New School Admissions Code

[sss]

I've noticed that Stratford Girls Grammar School will be increasing their PAN from 75 to 112 for 2013 entry which is great news as the 'pass mark' should decrease.
Are their any plans for a change in PAN for the Foundation grammar schools in B'ham under the New School Admissions Code introduced recently I wonder?

[UmSusu]

Excuse my ignorance, but how does the new admissions code affect PAN? I have heard that CHB is increasing its PAN from 93 to 96 ( but I only heard that from DS2 who was speaking to a teacher when he sat the exam at CHB - but don't ask me why they were discussing such a thing )

UmSusu

[mike1880]

If you look on the Birmingham council Admissions web page the PAN for 2013 are posted under 2013 arrangements. There are no changes to PAN that I noticed.

Personally I think 31 in a class is already enough, you can see the effect on their GCSE results very clearly whenever they've gone over PAN, and I don't believe they have the capacity for another form (unless they come to some arrangement with the girls school about that grossly underused domestic science block they built a couple of years ago) so I wouldn't expect any major increases.

mike

[Okanagan]

Have a look here - basically there used to be a restriction on grammar schools expanding, which was removed, with the 2013 entry being the first year that this can apply to. All the Warwickshire grammars (not just Stratford Girls) reacted to this very quickly with all except KES Stratford officially adding places this year. Anecdotally it seems they were always able to take more but had to keep the extra places for appeals so they weren't officially expanding, so in practice there might not be too much difference in total admissions, it just means that it it's in the open rather than favouring those who are prepared to go through the appeal process over those who accepted the initial decision.