Help me understand Brighton College

[4U2]

Please help me understand Brighton College, as it continues to remain an enigma in our books. Its ethos tends to be similar to that of Wellington, with a strong PR push and very good GCSE and A-levels and Oxbridge rates.

Normally there is a good correlation between a given school's performance at inter-school competitions and Oxbridge/Ivy/medical school acceptance rates, as one would expect that these universities would look beyond grades only. E.g. Winchester gathers around two dozen medals at science olympiads, and medics are around 9% of leavers, Merchant Taylors and Sevenoaks around a dozen medals in science olympiads, and medics are around 6-7% of leavers. A similar pattern holds in Model UN results, which tends to translate well into Oxbridge/Ivy acceptance rates in humanities.

I am not aware of BC getting any special recognition at these large inter-school competitions like Model UN and math or science olympiads, or at least they don't seem to advertise it (and I am sure that if they had they would🙂). The pupils we have seen at BC don't seem to come across any better than those at other the top schools, and seem to be more in league with Wellington than Eton. How it is possible then for BC to beat most of the top schools in terms of Oxbridge and medical school acceptance rates is a mystery to me.

It makes sense that if a school focuses strictly on the curriculum, then there will be stellar results in the GCSE and A-levels league tables. But surely Oxbridge/Ivy and medical schools will be looking for more in a candidate than just top A-levels?

Oh, the horror that Brighton College get 1.4% more children into Oxbridge than Winchester College. That’s a huge difference. Does this massive difference occur every year? And this despite not even showing Oxford and Cambridge they are objectively superior by entering Olympiads, relying more on obviously subjective aptitude tests and interviews, or more secretive, subtle and unadvertised ways of showing their ability and interest in their chosen subject. I don’t know. It really is profoundly disturbing, especially given the maturity of boys from Winchester. Is foul play involved?

My dd did STEM A levels at an independent school with great academic results and a good Oxbridge entrance record. The students did the Olympiads in the Sixth Form too. At her school they just turned up that day to school and were told that the lesson was to take the Olympiad. It was regarded as fun, stimulating and challenging for the students but nothing more than that. Whereas a friend's dc who went to a different school spent some time before the Olympiads looking at past questions in class and being prepared for the structure and content of the test. Nothing wrong with either approach but students are inevitably going to fare better with the second. I have no idea about the individual approaches of the schools you are talking about, but it might well be something like this?

The workload is intense from 11 onwards , mine often had several hours. Night of work to do despite not finishing school till 5.30, again would assume same at any of these schools being talked about.

This would worry me far more than Olympiad results. My DC are at a similar 'level' school to BC and their homework load is absolutely nothing like this. Homework is pretty light up until public exams, with a recognition that kids have loads of other things to get involved in, and that evidence for the academic benefit of extensive homework is patchy at best.

More generally, I think the OP's focus is far too narrow on something that's not really very important. Once you're choosing between schools of this calibre in terms of results, then it really doesn't matter whether one has more Olympiad successes than another. It's far, far more important to pick a school where you think the culture, practicalities, subject options and extra curricular opportunities will suit your child.

😂 Poor Eton boys, not even being allowed to apply for law or PPE. (No wonder they don’t get any students in to study those subjects). And such a low Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate generally, too. Should have gone to The Windsor Boys’ School - they are far higher in the Oxford and Cambridge admissions top 100 table.#shouldhavegonetospecsavers.

Science olympiads and model UNs do exactly that, and Oxbridge would certainly pay attention to those when ranking candidates?

I'm not sure if that's the case as it can only be mentioned on PS and Oxbridge don't place much emphasis on the PS. For STEM appplicants Oxford use admissions tests to select for interview. Perhaps that's where BC focus and are successful - rigorous on the preparations for admissions tests and interviews?

Interesting thought @Fireflygal thanks for joining. Could any BC parents possibly comment on that? May also be interesting to know the number of university councillors, and support for US university applications (SAT tests, etc)...

@4U2 do you have the stats for other schools besides Winchester on the Science Olympiads medals and Model UN success? Don't we really have to look at this across most of the top Oxbridge feeders like the ones from this chart in 2020? That way we can come up with a medals/offers success ratio to see if BC is really an outlier? I think your analysis is good, but we should broaden it.

Got it somewhere on my desktop for the half-dozen boy and coed top tier indies we were looking at including Merchant Taylor, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Harrow, Brighton college, etc. They are easily accessible online. Nearly all tend to produce medallists across the board (science olympiads, debating, model UN) other than perhaps Tonbridge which performs well in science olympiads but less on the other two, which is also in line with that school's reputation so no real surprises there.

It was only Brighton College that was staring me in the face with nothing to explain the anomaly between popular league tables and my own analysis. Which is where I realised that I must be missing something.

The only reason why I brought up WinCol specifically is that if the current trend holds, then the ratio of medals/offers could easily turn out to be larger than one for WinColl in the next few years (so medallists would be overlooked) which to me sounds really unfair to those boys who have obviously worked hard for five years to polish their expertise in their fields and should deserve better.

The same ratio is not necessarily as alarming for the other schools, which are larger and have more Oxbridge offers in absolute terms and also tend to gather fewer medals. Maybe not always perfectly fair (as there are also annual variations, soft skills, and politics of the day involved) but not alarming either.

Perhaps BC knows something that I/the other schools don't (what is it?) and the current trend is sustainable in which case it should be seriously considered as an alternative. The other possibility is that BC is a rising star near its zenith and the current level of offers are unsustainable.

To be honest, in my opinion Model UN isn't that big a thing, but of course it is a great extra curricular activity for encouraging students to improve negotiating skills, public speaking, team work, etc. Just because BC students don't attend Model UN doesn't mean they don't have those skills. BC school culture is more diverse. As long as you don't think the learning is pressuring you will find your own interests there and thrive.

They absolutely should be looking for academic potential, and so they are aware that a mediocre student can be polished, coached, tidied up and given a tailored CV completely independently of whether they have any great talent or not.

It’s quite hard, as an employer to know what to make of candidates from the “better” schools, as it takes so much time and effort to work out if it’s all surface and sheen, or if they are actually good.

In many cases it’s the safe bet to take the kid from the state comp who went in to Oxford and shine at interview, as there’s a virtual certainty that they are a rare talent.

You seem to be confusing privilege with ability, something that employers are getting pretty good at distinguishing between.

Weird grammatical failure in my post. I could swear I wrote “went on to Oxford and to shine…”

I don't disagree as debating and model UN is not as scaleable as olympiads due to their nature, and the playing field is defined by the invited participants and topics drawn, so counting the medals there is like counting the oscars, or titles in professional leagues.

The playing field is very much open and levelled at olympiads however, with almost no barriers to entry and no really effective short term prep, which is why it makes sense to use it as a starting point to compare.

Still, from a top Oxbridge feeder school like BC, I would still like to see at least some high level results also in model UN and debating to make me believe that the school is not just about PC PR and learning textbooks (and admission tests/interview phrases) by heart.

Maybe the best thing is to go to BC and ask Cairns your question. It's a reasonable questions. See what he has to say.

@4U2 This is diversion from the topic but do you have any knowledge of the US / Ivy league entry system?. Does debating and Model UN count for much in the US universities? How much does being first generation increase an applicants chance?

Generally, the US admissions process will give more weight to non-school, non-standardized test things compared to the UK. Sports, arts, music, success in debating, chess, science medals, will all be considered in the US. The UK is way more prescriptive. Just different systems.

I am not in education and have no idea whether even Oxbridge does:) I just know that if I were in admissions, I would pay attention to it. Work experience tells me that reports and interviews say very little about a candidate's long term potential. Track record in a competitive environment and extras/interests tend to be much more informative.

Thank you@pkim123 I know that the Ivy league schools will also want top results obviously. We are just trying to work out what sort of chance DS would have. We were not born in this country and DS will be a first generation student. The acceptance rate seem so low.

Why would Oxbridge pay attention to something that they know most candidates will never have had the opportunity to take part in?

They are looking for ability, this sort of thing is more about your school than yiur talent.

Agree. I think if you show success in one of these events, that's great. But with all the pressure on Oxbridge to be inclusive of all backgrounds many kids may not even have the opportunity to compete in such events.

It’s reminiscent of a candidate I had who made a big point of listing on her CV all the countries she’d worked in, when it turned out that that “work” was being paid by her father, the ambassador, to accompany him on trips.

Exactly, give me a scrappy, hard-working, smart kid to work with me any day of the week. I can leave the princes and princesses behind. I have never ever hired anyone from Oxbridge, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale. Worked with a lot of them. Some great, some meh.

Olympiads are national level events to choose the best of the best for the national team. All the grammars, indies, compehensives all included. If a school decides not to send a pupil (or if a student decides not to participate), then it is because the school is not confident in the ability of its pupils. Anyone able can participate, there are virtually no barriers to entry.

The above are like saying my DC would have won the 100m dash in the summer Olympics. The only reason he didn't is becuse he didn't parttake.

Maybe BC is right in its woodcutter approach. Noone cares beyond grades anyways, and excellence will always be blamed on 'privilige' so why even bother?

Nobody said their kid would win anything regardless of whether or not they competed in any event.

Utter rubbish. If a school chooses not to send someone it’s likely because they haven’t the time, the expertise or the funds to do so. My school never sent anyone in all the years I was there, and it had some brilliant pupils.

I get the idea that parents with money want the things that they have bought for their children to move them ahead of more intelligent pupils with less money, but they need to take on board that this is much harder to do than it once was.

Oxford has had enough of being fooled by a good vocabulary and an expensive CV attached to a mediocre candidate, and is rightly ignoring the things that have been bought.

Professional employers are doing the same. The world of work is too technically demanding nowadays to let someone in based on RP, an old school tie, and a knowledge of which cutlery to use on the oysters.