City of London Boys vs Bancroft's

[lucy83]

Hi all, we are torn between the 2 schools and will appreciate any feedback from parents with children already attending. My son is very strong academically, love sports, doesn't mind to travel and is aiming to get an Oxbridge place in future. City is 30min train journey, while Bancroft's is walking distance.
In terms of league tables we all know City's reputation, but Bancroft's did equally well last year with Oxbridge offers. Anyone please
tia Lucy

[drinkmoretea]

Loves sport and lives close to Bancroft?

Which sports? Are they ones that City does? Onsite or in South London?

I would definitely be considering the one with the sports fields walking distance if you think he has the academic potential to do well at either.

What are the Saturdays like at both schools? How many fixtures do they have? What time do they have to be at the school for each?

[Wearedone]

Hi
I know quite a few boys in year8 coming from that area .
My son is in y8 CLSB and we absolutely love the school. They offer
Football , basketball , waterpolo and also other sports like cricket that my son doesn’t do but it’s mainly the atmosphere and teachers we love.
We also live 30-40 min train journey away

[nyr]

I don't know the two schools in questions but Oxbridge is mentioned twice in your post and I think using current, recent or headline offer numbers in your decision making could be risky. A lot can change in a few years and, besides that, applications for subjects such as Classics and related, ML and related, Music and to some extent the humanities tend to enjoy high acceptance rates and these help to up the raw numbers. Hopefully a child's academic interests lie beyond purely an Oxbridge education and it may be that your child has no interest in the above subject areas and their chosen field may be more competitive or better served elsewhere.

[Daogroupie]

The latest set of figures released by Oxford and Cambridge on total amount of offers made to schools has been ranked into a top 100 list.

Bancrofts is not in the top 100 but City is 11th with 86 applicants and 41 offers giving them an acceptance rate of 48%

Their acceptance rate is only 2% lower than Westminster and ranks them at 5th in acceptance rates in the top 100.

The idea that a school could somehow achieve these figures through "easy arty farty" subjects such as Classics and Music is of course nonsense, but is a common opinion held by parents who think that the only really academic subjects are STEM subjects.

When my dd was the only person from the top set in GCSE Maths not to choose A level Maths several parents told me that I should "force" her to do it as it was so highly regarded. So it seems likely that there are students doing STEM because of this and not because they enjoy the subject. It is likely that they will find it difficult to do well in an Oxbridge interview if they are not immersed in their subject.

What was the figure that Bancroft gave you for their Oxbridge figures last year? Make sure they give you the figure related to percentage of acceptances to applicants.

I would 100% choose City. If he is very strong academically then he needs a peer group of like minded boys. edited by moderator DG

[lucy83]

Thanks all for your responses!
After visiting both schools for taster sessions this week, we have made a decision to go with City.

[Daogroupie]

Thank you for the update.

What were the deciding factors for you? DG

[lucy83]

@Daogroupie
The taster sessions in both schools gave my son an opportunity to take part in short lessons and speak to teachers and students of each. He chose City without any doubts

[nyr]

The latest set of figures released by Oxford and Cambridge on total amount of offers made to schools has been ranked into a top 100 list.

Bancrofts is not in the top 100 but City is 11th with 86 applicants and 41 offers giving them an acceptance rate of 48%

Their acceptance rate is only 2% lower than Westminster and ranks them at 5th in acceptance rates in the top 100.

The idea that a school could somehow achieve these figures through "easy arty farty" subjects such as Classics and Music is of course nonsense, but is a common opinion held by parents who think that the only really academic subjects are STEM subjects.

When my dd was the only person from the top set in GCSE Maths not to choose A level Maths several parents told me that I should "force" her to do it as it was so highly regarded. So it seems likely that there are students doing STEM because of this and not because they enjoy the subject. It is likely that they will find it difficult to do well in an Oxbridge interview if they are not immersed in their subject.

Some facts, just to set the record straight for future reference.

The post clearly suggests that City students received 41 Oxbridge offers from 86 applications in the current admissions cycle and ranked 11th for number of offers (presumably from number of applications, in the case of a tie). This is data from the 2019 admissions cycle and data from the 2020 admissions cycle tells a different story:

11883 City: (Applications, Offers, Acceptances)
Oxford (46, 11, 11)
Cambridge (47, 14, 13)

From
https://public.tableau.com/views/Univer ... VizHome=no" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and
https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac. ... _cycle.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I have heard Oxbridge tutors lament that state school pupils apply for the most competitive courses, such as Law or some STEM, and this inevitably means their rejection rate is high. In the case of the most competitive courses, candidates are generally filtered using tests which makes it very much a first past the post system.

Oxbridge colleges have a fairly fixed number of candidates they admit for a course, so even if they had 2000 high-fliers when only 200 places are available across all the colleges then, after pooling, roughly 200 will be admitted, regardless of the candidates' levels of immersion. On the other hand, there are courses where there'll be about 75 applications for about 37 places.

Opinions such as what's easy or "arty farty" and presumably what's merit-worthy should be disassociated from the facts, which should speak for themselves.