Summer borns and 11 plus

[Raindancer411]

Hi all

Son is going to be applying for secondary schools once he is back at school and has the Medway test (11 plus) a week after going back after summer.

I wondered, but does anyone know how different it is for the summer borns points allowance? He was born literally at the end of August!

Many thanks

I don't know the points difference but DD2 was born mid august and she got into the top150 (intake for Y7) for her school. She had a tutor for about 6 months for exam technique and NVR which they've not see before and she coped really well (fuelled by chocolate mini rolls )

Good luck!

His raw score will translate to a higher standardised score than a September born achieving the same raw score, but the adjustment is only by a few marks.
But that is dependent on the older children scoring higher raw scores overall - if they didn't, although that's unlikely, your son wouldn't get an adjustment.

Also I believe it's calculated by month, so being end of August won't give him advantage over a child born beginning of.

My DD, born very end of August, got the equivalent of an extra three marks above a September born. This was in a different county. In the grand scale of things it doesn’t make a huge difference

I think it very probably differs by local authority/school etc. From the ones I've looked at, in terms of an uplift, in percentage point terms [final marks quite often aren't reported in percentage terms] an August kid might get something like a high single digit % markup over a September kid, so it's not a trivial thing.

Not sure how it works in your area, but in ours all the August born children are compared together, all the January together etc. In theory if all the January children did really badly their raw scores could end up in a higher end mark than the August children - but that never happens.

I have a September bond and apparently September is the 'Most Popular Birth Month'. Does this mean kids born in September have more competition?

September born!!

There is an explanation of standardisation here:
www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/advice/standardised-scores-an-explanationits simplified but the principles apply.

Basically standardisation is based on how well all the other children born in the same month score. It would be perfectly possible for there to be no "adjustment" at all (it's not really an adjustment, simply the raw scores are plotted on a standard curve for each month).

No

Why not? if a September born child is compared with 100 other children (all born in September) and December born child is compared with 50 other children (born in dec). Does this not have any effect on the average? Genuine question, I can't work the statistics and am glad I don't have to sit the 11+

I don't know what you mean. It works a bit like my table below, in which there are only 24 kids sitting a single test, which is marked in percentage terms [none of this is realistic]; the top quarter [six] kids will 'pass'; and to compensate for age differences raw test scores lose (gain) will an additional mark for every month before (after) February in which a child is born [real adjustments don't work exactly like this].

I used random numbers. In my example, in terms of who passes, the adjustments only made a difference to one child - a February kid who finished 6th in terms of raw score got bumped down to 10th after adjustments, an August kid with a slightly lower raw score got in ahead of him.