King's College Maths School, London - Apply now

[Astronotus]

Visited this state sixth form only school, sponsored by King's College Uni and was really impressed. I would encourage anyone's DC who is interested in studying Maths, Fur Maths, Physics, to A level and Economics/Comp Sci to end of yr 12 + EPQ to apply. The deadline for applications is tomorrow, 1 December 2017.

Upside: Great youngish teachers all really keen to progress bright maths students. Modern facilities 10mins from Waterloo St. Students' travel costs can be funded if needed. Last leavers - 100% students to Russell Group/Sutton Trust 30 and 23% went to Oxbridge. One went to new Dyson coll. A great chance for any child from any type of school to access expert teaching as long as they love and are very good at maths.

Downside: Tories' idea, under Gove, to set up these uni sponsored specialist schools, other one at Exeter, so presumably extra funding was pushed their way rather than to general education.

No, I'm not connected with KCMS - just thought it an interesting place.

my sonnet there and ut was transformative. It was just last week selected by the Sunday Times as Best Sixth Form College in the country. if your kid is a talented mathematician, send him/her there. you and s/he won't be disappointed.

I think it’s a bit off to criticise it because the Tories set it up. That way partisan madness lies. All the parties have some good ideas, and this happened to be an excellent Tory one.

SimEqn - I was just pointing out how it had been funded before the MN liberals jumped on me!

fair enough. I think it’s a great idea and I wish we could have a few more of them dotted around, and in the north too. I love the fact that the school is looking for children who don’t have awesome alternative options: they’re not creaming off the kids from the selectives or independents, but really focusing on making a difference.

It's very oversubscribed. This years there were more than 700 applications for 70 places. The test scores for admissions are heavily weighted by Widening Participation criteria (see here) so unless your child is brilliant at maths there may not be much point applying if you don't qualify for some of those.

@bringan - that letter was gobbledeegook to me. Can you explain what the widening partition thing is?

One DC of mine very good at maths and have ear-marked it as one to watch in the future for her potentially.

She's at an independent school now though, so would that count against her?

@AtomicRabbit, yeah, complicated isn't it .

Basically your DC sits an entrance exam which, this year, was marked out of 142. They then add a Widening Participation Score which, this year, ranged between -21 and +50, so it does make a hugely significant difference to the overall score. It's based on things like ethnicity, pupil premium status, home postcode affluence, your current school's progress 8 score, whether parents went to uni, etc.

Having got an overall score they then select the top 150 for an interview, consisting of a personal interview and a maths interview. The interviews are scored too (not sure how) to whittle the numbers down to 70.

She's at an independent school now though, so would that count against her?

Definitely!

Are there any privately educated kids there then? It sounds like the answer is.... no! So you'd need to be absolutely outstanding to get in from a private school... hmmm.... possibly cross off the list then. Shame.

Are there any privately educated kids there then?

No idea, but if there are they probably have other WP factors, e.g. adopted. Some 'top' private schools do seem to have relatively low Progress 8 scores, so it depends how the different criteria are weighted. It's a very opaque admissions policy.

It is possible to get in from a private school and they do have kids there from private schools. However one of the stated purposes of the school is to widen participation - so if the applicant doesn't get any of those weighting maths they have to score very highly in the exam and interview. My DC is at an independent at the moment and has been offered a place in September.

Our local private school is one of the most sought after independents in the region, and regularly has maths teams winning high profile competitions, yet it has a lower p8 score than some of our local comps so I guess its students would get a higher widening participation score. The comps mainly just focus on getting kids through their GCSE's and apart from the annual UKMT challenge don't do any maths enrichment of the kind that might give students an extra advantage in the King's entrance exam. The exam uses no more than year 9 maths which everyone should have covered, but they're UKMT-style questions that need lateral thinking.