Students to applicants ratio in indies

[FAC51]

From OP's original list, NLCS and St Pauls are the very top tier, and consequently the hardest to get into.

The VERY confident might see Habs and City as backup options.

The ordinarily confident would still see those schools as a challenge, and should have a backup of the type mentioned by DG. If you live in N London or Herts, I'd add St Alban's Girls to the backup list.

[Londonmummy]

Out of curiosity what scores do you need to consistently get in the consortium tests for schools like SHHS, Godolphin and City, granted City is now doing their own exams? Similarly for the likes of Francis Holland and Queens?

[mad?]

St Helens, Northwood, South Hampstead, Channing, St Margarets are all more middle tier. But I would advise you to put location somewhere in your critieria. DG

+1

[adelante]

Out of curiosity what scores do you need to consistently get in the consortium tests for schools like SHHS, Godolphin and City, granted City is now doing their own exams? Similarly for the likes of Francis Holland and Queens?

Something I hope to help with since I found it very disconcerting when we were going through it last year.

DD was getting consistently into 75-85% range on old Consortium papers, both Eng and Maths (depends on how hard the parent marks it obviously, I'd consider ourselves to be average to strict, but we did use the marking scheme to make sure she learned to show her work, and try and get points for intermediary steps even if not getting to the bottom of the question).

Reading feedback on boards, would have thought this wasn't good enough for the top tiers and yet she received an offer from every indie place she had applied to (various parts of the spectrum). So unless she massively outdid herself on exam day, would say the range above is a decent guidance.

Also a word on interview "weeding out the over-tutored", controversial opinion on here, but I simply do not believe it, or at least not at a massive scale. Would rather think the offer list has high degree of rank order correlation with the exam result list, and interview screens out what the school may believe are bad fits for a variety of reasons.

As for offer ratio, maybe moot point since they've changed format, but City said at their open day last year that they had 700+ applicants, invited ~300 back for interviews and the offers were probably in the 150.

Worth noting that one thing schools have tended to do lately to manage the over-offering is to make what they believe is the target number of offers they need, but have a hard number of places (on a first accepted, first served basis) within that group. Whether that is scare tactics to regain upper hand on parents holding multiple offers, I don't know, but Highgate and City very explicit about this last year.

Hope this helps. Good luck to all.

[Londonmummy]

Hi Adelante,

That is very helpful so thank you for sharing that information! It's so hard to know as the ranges will vary over the different year group but nonetheless a little transparency is useful. And I would agree that Highgate have used at least for the last couple years the first come first serve to fill their year, so an offer per se is not a guarantee of place! Did not know City was the same too.