Anyone heard from Tiffin Boys Sixth Form - interviews?

[Vive42]

DD is keen to go to Tiffin Boys for sixth form.

We found on another forum website that by now, last year, a lot of people were having interviews and had heard from the school.

So far we've received no further communications from Tiffin Boys about DD's application.

Posting here to see if anyone is having interviews and if we should expect a rejection. 😞

From UCAS:

The website states Oct, and Jan deadlines. For some subjects even March.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/applying-to-oxford/application-guide/starting-your-application

My DC is 11 yrs old :)

Your link is for Graduate admissions. We're talking about Undergraduate admissions.

Sounds like you've got a few years to learn your way around their website though. 🙂

Ah that may be it. Thanks

Hi @Vive42 a friend of my DD at school received an invitation for an interview for sixth form this week. We havent heard anything but I was surprised as I thought as per email they were only starting to send invites from 26 feb onwards. Has anyone else received an invite or comms et?

Has anyone heard anything yet?

Are you sure it didn't say the meetings would be from the 26th onwards, not the invitations? The invitations obviously have to go out a week or two ahead of the meetings.

They don't send them all at once - they go out in batches over a few weeks.

Hi @dredded the email said: "If we are able to take the application further we will contact you to discuss course options. This stage will commence from the 26th February 2024."
Reading it again - it is quite vague and might mean interviews are from 26th not necessarily invites??

Hi,
It is vague and it’s definitely later than last year. I know they invite them for interview over a few weeks but I also understood the process of inviting them started from next week. Has anyone else been invited for interview yet? Thanks

Ask your DD to ask her friend when her meeting is. Probably it's on the 26th or that week.

Either way, there's no need to worry. The meeting invitations go out in batches over a few weeks. They are meetings, not interviews - everyone invited to a meeting will get a conditional offer verbally at the meeting, then in writing afterwards.

When the meetings are finished, remaining applicants get a commiseration letter saying they won't be getting a conditional offer but can contact the school in August if they do better than expected in their GCSE results.

It's worth mentioning - the email usually comes from the admissions officer's account (she has initials ZM) not from a generic school admissions account. It will probably go to your child, not to you, so make sure they're checking their Spam folders.

A friend's daughter was at Tiffin boys. Classics and languages are the least popular. Maths, physics and I believe computer science very popular. Success re Oxbridge relates to being highly selective. I believe looking for students who are predicted all 8/9s!!

Our son hasn't got any communication from Tiffins yet. He has a 8.75 average but admission chances are tough. His choice of subjects - Physics Chemistry, Maths,Further Maths are quite oversubscribed. Plus there are very few seats for boys from outside, around 20.

" Plus there are very few seats for boys from outside, around 20"

@DblEspresso where have you got this number from? It sounds like hearsay. The admissions policy is here: https://tiffinschool.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Sixth-Form-Admissions-Policy-2024.pdf. It says that there are a minimum of 60 external places. In practice there are likely to be many more, because not all of their internal year 11 boys will stay on. There are usually more than a hundred new joiners.

They are not allowed to discriminate in favour of girls or boys - if more girls join, it is because of their course choices. But that is all discussed up thread. ⬆️

Girls are definitely prioritised and understandably so. They need to get some decent gender ratio in a boys school. Their site itself states that out of 120 seats, 80 are for girls. Usually they try for even more.

If there was any evidence that girls were "definitely prioritised" then the school would be in breach of the national admissions code, and rejected boys would have strong grounds for appeal.

The more I read the less I know LOL - there does seem to be a bit of a dark art to selection. I guess we will know soon-ish? From what I can tell most people are contacted by mid march and then it is waiting to submit results once final GCSEs come out. Would be good to know how many people have already been invited.

What have you all submitted to Tiffin? Predicted grades? Mock grades? If mocks, which set of mocks? Honestly I think their offer system is flawed, I think they should consider for admission everyone who has over 56 points and ask them to submit actual GCSE grades in August, and rank them then.

There are schools that don't even do predicted grades. There are people who applied using target grades which are based on year 7 entry point (SATs/CATs). We applied using year 10 predicted grades which are the lowest of the lot!

Our school's report shows 5 different grades for each subject on the reports: target, working at, predicted, mock 1, mock 2.

My DD's last mocks (mock 1 grades) were in November when they sat paper 1s mostly. They are now doing "mock 2" sitting paper 2 for most subjects, but results won't be available until mid/late March when it might be too late to send to Tiffin.

Used year 10 predicted for initial application in December and year 11 mock predicted grades (done in December/Jan). They (Tiffin) do say that they double check with the schools to ensure that the predicted grades are for the latest mock results they (the school) has.

@Richmond001 what do you mean by "year 11 mock predicted grades"? Sorry I'm being thick.

My DD's report shows "Predicted grades" and "Mock grades" that are different i.e. school expects half a grade or 1 grade improvement from Yr 11 Nov mocks results to May/June GCSE exams. The Tiffin form asked for "predicted" if I remember correctly.

@anoukis exactly. We gave the predicted grades based on the mocks

There is definitely an art to selection... it is all based on Tiffin's "assessment of their estimated grades in their best 8 GCSEs from the qualifying list". So I guess the more (recent) information they have, the better... predicted, mocks etc.

"Honestly I think their offer system is flawed"

@anoukis you're right. Their policy breaches the National Admissions Code because the oversubscription criteria are subjective. Another school with a similar policy had an adjudicator ruling against it - there are other threads about that. But until a parent or someone else gets round to referring the Tiffin policy to the adjudicator, the policy stands.

Students have started receiving emails to provide their predicted grade scorecards in my son's school. School teachers had already submitted the score for all the students so it's strange that some of the students are being asked to submit the same again. Again it's mostly girls who received the emails. So I still think that girls have a leg up in the process.

Yes I was asked yesterday to resubmit my daughter’s predicted grades. I thought this was strange as we had already submitted them previously.