City of London Girls withdrawing offers

[Leo12345]

Hello! I was surprised to receive an email today from City of London Girls that their offer to DD is now withdrawn. I opened their original email with the offer and read that indeed this is their policy: first-comes-first-gets.
We are much more prone to go to LEH or if not Kingston Grammar, and now I bless this decision as I learnt something about City of London Girls character and aptitude towards its pupil.

My question is: do other schools (in particular LEH and Kingston Grammar) practice such policy?

We would accept the offer in LEH today then, though we are waiting for the tour in there.

Catching up on this thread this evening I do feel Soya was a given a hard time but......
I get that current and prospective parents want to defend City because it’s not a nice feeling having your child at a school that so many many believe has treated girls with disdain; a school that has a slight whiff of foul play about it; an academically elite school that now has a suspicion of ending up with lower ranking girls whose parents had no choice but to accept offers immediately, within hours of receiving it, because they don’t have other equally good or better offers to mull over....

I get all of that but if you really want to help your school engage with the people who matter - the admissions office and other decision makers and encourage them to change this practice. It is simply not acceptable to come on this forum and justify or defend what City did because justify you have done. There is absolutely nothing unique about City - just another very oversubscribed London Day School. If other schools can adhere to a sensible admissions system so can City - offer fewer girls and put more on the waiting list. If it is such an exceptionally highly sought after school as you claim it is the offer holders will accept and if not all do, the waiting list girls will jump at the opportunity. You see, 2 years in a row City have messed up. There will be some parents reading this who will be put off applying next year and those could be the very girls City needs to attract to continue to be an academically successful school. So, if you want to help your school Pradaqueen, Soya etc do what you can to prevent a recurrence of this fiasco because I don’t will not get away with it 3rd time round.

I don’t think City will get away with it 3rd time round.

It's difficult to see how it's sustainable at

User223344 - there will never be consensus on this matter but I do strongly feel that one of your points needs addressing. City only makes offers to girls who they consider are of their academic standard. It is not correct or fair for anyone to suggest that those girls who take up the offer first this year or any other are somehow 'less able' or will affect future results. Only time will tell. There is no waitlist other than those girls who have reached the school's standard but who have, unfortunately missed out on a place.

Anothernewt - I would agree that the dash for places is not sustainable and I am sure the School knows this. Last year the offers exploded after 13 days and before offer holders day. This year in apparently 9 hours even though less offers were made. The difficulty the school faces from reading this year's thread (and others on the forum) is the potential number of places which may have been 'reserved' by parents fortunate enough to have £1500 to dispose of to do so. This makes analysis of the data even more tricky as parents from seemingly all parts of London have deposited 'just in case.

Prada you missed my point. Again, some parents with girls at the school would like to believe their child is unique and City only handpicks only such girls etc etc. Of course City only makes offers to girls who hit “their academic standard” but I put it to you that this standard isn’t exceptionally high in the context of top London girl schools. So many other schools in London - NLC, JAGS, SPGS, Godolphin, Habs, LEH and others I’m probably not familiar with are looking for similar girls. Each has some 75-120 places available and each will over offer. Judging by the dozens of girls whom City offered but couldn’t accommodate they may have offered as many as 200 girls. Within that 150 or 200 there will be a RANGE of abilities and actually I see that within the microcosm of girls at our school who got City. A couple scrapped in much to everyone’s pleasant surprise and there is one girl who also got NLC (with academic scholarship) as well as SPGS, Habs, and a couple of other backups. She is going to NLC. If City offered 150 places the top ranked, say 75 girls, most definitely would also have the choice of similar or better schools and those families are the least likely to be elbowed to jump and accept City within hours of getting the offer or queue up in the early hours with forms if this happens again next year.

Best thing current parents can do is put pressure on their school to have a fairer admission process consistent with everyone else. No school likes to go to waiting list because - fact of life - it’s the lower ranking girls that are placed on the list but sometimes it’s necessary and City needs to accept that. The most sought after schools like NLC and SPGS rarely draw much from the waiting list. All City has done is to include more of those girls who ordinarily might be waitlisted within their “confirmed” offer list, chances are those girls are the very ones that ended up accepting within the narrow timeframe allowed.

I’m typing this at work !! Too much time spent reading this thread...I will leave it now. For us the 11+ journey is over and ended well. I will always feel for the girls who City courted then let down at the last moment. Wish all your girls at whichever school they are going to, City included, a fulfilling school life.

I agree that City have probably shot themselves in the foot. I would certainly hesitate about even putting my child down for the school in future: there would be no point in putting her through all the stress of exams and interviews only for her to be accepted but lose the place because I happened to be 71st in the queue on the day acceptances came out. Inevitably they will reduce the pool of able children applying to them which will affect standards in future.

I suspect also that it will be made very clear to them that, unless they follow the practice of other schools from now on, they are out of the ISA, which would hold clear disadvantages for them. I therefore think that that factor coupled with the appalling signals they are sending out to potential applicants will bring about a major rethink in future years.

Love Prada in various other threads and know from my friends experience of how great is City however I do think that City isnt doing themself any favour either for their reputation treating offer holders or creaming the top candidates. No doubt some very able children were the ones who have multiple offer holders and choices to make and with City academic records l, City could be equally on top of their list compare to many other schools including top grammar schools. Treating offer holders(parents/children) this way has set City back in many ways.

Once my friend asked a Cambridge professor who interviewed DCs how they chose the candidates. He was told that that depends on the interviewers. For few super talent applicants, every interviewer will give offers. For many others, it is just like a lottery. I would believe same law applies to City and all other top London schools. It can't be wrong to give offers to any applicant get to the interview stage. The fact is that the super talent kids will mostly received offers to any school applied, even with music, academic or other scholarships. City's exploding offer certainly will do harm to itself by losing these top applicants. It has been proved to be true.

Am not at all clear in what way CLSG is not like other schools?

It is a good single sex school with amazing academic results in a very urban setting with little outside space. It is better than some schools and worse than others.

The school is constrained by the size of its site, but that is not an excuse to badly manage this process to the extent they have done.

The vast majority of London day schools manage their processes expertly and end up with exactly the number of classes per year they set out to. Without recourse to exploding offers.

The situation at CLSG is escalating. 2 years ago the offers took several weeks to explode. This year it was less than 2 working days. I predict a hysteria next year that will see parents queuing through the night to be sure of a place on the Monday morning. This does not mean it is a more in demand school. It simply means that they have chosen a registration process which creates hysteria and panic.

The idea that some parents don't care about their children enough to have foreseen this escalation is bizarre. And unattractively smug.

"Someone who went to the offer Day this week said that one of the teachers indicated that they had made far fewer offers than last year and still had the problem."

Exactly. There are more people living to the East of London who can afford private education, so overall demand has grown. (Plus SPGS drawing boundaries, etc, etc) Equally acceptance rates per offer will have risen, as for people to the East are much more likely to have City as their first choice, and now they are out of the Consortium there will be far fewer who simply tick the City box and pay an extra cheque. The Consortium also meant a consistency of results. So a good day on the Consortium papers would have meant lots of offers including City, a bad day not. Now a girl might have a bad day on the Consortium but a good day at City and so is more likely to take the City offer.

That is what I meant by drilling down into the data. With 70 places it can almost be done manually. A very bright girl living in Hammersmith might only have a 5% probably of taking up an offer. A more marginal girl living at the Barbican can be 90% assumed to accept. Throw in a bit of mapping, including TFL links and grammar catchments, even house price data and you ought to get something reasonably accurate. The picture will change again with Crossrail (girls from Shenfield and Woolwich?) I think they should collect the £1,500s and get themselves along to Cass and ask if any student forecaster/modeller has time for an interesting project.

Its not about the reputational damage. People will still apply. Its about those distraught 10 year olds.

Thank you expat

I know CLSG has limited space therefore cannot accommodate an extra class. But academically it is no different from other outstanding independent schools in London such as NLCS, SPGS and so on.

But that still doesn't excuse how they have handled their admissions process.

The idea that some parents don't care about their children enough to have foreseen this escalation is bizarre. And unattractively smug

Completely agree with this. I really hope the situation resolves happily for those poor girls.

An alternative might be to copy the approach used by some medical schools and in demand courses at Universities like LSE or Durham. Split applicants into yes, no or holding. Then give the initial offers a much tighter deadline, perhaps a week, to accept (with a bit of unadvertised wiggle room for those who put a good argument for a need to wait) and tell the holding group that the school, because of its capacity issues, is not in a position to offer a place immediately, but hopes to be able to do so within 7 working days. Asking that anyone who is no longer interested in being made an offer to let them know asap.

Manage the middle group pro-actively and keep them updated. Then hopefully you can have made the right number of offers to your preferred applicants before the general acceptance day.

(Both my DC received University offers towards the end of March having applied in October. The wait was not fun, but they got their places and the Universities got the right numbers.)

Plus SPGS drawing boundaries, etc, etc

I don't think they actually do, or this is something new to this year. I also don't think that all families have a first choice from birth. We honestly had a very hard time choosing and in the end my DD made the choice. What was her first choice in y5 was not in by the end of the process.

Well City has sent another email today about the waitlist today. There at least 50 girls on the waiting list...

SPGS have said "Girls are required to live within a reasonable distance of the school and should not be travelling for more than 50 minutes each way. We may decline to pursue an application
where in our opinion it may require an unrealistically demanding journey for the girl."
They have said similar for the last few years I think

That makes sense, though they don't always adhere to that, it must depend on the girl. I know of two girls that commute from south Buckinghamshire, which I guess is an hour away. And then there are the girls that move from further afield to be closer to the school. I think most schools in London must get applications from all over England and the world for that matter, and its up to their admissions team to figure out who fits into their school.

SPGS is the holy grail in our area of East London. You do get bonkers parents applying for it and the numbers seem to be increasing.

It's in fecking HAMMERSMITH. You live in BUCKHURST HILL. WTAF.

They don't seem to care so much about going as being able to say they got in or even to say: "My daughter is applying to St Paul's."

I do see that the schools have to figure out how to mitigate against people like this. I don't think City's strategy is the way forward though. There will be a tent city in the Barbican from 48 hrs before.

"Well City has sent another email today about the waitlist today. There at least 50 girls on the waiting list..."

Which shows that they are severely over-offering, because quite a lot will have dropped out post-explosion, as they will commit to their other schools.

Nothing on this thread suggests the schools admissions admin is of the same standard as that if other London schools.

And I don't really get why CLSG thinks it is unique in some way. Lots of London schools have no room to accommodate a bulge class (or can manage one only once in a blue moon) and have applicants from a wide area of the capital (the demographics of number of local resident children really isn't relevant)

There are clearly families on the outskirts of London that, possibly having missed out on SPGS, think that City is the next best thing, hence why a poster earlier on was mentioning that her DD has girls in her class coming from Surrey. How ridiculous is that! How many good schools would they travel by each day before getting to City?
Or other families getting their girls travelling in from Essex bypassing other very good and much more local schools. It’s the parents obsession with league tables that results in these absurdities.
Back to the admission/offer system - it’s naive to believe that City is somewhat in a trickier situation than other academic, in demand schools when it comes to judge how many acceptances they will receive. They are a highly achieving, very sought after school (as proven by how far many families are willing to get their girls to travel there) and they know it. If they now have even more families applying from the “Canary Wharf area” then it should make their job easier, not harder.

This already is the 3rd year running that City has had exploding offers. The admissions was a shambles this year, rife with misinformation and confused communications.
Why do they keep doing it? Because they can. They can, in part because the centre of gravity has moved east in London. They are central and can compete with the whole of London geographically, but have the Northeast as their own personal hunting ground. Lots of families there now and no competition in their league.
I miss Diana Vernon. The place feels more expensive, more formal, and more transactional since she left.

I still think that a lot of the angst about this isn't actually to do with girls being distraught and having offers they really wanted to accept whipped out from under their noses, but parental annoyance at the seeming arrogance of a school denying them what they think is their right to have lots of time to choose.

Here we are, a couple of weeks after offers day and already, lots of people have moved on significantly from where they were a couple of weeks ago....in light of the offers they have. Parents and children adjust quickly, especially when they weren't dead set on a school and most of those who were dead set, accepted a place anyway. Although people say they need more time to choose, in reality, most people know where they will accept. If they are forced to do it speedily, then most can do that, but if they are given longer to accept, many will take longer to get the paperwork in....not because there is loads more to think about, but because it's human nature to do so and because lots of parents find it hard to let go of the offers from other great schools and accept that after a long old process of uncertainty and keeping ones options open, it's finally over and sorted. Lots of people would love to hold loads of offers and avoid committing finally for as long as possible.

So those who had a City offer explode have now mostly moved on mentally - that's children and parents. Most of them were never going to take City anyway, but go to one of the other great schools that is probably nearer to where they live. Some of these have accepted their offers and others won't do so until the final deadline, because they can't bring themselves to the finality of it. Most could make a choice today if pushed. Most will be happy with their choice when they make it and in the years to come when their child is at the given school, most are happy. I believe that the angst people talk about for the children and the unfairness for the children is much exaggerated. Some children have very clear ideas on their preference and voice it to parents, but many, rightly choose to leave the final choice to their parents and especially if applying to lots of schools, barely know or can remember the difference between them. Yes, they are excited by results day and everyone likes to have a number of offers. Usually there is a sense already if what the top option might be and if an offer from somewhere else explodes, it might be a bit surprising, but for the majority who were never going to accept it anyway, it doesn't fill their thoughts for lomg. The people it seems to fill the thoughts of are parents who feel annoyed on principal rather than practicality, in my view....and whilst I understand the approach is unpopular, I think that the school have simply made a rational decision given their location making over offering without explosion to control intake for their severely restricted site, whilst facing the problem of so many applying without it being their top choice due to geographical location.

I agree that things will probably be different next year. The school won't want people camping out and I'm sure they will avoid this. The fact that offers exploded early last year, that this year they offered less and they still exploded far sooner does show the uncertain tules and lack of info the school have when offering. I don't see this as a failure to do their homework beforehand, but simply a function of the fact that huge huge numbers apply and whilst there are more than enough who are both good enough and will choose City first, there are far more others who will accept an alternative offer....and City simply cannot know which are which.

It might be possible to impose a much tighter deadline of just a few days and then go to wait list. This would however be difficult because schools have an agreement about deadlines and can't really unleash a system where they all do their own thing regarding this - the competition which would ensue to get candidates would be far more unseemly than just exploding offers. City have officially kept the same deadline as the other schools, but their exploding offers is a way of both sticking to the letter of the law and manipulating it at the same time. Finding a new agreement for these schools about admissions would be hard to achieve. Self interest would be strong. The current system goes back a lomg way and has broadly worked, although better for some schools than for others and probably for all, works less well in this age of multiple applications and uncertainty about who will accept offers - more of a problem in some areas than others, according to just how many schools are in that area, how many schools of a similar type and locational flexibility to run bulge classes.

Perhaps schools will go for a shorter deadline overall so they have more info sooner. All difficult when there are state school offers to consider too - again more of an issue for some schools than others A some will lose very many good candidates to state grammars, but others very few. It will be interesting to see what transpires.

What is certain, is that schools will continue to look to their futures and to take actions to prioritise those. Top, academic schools live and die based on having the right number of students and having those of high enough ability to make the school financially viable and to deliver the results that parents expect. Admsissions is all about doing that in reality. Part of this process is turning down many at different stages of the applications process, and this will have to continue to happen in one form or another.

I have followed this thread from the beginning, but have held back from commenting so far. I'm afraid the constant assertions that this has no impact on the girls are just not right. DD was one of those girls whose offer was withdrawn. We, as parents, had been clear City was our first choice all the way through, but discussed that with her over the weekend. Ironically, I had taken her away for a long weekend to celebrate her hard work, thinking we could safely accept on the Wednesday. In the event, I was on my own with her when my husband called frantically to say the offer had gone.

Although she didn't have strong views on which school she wanted to go to, she felt the unfairness of the situation - rightly or wrongly we hadn't appreciated the implications of the offer, she is at a new state school where there was no advice or experience to guide us and we had been distracted by a recent bereavement. Her main reaction was to reassure me that the situation was not my fault. From her perspective (and the offer email, as with others from City was very much designed to be read by her) she had an offer, which has somewhat inexplicably disappeared.

DD email the school of her own initiative (I did not see a draft before it went) to set out her take on the process and suggest the school might do it differently in future years. They have failed to respond to her (never mind to us).

What has DD taken away from this? That institutions with authority behave badly and don't admit to their mistakes or face into the implications of their actions. If she does get offered a waiting list place and we take it, that is a long way from the best place to start.

TheInvisibleHand, I'm sorry to hear that but your daughter sounds completely awesome. I really feel that City won't deserve her.

Maybe we're idiots but we genuinely did not know which school was our favourite before offers day. We knew there were probably two that were ahead of the others and if we got them both we'd go to the offers day and then choose by the end of the week. This means within two weeks of receiving the offer and well before the deadline. Some posters seem to be suggesting this is ludicrously indecisive of us and that we just like collecting offers for smugness.

I also resent the implication that going on a half term holiday is a dereliction of parental duty. We went round the bleeding schools, we worked in the Christmas holidays, we turned up for exams and interviews. I don't know, I just thought that maybe we'd be allowed a holiday at the end of it especially since it was with family after a bereavement.

Thanks Lotsofsighing - we obviously think she is awesome too!

Maybe we are naive, but gaming the system was very far from our thoughts. DD sat 3 private schools, all pretty academic, on the basis we couldn't guarantee she would get in, but given that we have perfectly acceptable state school alternatives, we weren't going to go for private schools for the sake of it. She totally utterly did her part (as did we) and secured 2 offers out of 3. To be honest, I could even have lived with the exploding offer system (though yes, a half term break and just a few days of reflection would be nice), if it's implications had been spelt out more plainly and I could have managed DD's expectations appropriately. But that really wasn't the tenor of the offer letter. I am a capable professional person - it might have been in the small print, but it wasn't intended to be focused on.

"Top, academic schools live and die based on having the right number of students and having those of high enough ability to make the school financially viable and to deliver the results that parents expect."

I think there is another element. Certainly schools like LU and Westminster seem to pay a lot of attention to their founding principles. They are supposed to be charities not businesses, their function is to educate, which is something that goes beyond grades. Bursaries help, but I understand that there is also a concern about he "missing middle". In an age of dramatic tutoring (DS once described the routine of a classmate, where, had the school not stepped in, I would have been tempted to call SS) and parents able to drop £1,500 in order to get a couple more weeks to decide, schools may lose their diversity. I am not sure I would want my child to attend a school where the sharp elbowed, grade-obsessed, monied and super-organised, were dominent. Call me old-fashioned but we always sought a element of jollyness in our DCs education. Education should be fun. Happy children, encouraged to be individual but caring and to pursue their interests, will hopefully make successful (in a broader sense) adults.

If City want to be a high achieving school educating the scions of high achieving City folk, they are taking the right approach. It used to have a reputation of being relatively down to earth, with a fair number of kids from state primaries. I think the expansion of the catchment to the East, due to regeneration and improved transport links is an opportunity to improve both diversity and increase cohesion. Instead they may be caught in a cycle of having to meet ever increasing parental expectations in terms of results, at the expense of providing the broader education that young people and society need.

I remember meeting the mum of a Yr 7 SPGS child who may well have been OVienna's neighbour. SPGS was a fantastic school, her DD was incredibly bright etc. Did her DD enjoy the school? No. She hated the journey, and having to commute at the weekend to meet up with friends in Westfield.

And InvisibleHand, what has happened to your daughter is shocking. Unacceptable. Our DD is dyslexic so it was far from clear who might offer her a place. She sat five, and slightly to our surprise, got two. We have been very careful not to focus on any one school. Any would be acceptable. We then let her go into her (prep) school and talk to her favourite teacher about the options. The teacher gently guided her towards the school we also though was best for her. But her choice. She had to go there. If that offer had exploded before she got her head round the decision, she would have been distraught.