Aethel wrote:
I suspect, like any school, it depends upon the demographic of students and families who enter and pass through the school. Certain parents value some degrees more than others:
There is often an obsession with numbers of medicine/pharmacy/law/engineering.
Likewise a “thing” about Oxford/Cambridge/Imperial/Bristol or similar.
So perhaps what you should be asking is “do the children leave and go to where they want to be”, rather than where Mum/Dad/others think they should go.....
Given the grammar school cohort is generally quite academic, I’d expect a broad range of unis and subjects, and comparatively few vocational courses.
That is the nub of it. My daughter's year group (Y13) is unusually obsessed with medicine and for many of the students, it's less about what they actually want to do and more about what their parents
expect them to be doing. What has been encouraging, although sadly upsetting in some quarters, is that universities appear to be good at differentiating between the two types of applicant. Some of the girls whose parents have been pushing for medicine for a few years have struggled to get interviews and those interviewed have had few offers between them. The girls who have a genuine desire to pursue medicine as a career have got the offers they wanted, even though in some cases they have less impressive grade predictions.
Who would you rather have as a medical student? The young person who's demonstrated a long-term commitment to care by working in a care home alongside his/her A-levels or the young person whose experience is two days stood at mum's shoulder as she carried out heart surgery?