Well done to your son!
I agree, it’s not something I think of too much but I do see differences in the boys who are Autumn born - maturity is one point!

What year is your son currently in? DG

You will laugh DG. He is in Reception so we have a lot of time, so for now I am just keeping in the loop.

I think the difference is massive at your ds's age - it often is at least.
As they grow up it becomes less obvious.
The vast majority of ds's friends were born in April or later and are at DAO. To be fair, I don't know how many of them sat the exam but I think at least half of them did.
The majority of dd's friends had birthdays before Christmas.
But I think that's probably just chance.
There is a difference in maturity between different children still but it's much less to do with when they're born now and just relates to who they are as people.
I think if you look on the DAO website somewhere there is a chart of previous scores and they list the birth month of the child next to it. I think it used to be in a section on admissions called FOI Requests?
That would tell you the actual statistics if you wanted to trawl through it.

Yes I’m sure it will change. I find my boy is becoming more thoughtful and starting to enjoy sitting at a table with a worksheet and pencil so hope it continues.

Thanks yes I looked at those stats a while back - summer born faired quite well! I can’t get to that data now on the school site, perhaps it’s being updated but will relook.

For what it's worth, I did some analysis on the 2019 data that was publicly available. Based on that, it was clear that the age standardisation was working - the summer-born children were just as successful at getting offered a place at DAO as the autumn-born ones (technically, I saw the smallest difference but that could easily be accounted for by random chance and/or parents of summer-born children being less likely to enter their children). If you want something concrete (albeit based on a bit of reading between the lines) - it seemed like the age standardisation allowed for August-born children to make around three or four mistakes more in the VR paper and still get into the second round. I'm pretty confident that birth month makes little difference to a child's chance of getting in.

In case you want to look at the analysis in more detail, I put it up here:
https://sites.google.com/view/11plusanalysis/dao-analysis#h.ju4z3glh509

Very interesting and helpful. Thank you.

Lots of parents on facebook claiming their students "lost" x amount of marks and did not secure a place in various schools because of it.

Lots of myths around summer born babies not having a fair chance. DG

Really great to read and put it in some context. Thanks for sending the link!

Now back to phonics for my boy for now