When parents are slagging off the local comp...

[Everyoneafter3]

I've posted before about my concerns over the local secondary, which, thanks to comments on this board and an excellent recent Ofsted, are very much allayed. I had a very good read of school newsletters etc and am much happier. Dd1 (Y4) is musically gifted and will also audition for a specialist music school.

The area in which we live is very affluent: many children round here go to fee-paying independent schools. These dc are going to school and telling my dd (and others) that the local secondary is rubbish ("my mum and dad say..."). One particularly stupid parent has said at home that "no child of mind will set foot in x school" which of course is coming back home with our dd.

Dd1 has now got it into her head that the local school is terrible, that she's really upset to go to not a good school, that she wishes we weren't poor (we're not! But no, we can't afford independent school fees without having to sacrifice other stuff we prioritise as a family). She's been researching exam results and all sorts.

For our part we've said well look at any local school she'd like to, although as we live across the road from the school in question it'd be unlikely that she'd get in.

I'm heartily sick of parents telling their dc how awful the local school is. It's simply not fair. My dc won't receive a 'lesser' education. They aren't going to a 'rubbish' school. If this continues I'm tempted to speak to their current primary school tbh. What else can I do? I've told dd to not listen, we've looked at the school website, talked about results (!) but I'm at a loss.

The college links do still exist though -

No they don't. Argue about other unfair things, yep , but no no getting into am Oxbridge college for your DC , they do not happen in the modern world. Listen , I'll say that many things are somewhat unfair but the days of a school getting you into an Oxbridge College - just don't believe it. Prepared to be argued against.

Ah hell , I wish I not commented

Basilisk considering I experienced it not 10 yrs ago I do still believe it. In fact there was a girl in my year with much more egregious nepotism. She applied to Cambridge with predicted ABB, got an interview and an offer because her dad was mates with the admissions tutor, she got an offer! But it was for AAA and she ended up at Reading uni after getting...ABB as predicted.

Mumtrying - your info misses out Cambridge, unless you know where we can find that info too?

Alyosha it is not rocket science, the info is where you would expect it
www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/statistics
under UCAS apply centre
What are your sources for saying that the official view from Oxbridge is that admissions just about A level grades?
It never has been.

The admissions people on this thread, for starters?

No I think the message put out is that meeting the minimum standard A level grades is the starting point, not the end point. Not that that has to do with why grammars lag behind equivalent independents in terms of Oxbridge entry.

Oxford & Cambridge who say no.1 most important thing is A level & module grades?

Thanks for the link. Higher acceptances again for NLCS in 2015, will look at the 3 year average :D

Oxford & Cambridge who say no.1 most important thing is A level & module grades?

Where has this been stated?

The admissions people on this thread, for starters?

We have said the opposite. Presumably you are just trying to have an argument.

Well to be fair to Alyosha Cambridge has been pretty fixated on average AS marks into the 90s until this latest round, just as the first sift. In the same way Oxford has always needed people to be predicted at least the minimum (relatively low) A level grades to be put into the interview pot. But as I say, it's the starting point and I don't recall any Oxbridge admissions tutor anywhere ever saying anything different.

The advent of 1-9 replacing letter grades should be interesting in this debate. If schools like Westminster really are teaching beyond the A*, lots of 9s compared to grammars would be one albeit incomplete not of coraberating evidence.

But Cambridge in any case interview a very large fraction of applicants, much more than Oxford do, so UMS filtered out relatively few applicants.

If schools like Westminster really are teaching beyond the A, lots of 9s compared to grammars would be one albeit incomplete not of coraberating evidence.*

When we say they are teaching beyond the curriculum, we mean that they are teaching beyond the curriculum i.e. not aiming for perfect scores on tests but teaching wider and broader material. I do think that it will be interesting to see the 1-9 grades - although many private schools avoid exams under government influence and are still doing iGCSEs until the dust settles - but these grades are not really going to be corroborating evidence for Oxbridge potential, as they are not directly correlated with what Oxbridge is looking for.

Phew just came back to the thread. bit of corroborating evidence.

(I am terrible on a mobile, sorry.)

Yes quite user615 so why Cambridge banged on about UMS at AS goodness only knows. They may well have lost a good number of very talented students that way, or at least deterred lots of state school applicants. Anyhow, irrelevant now I suppose.

More generally, I don't know to what extent 9s at GCSE will actually correlate with very high academic potential for university level study.

Oxford has always rated complete sets of A* at GCSE user615, and Cambridge always tends to follow Oxford's direction, eventually.

From the other camp, I would say that Oxford's insistence on GCSE results and pretests also put lots of people off. Cambridge certainly picked up some people who didn't want to go through the hurdle of pretests.

I don't believe that a full set of A stars at GCSE had much relevance for e.g. potential in science subjects. One could lose a lot of star scientists by filtering on GCSE grades in MFL and humanities. I do think 9s in maths will be essential for maths related subjects, although almost all candidates will have them anyhow. Not so sure that 9s in other subjects are going to be well correlated with high academic potential further down the line.

Or the other way around. You could lose a lot of brilliant linguists and historians by filtering on maths and physics GCSE....

Absolutely agree user721 with both your posts. Perfectionism and excellent exam technique are laudable but should not be the main focus of education or criteria of future potential. Time spent on chasing those perfect marks by repetitive practising of exam technique could IMO be more usefully spent on other aspects of education.

sendsummer if you believe that that's how straight A* are/ were achieved I guess, but I'm not sure that it is/was. At least I don't recall my DC approaching their GCSEs that way.

Goodbyestranger no but some schools and pupils do. That is one of the reasons why students can be so different despite having a similar string of A* grades.

I would hope that even Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard or Yale students can be different....

I meant different in their academic potential.

Ah got it - NCLS and SHHS the way to go

Ds has a decent fistful of GCSE A*s - nowhere near as well as others will have done from other schools , many of which will not have been fee paying , - but also did well on the aptitude test (humanities) . He has an aptitude for a subject and that one only. I believe that is why he got a place. The school could not have altered that decision either way IMHO .