Peter symonds - private schools

[duckbilly]

A few of my child's contemporaries at a private prep are going to Winchester college "for 3 years and then on to Peter Symonds as a better chance of going to Oxbridge" .

This feels like playing the system- surely Oxbridge are attune to this or is it really the case people can attemd a state six form after over 10 years of private education and play the state education card?

The Govt has told Oxbridge to increase their state school admission. Yes they take the secondary school on the UCAS form into account when making the offer but if you are attending a state sixth form when offered the place then you are counted as a state school admission. You only have to look at the Hills Road sixth form in Cambridge and Peter Symonds Oxbridge admissions numbers V leading private schools to see part of the complicated picture.

Yes and it seems those candidates have a 1 in 3 chance of getting in too (versus an average of 1 in 4 for other candidates).
State sixth form even if the previous education was private apparently allows them to tick the state school box for that candidate.

At least according to this article anyway…

www.varsity.co.uk/news/19783

No idea re whether it is 'advantageous' or not from a gaming the system point of view.

What I would say is Peter Symonds draws from a wide catchment with some very good comprehensive schools feeding into it.
It also, from talking to parents of kids I know who have gone there, very much expects the students to get on with things themselves and doesn't appear to chase / spoon feed much.
It allows students much freedom to grow up, and its wide range of A levels allows students to pick what they really want to do rather than what their school offers.

Personally I think anyone choosing between state and private at 6th form based on increasing chances of an 'Oxbridge' place is pretty daft given there are far more qualified students out there than there are places so there is a lot of luck involved.

Knowing that PS is free compared with ?30-50k? per year for independent is of course another matter!

www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-oxford/decisions/contextual-data

@ChangeOver22
I’m not sure this is anything to do with contextual offers. I think it’s more a situation with 2 candidates who are pretty much equal but one having been privately educated to GCSE but then having switched to state sixth form and the other having been privately educated the whole way through, then the perception is that there might be an incentive to pick the state sixth form candidate.

There’s no suggestion at all the state school candidate would get a lower offer - just that they’ll more likely to be offered a place.

I’m only interested in this because I also know quite a few parents who switched to state sixth form for this reason. Some but not all were successful but it’s such a lottery who’s to say whether it made any difference or not!

Not quite the point of the thread but...I went to Peter Symonds (22 years ago now) and it was brilliant. Amazing teachers, just the right amount of guidance and a real mix of students. I came from a very low performing/failing inner city comprehensive and got four As at Symonds. If that's not testament to how good it is, I don't know what its. I'd save money on private school for sixth form and send my kids to Symonds too tbh!

Hills Road 6th Form Ofsted says it typically has two-thirds of its intake from local 'partner' state schools. The rest aren't necessarily from independents, though, as kids go there from quite long distances out of catchment.

As a matter of pure anecdote, all their Oxbridge successes that I've known have been at state schools throughout. Wonder what the proportions really are?

Here it is via the Daily Mail
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11310949/FOUR-state-schools-10-pupils-getting-offers-Oxbridge-better-Eton.html
Peter Symonds is in the top 4 state schools for Oxbridge offers in the UK.

Peter Symonds is way larger than Eton. Symonds has around 2000 pupils per year.

I don't think % acceptance rate means much either, some places will encourage pupils to 'have a go' whereas others will be more circumspect.

Furthermore Schools/colleges 'down south' will almost certainly have more applying to Oxford & Cambridge because they are relatively 'local'.

This is really complicated.

Table 4 in the report below shows that in 2021 1829/9608 = 19% of Oxford applications from state schools resulted in an offering being made, compared with 833/4104 = 20% of applications from private schools.

www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/AnnualAdmissionsStatisticalReport2022.pdf

So it's not immediately obvious that switches like this are helpful. I suppose it'd be interesting to compare the private school average acceptance rate with the same for that subset of state school applications which comes from upper upper middle class households who splash out on admissions tutors and so on.

In fairness though, at least some of the benefits of private schools do start to melt away at sixth form level, since bad behaviour etc in state schools all but vanishes by the time you get to A level, and differences in class size tend to be smaller too. Set against this, the most expensive private schools especially really do offer an awful lot of support for top tier university applications.

I'm not sure it's as simple as "applying from a state school".
My kids, state educated all the way through, aren't eligible for any contextual offer programmes that I have seen at the top 20 or 30 universities. Their ordinary comprehensives aren't ordinary enough, it seems. You have to come from a poor performing one (which Peter Symonds isn't), or have some other marker of disadvantage.
If "good universities" don't prioritise state school entrants in general, why would Oxbridge? Surely their widening participation programme would be more rigorous than just "oh yeah, let's take the state school kid".

That Daily Mail article just gives the number of offers made, Peter Symonds is absolutely huge so hardly surprising it got a lot of offers.

But it's not selective and Winchester is. The OP was asking if you go to Winchester for 3 years and then Peter Symonds for A levels are your Oxbridge chances increased and the answer is yes because Oxbridge can count a Peter Symonds student as state school on their Govt data regardless of previous schooling.

But only if a) you think the student will get equally good grades at PS and b) if you think admissions tutors will actively choose someone purely because it makes the uni figures look better.

Yes they do actively choose state, I work in the private education sector and if there is 1 fact all 6th form careers staff know it's that Oxbridge is near impossible hence the focus on US universities.
If you are in the upper 6th at Eton this year you are only allowed to consider Oxbridge if you have 11 x 9's at TAG GCSE and are predicted 4 x Astars and even then no one is allowed to apply for PPE because no Oxford college would ever offer to an Etonian in 2023.

@hockeygrass reading your last post one might think that no one from private school would ever get into Oxford or Cambridge.

Which is clearly not the case.

its very tricky if you are from a big name school and the poster was asking about Winchester. The Daily Mail article shows Eton, The Perse, Winchester and St Paul's girls are successful but not in the numbers that succeeded in the past, even a few years ago Eton had 80-90 Oxbridge offers each year.

Do top private schools actively stop students applying to universities of their choice. I worked in a a very good state sixth-form, we advised students about making at least some of their choices realistic ones but we couldn't stop anyone applying for whatever courses they wanted to.

@Galarunner , Oxbridge have told schools this year that only the top 10% of the cohort should consider applying - hence are Eton it's TAG GCSE plus predicted a levels at top level. PPE / Eton is a 1 off due to Tory PM's!

@hockeygrass I don't doubt that's good advice but do private school staff actually not send off ucas applications they aren't happy with?

Sorry I wouldn't know about Eton, I just know dc parents there but otherwise I don't think a school can stop anyone applying anywhere if they want to.

I work in a selective school (state) and I'm sorry, I just don't believe this. We would have parents literally suing us left, right and centre if we refused to allow pupils to apply for what they wanted. We can offer advice, we can (and always do) refuse to bump up predictions undeservedly, but we can't tell the students what they're "allowed" to apply for!

Also, if it was "near impossible" for private school pupils to get into Oxbridge, how come some 40-50% of British students studying there are from the independent sector?

Keep up, in 2021 for Oxford it was 68.2% from state schools

www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-statistics/undergraduate-students/current/school-type

you need to read more widely. Hockeygrass is right. As you don’t work in the private sector you’re not exposed to this on going conversation and it’s in the media too if you did a search and even on here in mumsnet.

numbers have been falling steadily for the last five years. The stated aim of Oxbridge is 7% intake private/independent. Numbers will continue to fall for privately educated children

Your 7% was "stated" by whom? Everything I've read on the subject suggests that the immediate target is that Oxbridge's state/private mix should reflect the national state private mix amongst kids who get something like AAA - AA*A +, i.e. something close to 75% state, 25% private. Anything less than this is beyond indefensible given that it's proven beyond any doubt that private schooling improves grades. And just maybe, if our oldest universities ever get to that kind of split, maybe that'd be time to start thinking about positive discrimination. But for the time being there's still blatant [albeit not nearly so egregious as it was in decades past] discrimination in favour of the private schools.

www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-statistics/undergraduate-students/current/school-type