Woodhouse College, North London

[pinkduckquack]

Hi there. My DS is currently in Year 10 - he's at currently at a selective indie. He's pretty academic (early GCSE predictions 8s and 9s) and happy where he is, but considering a change of scene for sixth form for various reasons. DAO and Latymer are options we're exploring - though the journey time to both puts him off a bit.

Have heard great things about about Woodhouse and it's apparently in the top five sixth form colleges in the whole of the UK?! Some earlier threads on here seemed a bit 'meh' though and wondering if anyone has recent experience? Thank you x

Loads of kids left my children’s private school to go to CSG for sixth form. To boost their chances of getting into university from a state school apparently. They could have easily afforded to stay private.

@Besmirch Yh it's been filled with private kids going state for decades. It doesn't increase their chances of a uni place though, at all.

@Foxesandsquirrels - to improve Oxbridge chances isn’t remotely the reason we’ll be moving from indie to state at sixth form, though I know that’s an agenda for some. Have heard it said that universities are getting wise to that move but I sometimes wonder if it does actually make a difference/help in the ‘first sift’ if that makes sense? If you’ve got thousands of applications, are officers going to check where each candidate did their GCSEs? Surely they just look at current sixth form and predicted grades?

@pinkduckquack going to CSG won't help even in the first sift though. It's not how it works. It's a very very high achieving school. You'd need to move to a very deprived underachieving sixth form for it to make a difference tbh and even then, they take the last 3 years of your education into account.

“If you’ve got thousands of applications, are officers going to check where each candidate did their GCSEs? Surely they just look at current sixth form and predicted grades“

@pinkduckquack it doesn't work like that, firstly filter out the non qualifying grades. Then only the broaderline applicants (not many really) will check if qualify for contextual offer: typical look at the school where candidate did the GCSE (is it a below par state school) , where the candidate live (deprived area or area with low university degree) . The current sixth form actually make little difference to the final outcome for most of the university places.

Yes. It’s so naive to think universities wouldn’t see through that!!