Marling and SHS to increase PAN to 150 from September 2016.

[DebsB]

Absolutely!! From my PoV, the timing's ideal - the new exam, which I felt gave my state primary educated child a more level playing field,

Interesting, having experienced the old type in Gloucs and CEM in Bucks I would say the CEM will give private DC an edge. I know that the maths teaching at my DCs old primary school was nowhere near good enough to compete with the teaching in private schools. Also very little comprehension work was done and there certainly wasn't any stress on acquiring a strong vocabulary. I certainly would have had to do a lot more work at home with them than I did for the old test.

On the plus side, they would have been better prepared when they arrived there as the prep done is more relevant.

Does anyone know what the statistics were this year for state v private passes. I vaguely remember a couple of years back someone commenting that Pates was already seeing a swing towards more state pupils getting in. Can anyone confirm that?

Interesting, as you say. I deliberately said "I felt" because I knew I didn't have any real data. I haven't heard of any reliable data being available at this stage, although somebody told me the other day that a private school she knew about (can't remember if it was RP or Berky) had got a lot fewer passes this year than last year. That's hearsay, though, based on playground gossip, so I make no guarantee of its reliability. I don't even have a full picture of what's happened in DD's class at her state school because she only knows about the girls, not having discussed it with the boys! (I'm not clear if she knows about all the girls or just some of them.)

I expect we'll be able to find out a bit more about what it's done to the state/indy mix of kids getting in after the allocations have been done in March. Regardless of its effect on that, I do think it is a more promising way of trying to select children who are all-rounders and so good at wider variety of academic skills than the old style tests measured, which I presume is what GS want to admit.