Anyone here yet for 2021 entry?!

[Bells]

Statistics I have are slightly different to those provided above.
2019 Pate's shares were 54% boys and 46% girls, and 2019 year 7 students were 53% boys and 47% girls. This might be just due to girls having more choices; 450 girls places versus 300 boys places and 300 co-ed.

As for shares with girls schools I would say they are pretty even. DD1 ranking last year was almost identical for DRHS and RH (1 place difference) and roughly 10 places lower than SHS.

[Glos18]

I would say the main driver for the gender imbalance in crypt is the availability of boys places. If crypt was everyone's lowest choice, then all the places would be taken by boys, as they will all rank higher than the remaining girls. Obviously it isn't the lowest choice for a lot of people which means that they have some girls, but they need to become very popular with both boys and girls in order to balance out the genders.

[Yellowhammer]

Yellow hammer - out of interest, how do you know about the 60:40 boy/girl ratio? I've never come across that before.

I trawled many historic posts on the site, press reports (which were mostly based on FOI requests), Gloucester Council's own stats and information direct from schools in e-mails sent out over the past few years - been gathering stats for a few years now. The numbers are rounded to the nearest 10% as they vary year on year, but an excess of boys to girls has been a feature in all years I've looked at.

Crypt numbers of first preferences (admittedly, post-results in previous years) has risen since they went co-ed, ignoring their first disastrous year when they failed to appreciate that adding girls into the mix would mean they would need to go further down the rankings to fill their places but that wouldn't dilute the quality of intake! And Denmark Road is now going lower down the rankings to fill places. Last year, according to this site, Denmark Road took some girls in the 400's range, and whilst Crypt took children in the 700's - well, that is from a double contingent with boys and girls in the mix, so "equivalent" to the high three hundreds/ low four hundreds for boys and girls individually (almost everyone shared with them last year, even if some were doing that as an insurance position).

That combination of facts suggests a reasonable proportion of people are favouring a co-ed school for their children (but with a large proportion still favouring single-sex schools).

[Yellowhammer]

Yellow hammer - out of interest, how do you know about the 60:40 boy/girl ratio? I've never come across that before.

I trawled many historic posts on the site, press reports (which were mostly based on FOI requests), Gloucester Council's own stats and information direct from schools in e-mails sent out over the past few years - been gathering stats for a few years now. The numbers are rounded to the nearest 10% as they vary year on year, but an excess of boys to girls has been a feature in all years I've looked at.

Crypt numbers of first preferences (admittedly, post-results in previous years) has risen since they went co-ed, ignoring their first disastrous year when they failed to appreciate that adding girls into the mix would mean they would need to go further down the rankings to fill their places but that wouldn't dilute the quality of intake! And Denmark Road is now going lower down the rankings to fill places. Last year, according to this site, Denmark Road took some girls in the 400's range, and whilst Crypt took children in the 700's - well, that is from a double contingent so "equivalent" to the high three hundreds for boys and girls individually (almost everyone shared with them last year, even if some were doing that as an insurance position).

That combination of facts suggests a reasonable proportion of people are favouring a co-ed school for their children (but with a large proportion still favouring single-sex schools).

[Polgara_Glos]

While CAF submission date and school allocation date is set nationally, Gloucestershire County Council (not Gloucester Council) could, as other authorities did, allow additional CAF choice, particularly given the number of grammars in a small area. They did not. They could have, as other authorities did, have a later date by which you could change your submitted preferences without it being considered later. They did not. (You may be able to tell I am not impressed by Gloucestershire LEA’s approach!)

I’m still confused around age standardisation and how the test outcomes will be impacted by the lack of education this year for many compared to a better school approach/tutored kids.

[Yellowhammer]

Last year, 674 girls shared with Denmark Road, 817 with Stroud and 990 with Ribston. So, getting an equal place in two schools’ and even all three schools’ rankings is partly due to coincidence!

It is also due to the fact that there is a fairly narrow band of abilities of the children applying and doing particularly well, and a feature of normal distributions and this type of test is that someone with any given higher-than-average raw score is in a small group of the total population. After all, the test is designed to identify those children with “IQ”’s of around 115+, so it proves the exam is doing its job pretty well when normalisation across different cohorts (probably partly based on geography!) with some overlap yields similar patterns at the high-end!

Had your DD1 not been as clever as she clearly is, the different cohorts would have lead to a bigger range of rankings.

It also suggests that the range of marks in the people who pass is probably very small.

When it came to CAF, 373 girls named Denmark Road as one of their preferences, but only 164 of those had put it as their first choice - and yet they went down to a girl placed 400+ on allocation day, presumably because some people "in PAN" for Pates (or some other school as their first choice) didn't bother with a second choice at all.

Stroud had 368 naming them of whom 201 put them as first choice, and Ribston had 463 girls naming them, with 182 placing them first.

So, the overlap between Stroud and Denmark Road is lower than one might expect, though it appears most people who only put one of those two did still share with Ribston.

[Yellowhammer]

While CAF submission date and school allocation date is set nationally, Gloucestershire County Council (not Gloucester Council) could, as other authorities did, allow additional CAF choice, particularly given the number of grammars in a small area. They did not. They could have, as other authorities did, have a later date by which you could change your submitted preferences without it being considered later. They did not. (You may be able to tell I am not impressed by Gloucestershire LEA’s approach!)

I’m still confused around age standardisation and how the test outcomes will be impacted by the lack of education this year for many compared to a better school approach/tutored kids.

You are right about the council - sorry, slip of the fingers when typing! And about their inflexibility, but I see that as only giving fundamentally sound grounds for appeal (hopefully, not required!) that may yet come back to bite them!

As to your confusion - around age standardisation I think that is more a lack of transparency by the schools and the examiners than "confusion" by any of us! I haven't been able to discover for certain whether it is calculated across the entire cohort (whether the county cohort, or even across all children taking the same exam across multiple LA's), and then merely applied at school level, or calculated individually for each school's actual cohort. As it varies in any case from 3% to 8% in all the different studies I've looked at, it seems to be more of a subjective fudge factor than an objectively justifiable adjustment in my view.

And around the impact that Covid has had on all our children - I suspect only the results will show the degree to which different children's performance has been impacted. There are so many different factors that could come into play, and also for many (depending on school and even teacher) a variable amount of "other evidence" from work done in the past year to even demonstrate how a child's potential has been left unrealised as a consequence of this year's chaos.

I see a year with an unprecedented level of appeals looming!

[proudmumwhatever]

Quote:Not only are there more places for them, but fewer girls than boys are entered in the exams – in rough terms 40% of applicants are girls and 60% are boys. Both genders perform equally well in the exams,

Yellowhammer, loving your diligence with the analysis. Worrying disparity between girls and boys in terms of who turns up to the test though. Same thing seems to be true in Dorset where it is written that in 2019 2630 girls took the test compared to over 3000 boys! Wonder why this is? Fear that the girl will take failure more to heart? Girls not appearing to be as clever as they actually are? Or maybe girls more often put their foot down and refuse to go down the eleven plus route?

[Bells]

Same thing seems to be true in Dorset where it is written that in 2019 2630 girls took the test compared to over 3000 boys! Wonder why this is? Fear that the girl will take failure more to heart? Girls not appearing to be as clever as they actually are? Or maybe girls more often put their foot down and refuse to go down the eleven plus route?

It's worth noting that the birth ratio of boys to girls is just over 105:100.
Your quoted Bournemouth split is also 53% boys to 47% of girls. 6% - 8% variance between boys and girls is more in line with the statistics I have seen and could be mostly explained but birth ratio. It still highlights that boys in Gloucestershire are doubly disadvantaged: by fewer spaces available and the number of total boys versus girls.

Last year, 674 girls shared with Denmark Road, 817 with Stroud and 990 with Ribston

I have seen DRHS shares in the results email, however I have requested that figure from them beforehand and the number provided was 975, so assumed the results email had a typo. I wasn't too concerned about that particular figure so didn't question it further, especially that 975 was in line with DD1's results.

The highest number of Ribston shares might be due to geographical location; North applicants would choose DRHS and RH but not SHS and the other way around: SHS and Ribston but not DRHS (with the large number still sharing with all).

[Leahdon]

Omg just spotted this in Ilford ... basically the out of area schools have had their exam delayed to Dec and many of their families were not notified.

https://www.ilfordrecorder.co.uk/news/g ... -1-6938787" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;