What's going on?

[BucksBornNBred]

Probably a daft suggestion and unworkable but... couldn't all Bucks students be marked as one group, standardised and then allocated a place, while out of area students are marked as another group and allocated remaining places?

That is something that happens for some of the North Yorks exams - the "passmark" is set by the score achieved by a set percentage of in area children - then the OOC have to achieve that score to be considered for a place. This has the effect of the "passmark" not being artificially elevated by OOC or 11 plus tourism

Thanks Hermanmunster. Does it work in those areas?

[2littleboys]

I completely agree with everything you have written anotherdad.

It gets my back up too when I see all these posts about

"Can my child get into .... from ....?"

Do these people not actually think what day to day life their child will have for 5/7 years with an excessive amount of "commuting"?

My child didn't sit the 11+ this year-I have the pleasure of that experience to look forward to next year but I know I would be peeved (to put it mildly) if next year my child had just narrowly missed 121 and I read all of these posts from people who have made their child sit the 11+ in Bucks with no real intention of taking up a place

Whoever mentioned about there being "local/Bucks" children being marked separately to "out of County children/children who live 3 million miles away" (sorry, I forgot who it was) might be on to something.

[hermanmunster]

Probably a daft suggestion and unworkable but... couldn't all Bucks students be marked as one group, standardised and then allocated a place, while out of area students are marked as another group and allocated remaining places?

That is something that happens for some of the North Yorks exams - the "passmark" is set by the score achieved by a set percentage of in area children - then the OOC have to achieve that score to be considered for a place. This has the effect of the "passmark" not being artificially elevated by OOC or 11 plus tourism

Thanks Hermanmunster. Does it work in those areas?

It seems to - the passmark at local GS is set at 28% of the local kids - that is ones who live in catchment, not necessarily at a school in the area.
These kids are pretty well guaranteed a place (tend to only be about 40 kids for 112 places!)
The pass rate for OOC is much higher as people tend to only take exam if they are fairly sure they have a chance.
Then OOC places are offered on distance.
If the passmark was set across ALL kids taking the exam it would end up with far fewer of the in-area kids getting a place, which I think is what is happening in Bucks where the "121" must be v similar to "28%"

[Guest55]

An alternative might be to allow the percentage of entrants getting '121' to be higher than the current third or so. Then the tourists might qualifiy but would miss out on distance.

However it wouldn't stop the 'How can I get to XYZ GS from outer Mongolia?' threads.

[anotherdad]

An alternative might be to allow the percentage of entrants getting '121' to be higher than the current third or so. Then the tourists might qualifiy but would miss out on distance.

However it wouldn't stop the 'How can I get to XYZ GS from outer Mongolia?' threads.

I think this is the most sensible and practical solution. I could deal with the daft questions (I positively enjoy dealing with them! ) if I was confident that deserving local children were being given a fair chance. There would need to be some sort of concession for service families, etc returning from overseas posts.

[Erystation]

As a potential OOC parent (currently agonizing over if the extra time and hassle of travel still make what would otherwise be an excellent choice the place to go - do wish I had magical powers of foresight) can I say I would be very happy to see the approach, or similar, suggested here adopted. We are not millions of miles away and fall well within the range consistently offered to our choice of school. But we are nevertheless not in Bucks and would perfectly understand if we were treated differently.

[BucksBornNBred]

An alternative might be to allow the percentage of entrants getting '121' to be higher than the current third or so. Then the tourists might qualifiy but would miss out on distance.

But that wouldn't actually stop 11+ tourists from skewing of the results, would it? It would just mean a few more Bucks students get GS places.

[Aethel]

I suppose it comes down to what you consider a "tourist" really, doesn't it.

We live on the Bucks border: in fact in the 1960s our house would have actually been IN Bucks as they redrew the county boundaries in the 1970s. So I didn't consider it outlandish for DD to take the Bucks test (especially as we are a mile nearer as the crow flies to our preferred Bucks GS than the in-cachement extremes of the county.)
We have every intention of putting a Bucks school high on the CAF, if it were not so I would not have entered her. We aren't considering other Bucks schools for reasons of sensibility (too far for place to be likely plus daft travel times)

What clearly isn't ideal is the word-of-mouth that seems to encourage many many west-London families who are hugely out of cachement to register, seeminglynwithoutnany clue of the schools' allocation criteria..... I suspect the enormous cachemetn for Slough consortium is partly to blame there. richmond, Twickenham, Southall, Hayes, are all in general cachement for Slough (Langley) and their by-score criteria encourages so many out-of-local applicants that the Slough local childrens' passrate is more like 15-20%.

At least this year Bucks wasn't deluged with Super Saturday practicees usigng the Bucks test as a "free trial run", I think the decision to set the test date later worked in Bucks' favour, it will be interesting to see if they do the same next year.

[punkeson]

This is a great thread, I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels like this!