London grammar and private senior school entry 2025

[CruCru]

Hi all

It doesn’t look as though one of these threads has been set up yet so I thought I’d do it.

I have a daughter going into year 6 and a son going into year 8 next month - both will be moving to senior school in 2025.

Hmm, that’s a hard one.

• my daughter’s preference;
• outdoor space;
• non awful commute (to be honest, I only applied to schools she can sensibly get to);
• academic results (this is lower because I’d be happy with all the schools we applied to from an academic perspective);
• music / sports / drama provision (again, this is offered by all the schools);
• possibly, if she were offered an academic scholarship, this might make me like a school a bit more. It won’t be a significant fee reduction though.

All - we are nearly at the end of the thread. I’ll start a new one in a bit and put a link here.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/secondary/5272468-london-grammar-and-private-senior-school-entry-2025-part-2

These are all good considerations!

The other thing I wouldn't discount when deciding on schools is vibe / gut feel for a school. When we were deciding last year, that was probably the biggest factor for us. We felt that all the schools we'd seen (and the ones she'd applied to / been offered on) had quite a different atmosphere, and we all felt quite strongly about which would suit her best in terms of overall culture / learning environment / educational philosophy.

So I would say trust your instincts too. I suspect most of you will have had a gut feel (as will your kids) for where they might be happiest and thrive. It's definitely worth listening to.

Wise words from @CruCru and @11PlusCraziness - all very relevant. I would add the currículum - eg, number and range of MFL, what is compulsory at GCSE level (and number of GCSEs), other non-examined subjects.
And on the commute, my advice would be to do it a couple of times using the means of transport that DC would use (and it possible at the same time) - it does help to focus minds (including DCs' ones 😉). Also, consideration of whether there is a plan B if the usual means of transport does not work.

We will also be away 🥳🥳

Snowy for us.

We did four private; two state banding tests; & two state selective exams. State selectives were for practice. These schools weren't right for DD.

Out of the four private, three are Consortium schools. We're hoping to get either our top state option - we're not quite in catchment but it's not out of question - or one of our top private choices. Sooooo looking forward to things being decided!

Some very good schools are seen as backups for other schools; many children apply but would prefer to go elsewhere. These schools will need to over-offer considerably. Between these five schools which publish both number of places offered and number of acceptances, we can see:

Francis Holland Regent's Park: 78 offers, 9 places accepted
Francis Holland Sloane Square: 85 offers, 12 places accepted
Putney High: 46 offers, 4 places accepted
Queen's College: 57 offers, 2 places accepted
Queen's Gate: 35 offers, 3 places accepted

Thank you for sharing. We're waiting for CLS, but it's good to know what happened recently. Good luck to everyone.

Oh wow! That is a lot of offers to one school! Thanks for sharing. Some schools must over offer quite a lot then.

@SamPoodle123 , those prep schools seem to focus on secondary with1 exam for consortium and multiple registration of schools. Also, accuracy at time of publication so can shift. Unfortunately, boys schools and coed don’t have the 1 exam online for many schools, ISEBs for boarding maybe. Girls only London schools does compete with the girls boarding options and coed boarding and day. It seems girls have more options compare to boys.

Yes, I noticed that girls have more options. Frustrating for boys! I wonder if it is because more boys go boarding? Otherwise, I can't understand why are there so many more all girls schools than all boys (at least within 45 mins travel from where we live!). I did 11+ first w my dd and now w my ds. Thank goodness my third is a girl! 😅

There are a lot more girls schools but remember that the all boys schools tend to be much bigger with often 200 boys a year. Most of the girls schools are around 100 a year, some much smaller.

The numbers from @NaughtyParent make interesting reading indeed - obviously those schools are rather academic and not representative of the cohort of applicants but the numbers of "rejections" gives you a sense of how many more offers the schools have to make. For instance. PHS had more than 40 rejections from those schools mentioned and that is even before going into the rejections from other preps in the area (another 20 or so rejections on a quick count) and that is even before counting rejections from those from the state system. With a 60 girls' intake, you can see why the offers would probably need to be at least 2.5-3 times the number of places, even for a great school like PHS.

For West London, Bute House is a big missing piece of information. They do not currently publish detailed numbers of offers and acceptances but, the last time that they did, literally half of their class of 60 had offers from each of the Francis Hollands (about 30 from each) and a third had offers from PHS and WHS (about 20 from each), and few girls accepted places at any of those schools.

With the number of applications that children make these days, and the desire for multiple "safeties", I think there are few schools that can make less than 2 offers for every place.

If you're talking about the clusterf*ck in 2018, CLSG made about 250 offers for 70 places. They expected for some offers to explode, as they had in 2017. They just didn't intend for them to explode on the Tuesday of the half-term, 1.5 working days after the offers were made.

Ah, I see. I hadn’t realised they’d made so many offers when they had so few places.

Not for us. The ones closets to us are 45 mins travel time and 36 spots at one, 70 at one and I think 60 at the other! (For all boys). Perhaps just bad luck on where we live!

Very interesting. It must vary quite widely. Based on some of those ratios a school like Alleyn’s that interviewed 250 for 150 places, would be offering to pretty much every child who took the interview…?

(Although maybe in that example they don’t interview their own Prep pupils, as some schools don’t, so maybe 250 interviewed for 100 places).

Yes, I think at Bute and most of the top girl schools many aim for St Paul’s, so those girls that get St Paul’s usually accept it and then decline the other offers they have and if they get St Paul’s they are more likely to have multiple offers.

I am curious for Latymer. They interviewed 450 for I think 128 spots coming from outside. As there is more in the year 7 (but the rest come from LU). Do you think Latymer offer 2 or 2.5 times the spots they have? I heard they make more offers to girls because as you can see from those charts that girls are less likely to take LU from the all girl schools.

The rule of thumb I've heard about schools which interview selectively after the exams is that they typically interview a quarter to a third more children than they expect to make offers to. So, if they expect to make 120 offers, they'll interview 150-160 children. Another way of looking at it is that they expect to make offers to 75%-80% of the children they interview.

If Latymer have 128 places and interview 450, that would be consistent with their making something like 350 offers, so they might be over-offering 2.5-3 times?

That is interesting, thanks for your insight.

From what I overheard being said to another family ( so please don't "quote" me) on interview day, they are going to be very careful re: over offering this year, so I don't think that ll be the case for Alleyn's