Medway council announces that test is delayed by 4 weeks. So now mid October.
Will Kent follow suit? .

_________________
red_debs

Interesting, yes maybe Kent will follow. Is the Medway test normally at a similar time to the Kent test?

Normally just a few days apart. But there are usually a fair amount of Kent children applying for Medway schools and vice versa and since you apply using your home county council it needs to be consistent otherwise some might be applying for Medway schools through the Kent process before knowing their Medway results!

If they are going to delay the test then I think that they should increase the number of options for secondary applications, it is a small change but being able to apply for six schools rather than four will enable people to be able to put aspirational grammar schools and ideal non grammar schools as well as having a banker school in there. It is a small change (and one might argue useful even without a pandemic) which would reduce the chances of being left without a school and would be a relatively easy administrative change.

Any changes must be approved by the Department for Education as they are changes to the admissions policies - it's not just a case of deciding to do so & being a simple administrative change - presumably they would have to revert to paper forms for school applications, or change all the programming for the application process. Currently schools are obliged to inform puplis of the results of the test before the application deadline, so I wonder if the deadline will be extended as well.

Yes it seems like everything could be delayed by a month, test, application and allocation of schools.

Medway residents are already able to apply for 6 six schools.

Bucks are postponing theirs, and when I wrote to KCC, they said they were liaising with other selective authorities, so it would make sense for them to follow suit, wouldn't it?

London applicants can also apply for up to six schools so KCC applicants are at a disadvantage when applying for schools in their own county. Whilst those in other counties can put Kent grammars and know that they have alternative options for a Kent applicant this is more risky. There are three grammars we could apply to with a chance of admission depending on mark, leaving just one option for a non grammar alternative. I think that many things might require DofE approval but these are exceptional times and in the framework of shifting the exam timing and potentially the application deadline it is not an unreasonable expectation. As the 31 October is a national school admission deadline day it might be easier to increase Kent applications to 6 schools rather than shift that date nationally when for most people there is not the same issue. I would still want the results asap but I could happily apply without knowing as long as I had sufficient options to cover different outcomes

With all due respect I actually don’t see why having more options is especially important this year over any other year.

I’m also not sure that Bucks have confirmed they are moving the test, just that they are exploring lots of options.