jennybond007 wrote:
Must have been a bumper birth year.
I think it’s probably more to do with the increasing popularity of the Bucks test, for several reasons, and the increasing desire of Bucks parents to attain a grammar school place, perhaps as much to avoid what are some pretty patchy upper schools as it is to get into a grammar school.
The Bucks test has become attractive as a mock for other areas, and those pre-selected children tend to perform well, skew the qualification statistics and have no intention of taking a place even though deemed qualified. They displace more local children who, without those mock-sitters, might have qualified.
It’s also become attractive to “tourists”, parents who are prepared to move around the country to get a grammar school place. Have a look at old threads on here and you will find that many of them are misinformed, don’t meet the likely catchment or allocation distances but sit the test anyway with no possibility of securing a place. As with the mock-sitters, they can distort the statistics and displace more local children.
The effect of all of this is that there seem to be increasing numbers of local children expected to qualify and suited for grammar school who don’t qualify and whose parents then have to enter the review process, which can be a bit of a lottery and throw up the wrong results. It’s making a mockery of the process and whilst the schools have taken steps to try and reduce the effect of these factors, word and behaviour is spreading faster than they are dealing with it.
Edited to add: Cross-posted with Guest55 but the point is related. A lot of scores close to 121 will be the “displaced” children I mention. To give an example, there was a poster last October whose child scored 120.98, perhaps the closest to qualifying we heard of. There is no doubt that that child’s qualifying place was taken by a tourist or mock-sitter so their parent would have to enter the review or appeal process to try and secure a qualification they arguably should have achieved under a better process.