Anyone waiting for Herts / N London 11+ results?

[bluegreencherry]

Our DS is only sitting two - Habs and St Albans. Second round for Habs next week, waiting to hear whether he will get invited back for second round of St Albans. I'm finding all this waiting is shredding my nerves, so if anyone else is in a similar position with these schools and fancies a pointless chat / baseless speculation on impact of VAT on applications / the process / Plan Bs, please say so!

Interesting, my son was asked an academic question at MTS interview - a maths ones
that he was able to answer showing a method
They also touched on poetry
MTS decide entrance in your exam performance ; interview and the current headmasters reference according to The School Guide , MTS Master says is ‘very very important’

two weeks to go! how is everyone doing? I would like to be a lot more relaxed / distracted than I am...

I wonder why the consortium chooses the start of Feb half term as offer date, surely the schools have done all their admissions wizardry by now and know how many offers they will make and which children those offers will go out to? Although maybe they want to keep offer date as close as possible to the state secondary allocation date at the start of March?

They have been busy sorting out the 4+, 7+ and in-year applications - now that they are all complete they can focus on 11+
Also yes, a lot of students will have grammar school offers so makes sense to have offers and deadlines around the same time. Plus some indies have only recently finished interviews.

I guess the schools also want to leave themselves time to double check everything, and the offers perhaps have to go through a few layers of approvals. At SAS they held music (and choral?) scholarship assessments this week.

I don't think SAS is part of the consortium, but it chooses use the same offer date. Which is odd, as when I looked at the consortium schools none are the main competitors for SAS - but maybe I've misunderstood, or got the wrong consortium! That said, I think City and Habs offers are on 14 February too.

Berkhamsted makes offers in mid-December though I've heard that they make relatively few offers then, and then a lot more after the state school deadline has passed as lots of families use it as a back-up for Bucks grammar places. This year their acceptance deadline is 5pm on Monday 3 March which is National Offer Day! I wonder if this is a mistake and they haven't twigged - you're pretty stuffed if you're waiting on state school offers and you don't get those until the afternoon - very glad not to be in that boat....

I'm feeling more relaxed now than when waiting to hear about the assessment and interview - it was very hard to know how the assessment went and from what DS said about the interview I felt it could have gone better, but obviously it went well enough to make the next stage. The group lessons he really enjoyed so hopefully that came across. I'm by no means confident, but if we do get turned down at the final hurdle it's not as if stressing about it now would have helped in any way.

@ToughWaitingGame yes of course re 7+ and 13+, hasn't forgotten about those! I guess it is a lot of work for admissions at this time of year

@BarqsHasBite wow that is an aggressive deadline for acceptance! Glad you're feeling more relaxed. I was much more zen a couple of weeks ago oddly. Rollercoaster! I think now I might have been hallucinating but I'm sure SAS and Habs and others were part of a North London consortium a good few years back, but one by one each school left as they wanted the control of setting their own paper. Can't find any info on it so maybe I made that up?! Or maybe it was just girls schools at STAHS and Habs were in it.

@bluegreencherry I read somewhere that STAHS used to be in the consortium and then left so it’s possible other schools were too.

We are hugely fortunate in that we received an offer for DD this week from one of our schools. We will hear from the second (and final) school on 13 February. It has definitely taken the pressure off after a bottom-clenching few weeks! Time seems to have started moving more quickly again after being in slow motion. Not sure yet whether we will have a decision to make but we are super happy with the first school and DD is going for a taster day next week.

Hang in there, offer day will be there before you know it and soon this will be a distant, if a little traumatic, memory!

Oh congratulations @DawsonsGeek, you must be so pleased and relieved!

Thank you! Yes, we are so relieved and the look on DD's face when I told her was priceless. She has been beaming all week.

@DawsonsGeek congratulations so happy for you!! That is brilliant news. Love the description of time speeding back up after living in slow motion - slow motion is exactly it!

We have found out that we have got a scholarship with fee remission from one of our
school choices so we are going to go for it and won’t be going for either St Albans or Mill Hill if we do get them; so all the debating between them and in the end we won’t be going for either! Crazy world!! Never expected such a high fee remission for this school, although the results aren’t as good for said school, we hope being part of a scholarship group will elevate DS’ academic progress and the fee remission will really will make a difference for us. Wishing everyone on this thread success and for your DDS and DSs to be very happy at their chosen schools. ❤️

Hello all 👋

Glad to have found this thread. We are also waiting to hear from St Albans school after the callback a few weeks back. DS loved the geography and science lessons! Starting to feel nervous now as we’ve decided St Albans is our first choice school; we have debated it for a long time due to logistical challenges but now we know we would go for it if offered it makes the pressure feel even greater. How are people feeling about their choices? Good luck to all of us

Congratulations @honeynutcereal and @DawsonsGeek Wonderful news 🙌

@honeynutcereal congrats, that is brilliant news, you must be relieved not to have the difficult choice to make and excellent re the fee remission, makes a lot of difference over 5/7 years. Hope your DS is very happy there.

@SunnyIslandSea, welcome to the thread! Are you waiting for other offers on the same day too? We have only applied to Habs and St Albans so both results are out on the same day in two weeks' time. Glad your DS enjoyed the call back day, they obviously did a good job making it fun for the boys, my DS also enjoyed it thank goodness (although it may have softened the blow of rejection if he hated it and we don't get an offer!)

Thank you @bluegreencherry We are waiting to hear from a few other schools, but they are not as academically highly regarded as St Albans. We chose them more for logistical reasons.

Its a very hard choice for you as Habs is very much in demand. Which school are you leaning towards?

Lovely to hear your DS also enjoyed the callback. I agree with those who said it’s highly likely those that were invited to the callback will receive an offer 🙏

That’s great news @honeynutcereal, congratulations!

And hopefully a lesson for all of us, that for all our stressing/fretting/agonising things usually work out in the end 🤞.

👋 @SunnyIslandSea

Congratulations! That is wonderful news. We would make the same decision if we were in the situation.

Hello, met a friend today whose son applied to SAS. She was told by one of the admissions team that they are expecting to make 150-180 offers to the 220 or so callback students.

Which is a bit lower than I was hoping for, what with all the VAT/acceptance rate uncertainty so I’m back to fretting again! 😣 Odds are still well over 50/50 though I suppose.

@BarqsHasBite oh no! That makes me nervous too! We have basically been talking about SAS like DS has a place! I guess it just seemed like a taster day rather than an interview…

Oh dear those odds are not as favourable as I had hoped! Thanks for reporting back @BarqsHasBite. I just don't understand how it squares with the odd approach they took to attending the callback (this is voluntary doesn't matter if you don't attend etc). Either it feeds into the assessment or not? Once they've done the first narrowing of numbers to invite to the callback, what additional data do they use to narrow again if the callback was voluntary?

I agree @SunnyIslandSea it felt like a taster not an assessment. Re your question about SAS or Habs, we would be thrilled to get either to be honest. I'd much rather SAS from a logistics / commute point of view, DS was wowed by Habs at the interview. Would be so lucky to have a choice, both seem to be brilliant schools.

I think the long wait also makes the (potential) disappointment harder for us + DS

I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of the suggestion that the callbacks were voluntary/more of a taster than assessment. Someone (either a PP or my same friend) reported that the Headmaster said in his talk that they were part of the assessment process. So it’s a complete mystery what would happen to an application if someone didn’t attend.

The stats my friend gave today do seem at odds with what the Director of Marketing said, namely that they weren’t looking to cull numbers nearly as much from the callbacks, they were expecting to make lots of offers and that the callbacks were really just to check the boys weren’t a PITA in the classroom (obviously my words not hers but that was the gist).

Not sure what to think!

Complete speculation (so probably unhelpful) but maybe:

We know the callbacks were to rule out a presumably small number of boys who do not seem a good fit in the classroom for whatever reason.

That leaves maybe 200-210?

They make offers to the top 150-180 of these and put the rest/most of the rest on a waiting list - because it’s almost impossible to predict the acceptance rate of the definite offers, and they don’t want to over offer by too much and find themselves with 100 acceptances. But obviously they don’t want to say no to too many and then find themselves with unfilled places.

It’s what I’d do in their shoes but needless to say I have zero experience and almost no knowledge of such things!

Totally here for baseless speculation! Yes that would be a sensible way to do it. I wish it was less opaque

It does make sense to have a waiting list. I know other schools do this. I don’t know why it just seemed so positive. Think it was the you can come if you have time line in the email. I hope we aren’t in for a real disappointment on offers day, we’ve been planning the coach times and routes 🫣

@bluegreencherry Habs and St Albans are both great schools, you can’t go wrong but personally if St Albans is nearer for you I’d go for that as location is a big factor for sure. St Albans is the furthest school for us which has put us off but it’s also the highest ranking school of our options so leaning towards it despite the distance; though it’s been a major cause for concern for us all

On the basis we might find ourselves with a waiting list place (again: pure speculation that a waiting list will even exist) I think I should be encouraging people to take any other offer above SAS, thereby freeing up a space for us:

Habs is an amazing school, far superior in every way to SAS, it’s worth an 8 hour round coach trip if that’s what it takes, you’d be mad to turn down a place there…or at any other school!

Apparently SAS is shockingly bad, they feed the boys gruel, the lessons are all spent polishing the teachers’ shoes and they put them in all day detention if they blink in the wrong way! And the school is sinking into a swamp so they’ve got 7 years of remedial building works planned and they’re going to quadruple the fees in September to pay for it!! etc etc
😆

@BarqsHasBite 😂😂😂