Daogroupie wrote:WP! Do talk us through this shocking statement. Was it just Parmiters who did this or has it been done before at other schools and is it in the small print somewhere?
Since you ask ... It's implied by the way they rank their criteria: LAC, 10% closest, siblings, medical, academic, music, distance. Usually they have 18 music places, and run out of places in the last criterion, but in rare years with a lot of siblings they can run out earlier in the list; in 2005 they had only 7 music places.
When the Watford Grammars had a cross-sibling criterion, it was ranked second-last before distance, and often not all of those siblings got in, but the number of test places was unaffected. Since that was abolished, they always get into the second distance criterion.
In the DAO criteria, the priority order is LAC, closest (22), siblings, music (10), academic (65), closest in priority area, others. So if they had more than 103 SEN, LAC and siblings it would be at the expense of academic places. The numbers of such places for 2004-10 have been 105, 107, 100, 98, 96, 98 and 97, but the larger numbers were before they introduced the extra 22 distance places, so this squeeze has not (yet) occurred.
PS: In 2009 Rickmansworth had 104 siblings, and gave up 3 academic places to fit them all in.