Grammar schools to be means tested for free places

[dera35]

Are admissions to Grammar schools going to be means tested for free places ? I.e Children from affluent families will pay fees ?

I can understand if it goes that way because there is lots of independent research that points to Grammar schools being dominated by affluent families and especially using expensive private tuition for entrance tests.

That’s interesting!
I’ve never heard of that and they don’t in Medway, Kent or Bucks. It’s not something I agree with but then I don’t agree with Grammars anyway.

Yeah, there are 6 admission groups and 2 of the first 3 are for pupils in receipt of pp

Our local grammars require a standardised score of 10 less for pp kids (no one knows what that translates to as a raw score). PP also make up 2 and 3 of the 6 groups for admission

I have never heard of a lower pass mark for PP children-that's good to see. Here, you still have to get the same pass mark as everyone else, but are pretty much guaranteed a place if you get the passmark. The fact that this has made little difference to the number of PP kids in grammar schools does more to highlight the unfairness of the system than otherwise!

I'm in Glos. Here most of the grammars have a separate application criteria for PP, although the exact details for each school vary. Also all test scores are put in "rank" order (they don't disclose the details of how they calculate this!), and generally PP requires a lower ranking to qualify for a space (e.g. 800 of 2000 rather than 400 of 2000).

Stop making shit up!

I’ve just looked up 2 Gloucester grammars at random (I don’t know the area). One of them does actually seem to do pretty much this (30 pp students who have either got the qualifying score or are within 100 places below the qualifying score) so I guess there is some truth to it.