Ok- we have decided to appeal. Grateful for any thoughts.
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 10:49 am
As some may know, my son failed his 11+ spectacularly.
After much consideration, we have decided to appeal. We are aware that the chances of success are vanishingly small, and we are in the fortunate position that the school he will be going to is OK. But we are going to give it a shot.
We have no extenuating circumstances at all. There appears to be no explanation for why, on the day he did so badly. He was expected to pass, he was perfectly well, not particularly nervous, finished the paper and so on.
So what we intend to say is simply something along the lines of "We are fortunate to have two good schools in this town, and we are confident that our son will do well in either. However, his academic record seems to indicate that he is better suited to the grammar school. As you will see from the supporting material supplied by his school, he was working at 5c at the end of year 5, currently working at 5A , and will be taking the
optional level 6 paper for literacy.
We have no idea why he did not perform well on the day of the test- all we can say about that is that it seems to have been a bad day at the office! His head teacher is equally baffled and fully supports our appeal. Had he just missed the pass mark, we would have accepted the result, but he missed the target so spectacularly that the result really looks like an anomaly. We would be very grateful if you would consider granting our appeal.[ It does seem as if the sorting hat got it wrong on this occasion!] (. Probably won't say that last bit!)"
Our supporting material will be a letter from the school- it will be very positive, and will be written by a Head who has done this before and who is very supportive, so we have no worries there.
Any thoughts? I am aware that it's a bit sparse, but I can't see any purpose in padding it out. We really have nothing else to say that I can think of!
After much consideration, we have decided to appeal. We are aware that the chances of success are vanishingly small, and we are in the fortunate position that the school he will be going to is OK. But we are going to give it a shot.
We have no extenuating circumstances at all. There appears to be no explanation for why, on the day he did so badly. He was expected to pass, he was perfectly well, not particularly nervous, finished the paper and so on.
So what we intend to say is simply something along the lines of "We are fortunate to have two good schools in this town, and we are confident that our son will do well in either. However, his academic record seems to indicate that he is better suited to the grammar school. As you will see from the supporting material supplied by his school, he was working at 5c at the end of year 5, currently working at 5A , and will be taking the
optional level 6 paper for literacy.
We have no idea why he did not perform well on the day of the test- all we can say about that is that it seems to have been a bad day at the office! His head teacher is equally baffled and fully supports our appeal. Had he just missed the pass mark, we would have accepted the result, but he missed the target so spectacularly that the result really looks like an anomaly. We would be very grateful if you would consider granting our appeal.[ It does seem as if the sorting hat got it wrong on this occasion!] (. Probably won't say that last bit!)"
Our supporting material will be a letter from the school- it will be very positive, and will be written by a Head who has done this before and who is very supportive, so we have no worries there.
Any thoughts? I am aware that it's a bit sparse, but I can't see any purpose in padding it out. We really have nothing else to say that I can think of!