Please can someone answer this simple question about state selective schools?

[Hakluyt]

If selection at 11 is such a good idea, why do wholly selective authorities not produce significantly better exam results than demographically similar wholly comprehensive authorities?

Thought this might be of interest (the schools has 25% academic selection):

www.watfordgrammarschoolforgirls.org.uk/docs/exam_results/results-2013-for-website.pdf

I am sorry I cant remember all the posts. I contributed to a very similar thread recently. Some one stated their very able DD got mostly As, a couple of A* in her best subjects and a B or 2. She asked how much better the results could have been.

As I said before in either a selective or a private school the brightest (and the vast majority in a superselective) will be getting 5 or 6 A*s in academic subjects. This does matter- these are the grades needed for medicine, law or Oxbridge. They will not interview with less. Unless we give these bright (most able 10%??) the opportunity to get these grades (rather than the couple of Bs being tolerated) we will not have any state educated representation at the highest levels where the decisions which affect us all are made.

I haven't made any inflated claims for DS's comp.

RabbitOfNegativeEuphoria I haven't made any inflated claims for DS's comp. I don't believe anyone has said you have.

Mum - It's ridiculous to keep citing Watford Grammar for Girls/Boys and Parmiters as only taking 25% on academic selection - you only have to look at their stats and admissions policies to see that they select by stealth. All three of the schools have between 73% and 80% high attainers and only 2% low attainers. At Watford Grammar for Girls the number of 'nearest school' admissions is only 18 (10%) which is the same as the number of specialist music places also on offer. Not only do they admit 25% from the academic test but nearly 50% seem to be admitted under siblings/cross-siblings and teachers' children. If you have a son at Watford Grammar for Boys then your daughter can get a cross-sibling place at the Girls' school without sitting the academic test, freeing up an academic place for another girl. Of course cleverness runs in families which is why they've weeded out nearly all the low attainers. You previously linked to a cheap property in the WD25 postcode catchment area for Parmiters - any child living in that property is more likely to go to Francis Combe Academy (also in WD25) which got 50% A* to C last year.

A colleague of mine says an able pupil ought to be able to get 'a good clutch ' of A*s.

Another says more A*s than As. And if you take too many that's your look out

Obviously this assumes a half decent school and no other flags.

I agree with StillWish. I am actually a bit surprised by the results of some of the superselectives - they are excellent, as would be expected by their level of selection, but a private with comparable "superselection" gets nearly 87% of the grades being As at GCSE and 97% AA.

Clavinova Mum - It's ridiculous to keep citing Watford Grammar for Girls/Boys and Parmiters as only taking 25% on academic selection

If it is preferred that I refer to the schools as a grammar I'm happy with that. However, I was under the impression that grammar schools are more commonly know to allocated 100% on the basis of exam and would imagine someone going to a grammar to question whether these semi selective schools can be compared alongside them. If the general feeling is that they can then I'm fine with that.

What these semi-selective schools do demonstrate is how difficult it is to compare like for like on paper:

www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/23/watford-grammar-school-girls-gcse-rankings

This article refers to the girls grammar as "is not a grammar school but an academy". By taking the middle ground these schools are more commonly compared to non selective schools, which as Clavinova suggests, is not really accurate.

Clavinova, I hope you are right that "cleverness runs in families" as it means that my DD who is quite a bit behind where my DS was at this stage will have no problems academically.

Also to be clear, the Boys Grammar offers 19 distance places and 21 academic places in the inner catchment. Am I right in saying that the siblings of those 19 distance place children will be as bright as those who gained an academic place?

Regarding the property, the reason I made this point is because the properties within the 250 metre catchment area of the Grammar schools are significantly more expensive than other comparable properties in the same area. This trend is not found around Parmiters (a distance cut off of 1384 metres), I am intrigued as to why that is.

@TalkinPeace , a couple of years ago I glanced at a RAISE online transition matrix and 90% of children with a KS2 SATS achieved a GCSE A/A, 50% the A. This was national data, not just Chipping Norton or Grammar County.

Wilshaw et al keep telling us any L5 should get A/A* which is a bit silly given that 5c is different from 5a, but I expect many schools are now trying to deliver.

We don't yet know what becomes of L6 and how the GCSE changes will impact on this, but I imagine the overwhelming majority at any type of school will get their top grade.

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Ignoring failing schools with daily riots, good school/teacher versus mediocre school/teacher is a relatively small factor in outcomes. That's in common exams though, so I suppose one difference might be in access to Latin lessons or something.

Eeek: "90% with KS2 SATS 5a"

Mum - only a quick reply as I need to go out. Yes, much better to label these schools as selective as an intake of 80% high achievers is comparable to many of the ordinary grammar schools in Glos, Kent, Lincs etc. A few of the grammars have less than 70% high achievers.
Obviously not all dc will be as clever as their siblings but there must be a good statistical chance which is borne out by the stats for these schools - they've run with an admissions policy that gets the intake they want - why do all the low achievers end up at the school around the corner?
Regarding the property prices around Parmiters - I don't live in the area but a 10% chance of getting into a school on proximity wouldn't be enough for me to buy a house I didn't like unless I had the means to move straight out again once my child had secured a place. Many newspaper reporters don't know what they're talking about I've found.

"As I said before in either a selective or a private school the brightest (and the vast majority in a superselective) will be getting 5 or 6 A*s in academic subjects. This does matter- these are the grades needed for medicine, law or Oxbridge."

There are some Universities who accept students for medicine from non-selective state schools with lower grades. Kings runs one such programme.

Apparently it produces very successful doctors....

Very true minifingers and I think such schemes are fantastic. However should it be necessary ?? Kind of proves the point the comprehensive system lets these dcs down.

"However should it be necessary ?? Kind of proves the point the comprehensive system lets these dcs down."

I'm all for increasing income tax to bring the spend per head on state school children to that spent on children from private schools.

I'd also be really happy if private schools were threatened with losing their charitable status if they refused to accommodate their fair share of disadvantaged/disruptive and unstatemented children with special needs.

Because the really fair thing would be for difficult to educate children to be spread fairly across our system of education, and for all children to have the same amount of money spent on their education.

Bristol does the same. It proves that some Comprehensives don't have a balanced intake. As it happens the two comprehensives that my children went to are in this category, but not three other schools that they could have gone to.

It seems a blunt tool and not necessarily appropriate: parental occupation would have been a better indicator, because there is a world of difference between the child who is the offspring of two top research scientists with doctorates and one whose parents both left school at 15 with no qualifications (and perhaps don't value education)* and have struggled on with low waged jobs ever since.

*Perhaps, because some are damn sure that their children will get more support than they did.

Surely the real point is that there is no evidence that areas with selective schools do better than those without

implying that if the kids at the selective schools ALL went to non selective schools, their personal results would be unchanged

as academic outcome has a very great deal to do with parents and home
as against school where kids spend only 1/6 of their time

65% of pupils who achieved Level 5 or above in both English and Maths at the end of Year 6 failed to attain A* or A grades in both these subjects at GCSE in 2012 in non-selective schools

2012 was an unusual year for English GCSE results. I know of one dc who got 8A*, 2A and a B in Eng language due to the grading issue (ie would have got an A if coursework had been submitted earlier or if any modules had been sat earlier) and I suspect they weren't an isolated case. This could have skewed the figures quite a bit.

Talkin, I have a hunch that bright dc would do as well in your dd's school as in a selective school since a bunch of ~20-30 dc per cohort all achieving no less than an A is enough to move forward together as a group. What I am more doubtful of, is how high achievers perform in comprehensive schools where typically only one child per year achieves that highly where they will be very much in the minority.

When people say high ability dc should achieve 5+ A or more A than A grades at GCSE how are they defining high ability? Is it L5s at KS2 or something else?

Also on the school performance tables when they say x% of a cohort are high ability, what does that mean in terms of KS2 results. What should be expected in terms of GCSE results from those dc?

I do wonder why this has turned into imponderables about whether a child who gets six as and 4 a*s in a comprehensive might have got the other way around or better in a grammar rather than whether a child with six ds and four cs in a sec mod might have got ten cs in a comprehensive.

I think it's quite telling that we're angsting about the top few, to be honest.

But the top few (10% is hardly a few) do matter. Just look at the cabinet 80% privately educated -why ? Because equally bright dcs in comprehensives just aren't pushed. Grammar schools do better and supers electives probably better again.

Because the received wisdom of Mumsnet is that education has to be geared to the top 5%, or at a pinch 10%. And anything which does not actively benefit that group is unacceptable.

"But the top few (10% is hardly a few) do matter. Just look at the cabinet 80% privately educated -why ? Because equally bright dcs in comprehensives just aren't pushed. Grammar schools do better and supers electives probably better again."

So why don't wholly selective LEAs do significantly better than wholly comprehensive ones?

And tbh the top 10% get far, far less in terms of resources than the bottom 10%, top sets are often bursting at the seams with 35 dcs per class, no TA whilst the lower sets are smaller with more individual attention. The middle is probably somewhere inbetween and in a comprehensive these dcs will be in the majority.

I am not saying the high achieving dcs are more deserving just equally so, in a selective system they get their fair share of them.

That's utter rot hak and you know it!

However it is evidently pertinent to question here.

Because if there is relatively little to choose between the numbers of DC getting 5 GCSE passes but there is a difference in how the top achievers attain then there is surely still an argument in favour of selection,