Waldegrave to prioritise music applicants for sixth form

[reememba]

Nc for this as i'm local. It's bad news for people wanting to apply to Waldegrave sixth form from another school, or good news if your DC are musical.They want to prioritise 10 of their 20 guaranteed external places for music from September 2022 and are consulting on their website if you scroll right to the bottom of their admissions page (who knew?!). They have 200 places in total but up to 180 of them will go to their own students. They have 216 in each of the lower year groups now and most of them stay on if their results are good enough, so the number of external places will be 20 plus whatever is left of the 180. I heard this year lots of DCs with conditional external offers had their registration appointments cancelled because the places filled more quickly than usual, which was Covid related but also because the transferring yeargroup was the first one that had 216 (used to be 180). From 2022 if 10 of the external places go to music students then it'll be even tighter. They also no longer prioritise boys for sixth form so the boys that do get places are going to end up in a tiny minority.

Yes this year boys are already in a tiny minority. But it’s fairer that way than boys having automatic priority over external girls, simply because of their sex. And fair enough to give priority to girls who went through the school.

I also think it’s a good idea to prioritise music rather than let the subject die out.

Luckily there is massive choice now with pretty much every local school having a sixth form, plus the large colleges in the area.

Just to add I don’t see why there is a problem with boys being a tiny minority! They know that’s likely when they apply. If boys get in, great, but it’s not critical there are boys just for the sake of it.

It barely seems worth opening it up to boys if there isn't going to be a critical mass.

Why not? It offers boys exactly the same opportunities as it does to external girls. If you apply to the 6th form of any school you know that (usually) the vast majority of students there will move up from the school.

To achieve a ‘critical mass’ of boys you would have to bar a large number of Waldegrave girls from entering. How fair would that be?