Will 2012 Eleven Plus exams be held in 1st week of September

[suchi]

See this form discussion

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/ ... 66&t=23488" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In February a new School Admissions Code is expected to be ratified by Parliament and become law. The new Code specifies that Admission Authorities (schools and Local Authorities) must take all reasonable steps to ensure that parents receive results of school entrance test before the deadline for submitting their Common Application Form.

As the national deadline for the CAF is 31st October (although some areas may specify slightly earlier dates) the whole process must now be shoe-horned in to September and October. Some areas may even opt to test in the summer term.

Really scared as kids will have 3 less months to prepare.

Please tell if Hertfordshire and Watford Consortium have decided on their dates.

[Daogroupie]

Dear Suchi, Welcome to the forum. If you scroll down this section you willl see that this has been under discussion in this section for some time now. Dame Alice Owen has already announced Mon 3rd, Yues 4th and Sat 8th September so those dates have gone and now the consortium will need to move quickly to get themselves a Saturday date in September and also get dates for the music aural and the auditions. I think we are going to find some clashes emerging as some schools are being slow to announce and so will end up with the same date.

As they have to give parents the results before the application deadline in October they really need to either put their exam in late July or early September. So it will be eight to ten weeks earlier than it has been. But this will impact all applicants equally and will probably result in a reduction in numbers as there are always so many last minute merchants! The cutoff date for applying to sit the test for Dame Alice Owen is 22nd June and there are no current plans to open the school for viewing before then. This means if you did not go to the Open Day in July when your dc was in Year Four you will have to make the decision to sit the text without seeing the school. In my school this would have been the case for 90% of the applicants, so as you can see, this year fortune is going to favour those who have been preparing for secondary transfer for some time. I expect the success rate of forum members to go up as so many potential applicants are knocked out of the race before it starts. Hopefully you have already started to prepare and find yourself in a great position. DG

[suchi]

Thanks for the reply Daogroupie. My DS has been preparing since last 5 months now. Am I correct in assuming that the SW Herts Consortium have not yet decided on their exam dates. I also heard that there will be some rule changes for the Herts Consortium test.

[Daogroupie]

It seems that Cross Sibling and places for Staff children are returning

[AlisonR]

It will be interesting to see how the SW Herts consortium feedback the outcome of the tests to people, if they go down the route of getting test results to children prior to application deadline day.

Giving the actual score out of 282 will be meaningless to many, if not most, people but it will be universal across all schools in the consortium. If people compare it against the "pass" marks (found on this board) in recent years for the various schools then it "may" give them an indication of their chances if it is very high or very low.

However, if only a potential pass or outright fail type outcome is given, then this will be different for each school in the consortium. It will stop people wasting options when they have a "fail" result for a particular school but may give false hope with a "potential pass".

Alison

[herty]

I don't really see how they can give a pass or fail mark as there is no such thing. They could give a place in relation to other candidates but again, a bit pointless, as they won't know how many of the other candidates will actually apply after the test; and how do you deal with a candidate applying for 2 consortium schools, who might be say 20th for 1 school but 100th for another?

So I can only assume they will give you a score out of 282. That will be meaningless to most parents; those who know to look on here at previous years will find it gives some indication.

BUT I'd expect the changes will mean that many kids who would not previously have done exams will now do them (as they have nothing to lose and can apply to do any/all exams for practice, without the risk of 'wasting' a precious place). Thus skewing the results. Thus I'd expect that far more people will sit the tests, esp for the v competitive schools where previously people might not have bothereed because they didn't think their dc would get in, and esp for the ones with open catchments like HBS or QE just to get extra exam practice, even though they have no interest in going there. I know I would have done this, had it been an option for my older dd - though we would not have wished to send her there.

So I think the effects will be interesting, and the first couple of years will probably be quite trying for parents, as the system beds down.

In the longer term, it will be a great improvement though, I suspect.

[Daogroupie]

We certainly are going to live in interesting times in 2012, I think the forum is going to get a lot busier! Alisonr, in terms of your comment about if the consortium choose to go down the route of giving the parents the results before application. They have no choice in the matter. They can only run exams for Year Seven entry if they publish results before application, so they really need to nab a Saturday date in September now before they are all gone. DG