Kingsdale School banding tests - how does this work?

[JuneMyNameIsJune]

I can see dates on the website but not an explanation of how this works.

Do you name the school on the CAF and they contact you after the final date?

There are two banding test dates in September - do parents have to request a banding test before submitting the CAF?

Admissions Policy - s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sh-kingsdalefoundationschool-org-uk/media/downloads/Kingsdale%20Foundation%20School%20Admission%20Policy%202019%2020.pdf

Extract from policy:

Waiting Lists
Kingsdale Foundation School will operate separate waiting lists for each ability band. Where in any year Kingsdale Foundation School receives more applications for places than there are places available, waiting lists will be maintained indefinitely by Kingsdale Foundation School from 1st September of the year to which the application applied in accordance with Local Authority guidelines (see Note 10).

thank you prh

Also - hope you don't mind being the fair banding guru! - do you know whether, for schools that use fair banding, there is any external scrutiny about where you put the cut-offs for your bands? Nor explaining very clearly but e.g kingsdale as a school wth no catchment area and a good academic rep gets a high volume of high achievers applying - as lots of people use it as their back up for the selective privates and grammars or indeed use those as the back-ups if their child doesn't get kingsdale. To me that would suggest the intake taking the test is skewed towards high achievers. if coupled with that you can put the band cut-offs where you like, doesn't that mean you could end up with a low band that's really low-medium, a medium band that's medium-high and a high band that's actually high-very high? That gives you one third very high achieving children and a good chance of having very few low achievers, which seems to me to skew the intake given that the purpose of fair banding is to make the school accessible to children of all abilities?

Not picking on kingsdale here - i know lots of schools use fair banding - but the combination of fair banding plus no catchment is more unusual and seems to present a particular issue, as the number of high achieving applicants isn't limited by geography.

Kingsdale's ability bands are split so that the numbers in each should be roughly equal. The intake should therefore broadly reflect the ability range of applicants. If they get a lot of high achievers applying that will skew the results.

On the more general question, there is no direct external scrutiny but there is indirect scrutiny via the LA. As part of the admissions process the school will provide the LA with a ranked list of all the applicants in each ability band. The LA can therefore see how many applicants have ended up in each band. They will check that everyone who applied is on the list. They should also check that the numbers in each band are broadly in line with expectations. So, for Kingsdale, they would expect to see roughly the same number in each band. They wouldn't expect the numbers to be exactly identical but if, say, one band had twice as many in it as the other bands they should start asking questions.

I too have had conversations with people who have been told their place on the waiting list and how they have progressed.

But I haven't been in that position, so felt a bit cautious to say, since it is clearly against the code.

Could it be that it is the scholarship places that have numbered waiting lists? Though the people I know weren't up for scholarship places.

prh thank you again, very interesting. One more question (sorry!). as you say, it's the fair banding rules that an equal number is taken from each band. But surely, the normal distribution of intelligence would indicate that, generally, most children will score in the middle of the bell curve with outliers at both ends. I get how equal offer will work for schools that use 5 bands, where, effectively, 3 bands are given over to the hump in the middle, but if you only use 3, by taking equal numbers from each band aren't you skewing your intake towards both high and low ability and disadvantaging children in the middle, or whom there will be more? Of course if the cohort are already skewed in one or other direction then it will be a bit different, but there will still be a hump - just higher up or lower down.

The week after offer day, I received a letter from Kingsdale with I my DD’s positions on both the scholarship and banding waiting lists. What I found strange, is that my DD was in virtually the same position on both lists.

A week later we were offered a place, so I wasn’t aware of moving up or down the list.

onewhitewhisker

The reason there isn't a problem with the normal distribution is that they arrange the band boundaries so that they have a roughly equal number of applicants in each band. If there are 900 applicants there will be 300 in each band. On a normal bell curve over 600 of the applicants will be in the middle (i.e. within one standard deviation of average). So, in round terms, the top band contains 150 high performers and the top 150 middle performers, the bottom band contains 150 low performers and the bottom 150 middle performers.

prh, thank you

I can't find the Dept of Education tables that show how many pupils in each attainment / ability band a school has. There used to be detailed information about a school - how many on Pupil Premium, how many low, middle and high attainers.

I seem to remember that Kingsdale did indeed have a high % of high attainers - which would make sense because of the many aspirational parents putting their children in for the banding test, and therefore skewing the band boundaries high.

On on the education.gov website, prior attainment information doesn’t seem to be available for the provisional 2018 results, but it is there for 2017 results.