CAF advise please

[Mum21]

However, looking at past years admission ranks, Crypt seems to go lowest with ranks. It would be quite frustrating if my son qualifies only for Crypt and we would miss getting a place due to this year's circumstances.

The rankings at each school are of course linked to the set of people that apply to each - and whilst it's tempting to think that everyone applies to all the schools "just in case" that's not really true.

It's also got more difficult to compare the rankings for STRS and Marling with Crypt due to crypt now also taking girls - where the only more equivalent list would now be Pates (but that then gets messed up by the fact that Pates looks for qualifying marks in each section and not just a total, so their order can get affected).

Last year our DD had about the same ranking for Crypt as Pates, and about the same ranking for DRHS, Stroud and Ribston - but I'm not sure I'd like to try and work out the relationship between the two types of list etc.

So crypt may not be the least sought after school (boys) even though ranking data indicates?
Perhaps I'm stressing unnecessarily and should go with natural preference and hope that we don't end up on the border of lower ranks.

[Glos18]

You need Lysander as she likes to analyse all the data and has graphs from previous years, although I'm not sure if she is around at the moment. It isn't easy to analyse as there are a lot less shares with marling compared to Crypt. I don't think there is a massive difference between Marling and Crypt scores, so if you prefer Marling, go with that.

[JayC]

Have you considered the travel? Depending on where you live the travel to Marlings may mean a very long day (or short day). It's not ideal that you have to remove an option and it's bad that they didn't give parents extra options, but having met some of the people who make these decisions, I'm really not surprised (it was like I was talking another language when I started to explain how the CEM methodology/calculation for ranking is biased).

But if you have to then I would say travel should be a consideration.

In terms of the percentage's - someone put this up in an earlier post, what they were referring to was how far down that school went in terms of number of applicants to fill their 150 spots. From my old 2018 data I can this is as follows: -
Pates - 10%
STRS - 35%
Marlings - 45%
Crypt - 45%

Now I think since then Crypt has got popular for some reason with parents so I suspect there % is slightly lower.

Hope that helps.

[Polgara_Glos]

I'll post the numbers later, but I can say we are going for actual preference as I'm not sure what else to do!

[2Socks]

I think we have to go with actual preference...we can't predict the impact of changes in economy, willingness to travel, people maybe not risking so many grammars on their CAF due to not knowing results. For that reason I am also not so confident of the ratings giving an indication of likelihood of getting the preferred school.

Also, I can't remember if it was mentioned above (I think so?!) The pool of applicants for Crypt is potentially 2x that of the single sex schools, so the actual scores (not that we can see them) are probably no lower than Ribston and Marling.

[Polgara_Glos]

School have sent a reminder that I need to submit the CAF. I feel the pressure

[Leahdon]

School have sent a reminder that I need to submit the CAF. I feel the pressure

Yep, here too!

[Polgara_Glos]

Did anyone make reference to taking the 11+ on the CAF? I ticked 'I believe they can pass it' but nothing to say they had taken it?

[starcrazy]

Did anyone make reference to taking the 11+ on the CAF? I ticked 'I believe they can pass it' but nothing to say they had taken it?

No, just ticked the box where applicable. I assume the schools pass their lists of rankings to the council admissions team for places to be allocated.