My DS is at an independent school with a high entrance level for 6th form (pretty much an A average across all exams) which they apply to internal and external candidates. A number of pupils every year are warned at the end of Y10 there is a chance that they may not make it, and they should at least be aware of that so they have the opportunity to look round for alternatives in advance. Its not nice, but the school are very up front (in a low key way) and let's face it, you don't want to be scrabbling round to try and sort something out in the week between getting GCSE results and term starting.
We got that warning, sucked it up and have done our scouting. DS did some tests, had an interview and has an offer with much lower grades from a v nice school which we all really clicked with when we went and looked round. So all good. We haven't actually said to school #2 that they are our fallback, but I suspect its kind of obvious because he would be moving from somewhere ostensibly more academic to somewhere less academic (and they are the same type of schools, ie not day to boarding/single sex to mixed etc).
His current school say: if you do not make the grades and have to leave post GCSE, you will not have to pay fees for the first term of 6th form - we will deem notice to have been properly given. Fair enough. What I don't know is what we say to school #2. Does anyone have any experience of this? The reality is that we want to treat this as a back up. I think however we are going to have to go on the hook for paying a terms fees if we tell them after GCSE's that we won't be taking up the place because he did well enough to stay where he is.
Interested in any experiences. I think it is completely "fair" that I pay something to school #2 if we are ostensibly taking a place, and I get that a term's fees may be the price we pay for the reassurance of knowing we have a back-up 6th form place in a school of our choosing. But GCSE's are just such a fluid and unpredictable time, and the schools must know how up in the air everyone is.