London Collegiate where mine went or Westminster it would only be marginal and those private schools tend to exceed those state grammars on most measures such that if the parents earn enough to pay fees it tends to be worth paying.

This is better than 'Live at the Appolo'... we need a LOL smiley !

Aga In the year my DD applied the result was given to you with their result given as the standardised score against the wider population and the lowest standardised score that was successful in getting entry. That was what the 97th percentile figure was based on. It was already the days of 2000 applicants. Presumably since then they have switched to giving the result as where they scored in relation to the population applying to try and avoid the insane score chasing amongst tutors, harder to gage and harder to challenge quoting scores on other tests taken I am not going to get into my DDs scores and stealth boasting, it is after all just the results one day, but amongst her peers the Tiffin girls are really not regarded as more obviously able than girls in the more selective schools (who do of course get better academic results) Just a bit more driven and a bit more entitled.

Aga The figure I was quoting for LEH was also the standardised score against the rest of the population of girls their age. That is generally how the results of standardised tests are quoted, according to the percentile of the population as a whole, usually adjusted to take into account age gender and ethnicity.

0.001% ....

Warren Buffet said famously that people who have an IQ of 150 should sell the top 30 points because 120 is plainly enough [to get rich]...

If that's not clear, the marginal increase in IQ/population % points does not translate to marginal success and contribution to humanity. Other factors play bigger role.

The Westminster lot are not more deserving, just more privileged.

May be... Mine is supposedly 152 or 158 and I earn quite a lot, got good exam results etc. 120 used to be the getting into grammar school and university level in the old days if you went back 40 or 50 years.