Boys and maturity

twellsmum · Post by **twellsmum** » Fri Nov 07, 2008 10:51 am

I have a DD who doesn't have much to do with the boys at school so I did not really know much about which boys passed and failed at our school (approximately 50 children sat the 11+). However, I was speaking to a boy's mum this morning and it does seem that a lot of the surprises were with boys who were expected to pass. I think six chidren in total who were in both the top groups failed - five of them boys. I know there were eight HT appeals, again only one was a girl and the rest were boys (so assume two must have got through on HT appeal).

I have really noticed my May born DD maturing over this last half term or so and I think it is the same for a lot of teh children now that they are in Y6 so just wondering if changing the timing of the test has had more of a detrimental effect on boys because as a rule they are less mature than girls of the same age.

Most of the boys that have passed are those with older siblings or who are older in teh year. Just wondered if anyone else had noticed this?

shuff · Post by **shuff** » Fri Nov 07, 2008 11:25 am

Very interesting Twellsmum, there is another thread which talks about exactly this issue. Maybe the earlier test did no favours for boys because of the maturity reason or maybe the easier maths and harder NVR was more girls friendly. We were wondering whether there is separate boys and girls standardisation, someone found out there wasn't. I am hoping that if the boys did generally worse than the girls the lowest scores for the super selectives will be lower this year.

kentmum1 · Post by **kentmum1** » Fri Nov 07, 2008 9:22 pm

It would be interesting to have some info from KCC as to whether there were any real differences in the outcomes this year. Most of the boys I know scored under 400. Some of these will still be putting the higher selectives on their CAF, so it will be interesting to see the cut-offs.

shuff · Post by **shuff** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:38 am

The Head of Judd did say he expected a lower cut off this year because of early testing!

travelling man · Post by **travelling man** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:15 pm

I was thinking that too, and then I came across a friend's school with several very high scores, mostly boys. Could always be an outlier.

As a couple of admissions tutors have said, we really are in uncharted waters this year. The tests are much earlier (so less mature children, particularly boys, and less complete syllabus coverage, particularly maths); people know their scores before applying (so people who wouldn't have looked at a super selective now do); more children take the test (now 60% of the cohort); and the schools no longer know the preference order (which has been true for a couple of years but not everyone has understood yet).

The standardisation will correct for some of this and maybe the maths exam was easier to cater for the lack of syllabus coverage?

Even so it all makes for much less predictability which I never like, we shall just have to gnaw our finger nails gently so they last until March.