Hello all!

I’ve got a question about the 11+ procedure at SPGS.

Do you know whether SPGS overoffers their places in Feb 2019? Will they offer say 50 actual places to a hundred girls and they‘re accepted on a first come first served basis?

Thanks for your insights

I don't know about SPGS but all independent schools will over offer as financially they have to fill the places. They will have a good idea what percentage usually accept. In the last couple of years there have been some "exploding" offers but I think that was only one school, and not SPGS. Occasionally schools get it wrong & have to take in an extra class, but I don't think this happens very often.

We have not had many posters for SPGS in the past couple of year but if you do a search on it you may find some info. My view would be that (almost) all schools over offer, but SPGS will not do so by very much. Certainly no exploding offers thankfully . OP if you find out please post back here as the information would be useful. Have you asked the school? I appreciate you might want to leave that until you have an outcome!

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mad?

Thanks scary mum and mad. Yes, 'exploding offers', that's the word I was looking for!

I will definitely come back and update on how SPGS handles offers - if we get that far. Although you're totally right mad, I won't call the school and ask about this issue as that would immediately out me as not 100% committed...

And Mad, you say that there's not much written on here about SPGS, I'm curious to know why is that?

CLSG, Channing and Highgate have used exploding offers for the last few years. I haven't heard that SPGS has done so. But the advice we received from our independent primary was that almost all independent secondaries reserve the right to withdraw offers if they are too oversubscribed; our headteacher strongly suggested that we prepare to make our decision as soon as we had the details of the offers. Unfortunately, you may be leaving yourself at risk of disappointment if you plan to use offer-holders' days to get more information or to have a last look around. At CLSG the offers exploded before their offer-holders' days each of the last two years, as they also did at Channing last year.

Didn't the matter attract some rather pithy comments from ?the head of one of the independent school associations / the HT of another London indie last year?

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Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.Groucho Marx

A few years ago there used to be several threads and there were plenty of posters on here with offers/regrets etc. I think once the 11+ for most grammars moved to earlier in the year, and therefore parents often had an idea of whether they were likely to get an offer, that 'traffic' on the indie section decreased as fewer parents were preparing their DC for both at the same time. Also I guess over time as there were fewer threads they came up less frequently when googling and that in turn reduced the new posts. It would be useful to have more up to date information than that of the most recent posts. One thing though, IMO SPGS will be the first choice of a substantial proportion of its candidates, I doubt very much that they will have to resort to exploding offers, or that they would over offer by much. Good luck and let us know what happens!

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mad?

According to our headteacher, these schools have been told off by the HMC repeatedly but no further action has been taken. Apparently, CLSG's position is that they are not breaching any agreements because they do not require acceptances before the first Monday in March, and that all schools must have the right to rescind offers if the number of acceptances exceeds the school's capacity. Of course, nearly every other school makes offers anticipating a number of acceptances consistent with the number of children they can educate. CLSG makes offers fully expecting far more acceptances than the places they can actually provide. Hence their need to rescind offers before the official deadline every year.

So it seems that CLSG, etc., are abiding by the letter of the agreement, though not by the spirit. I have to wonder about the social fitness of governors who approve this sort of arrangement. I wonder if they're all investment bankers.

On an open day to CLSG I asked whether they were intending to explode again this year and I was told that yes, they were going for a first-come-first-serve policy and that they had to because they were 'a very popular school'.

I would argue that extremely popular schools are the ones who are most able to make an accurate number of offers and thus avoid exploding offers. St Pauls, for example, should know that they only have to over-offer by a small amount and can then go to a waiting list if necessary. City should be able to analyse their offer-to-acceptance rate to a reasonable margin. It's the less prestigious schools who have a much tougher challenge in guesstimating how many acceptances they're going to get.

Anyway, there's at least one potential offer/acceptance that City don't have to worry about - I was so put off by this response that we didn't apply!

OP - I'd very much doubt that SPGS will go for exploding offers if they haven't before but at the same time I think it's worth having a rough list of preferences in the same way that you would on a state CAF.

DD got an offer from SPGS last year. She received it promptly when expected, there were no exploding offers and it allowed time for us to see what state allocation we got before having to respond (though in reality, even though DD got into the state school we had wanted, we'd already made our decision).