Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I called the school yesterday to see if perhaps my letter had also been "lost in the post" ... apparently mine was sent out on 1 June! The fee quote is higher than I was expecting ... but I'll find a way ... somehow! With a very limited food budget now this bodes well for the waistline!

Mrs Cairncross, was, as I remember an excellent deputy headmistress. She was generally very quiet but she could put the fear of God into Grecians if you crossed her. Indeed, if you were in serious trouble, you either wanted the head (Mr Poulton) or the second master / deputy (Mr SIllett) - Mrs Cairncross was the scariest proposition!

That was my memory as well - she still has a group picture of the school monitors on her study wall. I think he is going to really enjoy it - the idea of 3 extra maths lessons a week to broaden the maths curriculum with the Friday ones being with a professor of mathematical education in a group of only 7 (although biggest class size is 15) certainly sounds like it would have been heaven to 11yo me and he is far more mathematical than i was. Also the school is used to dealing with children a bit "outside the box" as it has all the governement funded music scholars. Now all i have to do is get my head around what a Astro boot is and the changes in hockey sticks since my days (when i was goalie anyway) and we can start looking for deals on the kit we need.

Wurzel wrote:

That was my memory as well - she still has a group picture of the school monitors on her study wall. I think he is going to really enjoy it - the idea of 3 extra maths lessons a week to broaden the maths curriculum with the Friday ones being with a professor of mathematical education in a group of only 7 (although biggest class size is 15) certainly sounds like it would have been heaven to 11yo me and he is far more mathematical than i was.

Does anyone know if there is a maximum class size at CH? DS is a bit vague about this (as about so much else! ) but seems to think that some of his classes are 20+, depending on the subject. He says for example that there are five maths sets for his year, which given a year group of 112 pupils would suggest average class sizes of around 22.

Although I have been looking at this website for a while now, this is my first post! My daughter has just finished 2nd form, she didn't settle down immediately, but now loves it and didn't want to come home at the end of term!!

In her year there are about 90 pupils, in this year there are only 4 maths groups, and the top set has about 24. In her set (she is in this group for all other subjects) there are 18.

On another subject my fee assessment for next year was only sent on 15th July!! At least I know now, and thank goodness, it is not significantly more than last year!

Last year's 2nd form was unusually small though, wasn't it? That was what always puzzled me so much about poor Bosty94 and her daughter, who didn't get a place from the waiting list. Surely the point about the waiting list is that you are saying 'if only we had room we would take your child. If you wait then a space may become available,' and clearly they did have room to take all the waiting list and then some! I can only assume that places were being held back to be filled on an 'as and when' basis by full-fee pupils. It might have been fairer to parents of children applying for places that year if the school had actually made clear how many places were really available to children sitting the entrance test, rather than letting them assume that it was to be the same size intake as in recent years.

Antinous

I know in the 80's pre merger there were 95 boys on our 2nd form - the forms (for non setted subjects) were 2A (for the good at English) 2W (for those needing extra attention with English) and 2X,2Y & 2Z so we had 5 forms of approx 20 each

Antinous1 wrote:Last year's 2nd form was unusually small though, wasn't it? That was what always puzzled me so much about poor Bosty94 and her daughter, who didn't get a place from the waiting list. Surely the point about the waiting list is that you are saying 'if only we had room we would take your child. If you wait then a space may become available,' and clearly they did have room to take all the waiting list and then some! I can only assume that places were being held back to be filled on an 'as and when' basis by full-fee pupils. It might have been fairer to parents of children applying for places that year if the school had actually made clear how many places were really available to children sitting the entrance test, rather than letting them assume that it was to be the same size intake as in recent years.
Antinous

I suspect that you have misunderstood: the number of places available depends on the number of pupils who leave in the previous July. This will depend on how many stay on to take A levels, perhaps even the number who stay even after that, and the number who leave after GCSE.

In my final years there were O levels, A levels é years later but to get to UNI you needed "S" levels a year after A level. One boy in Col A got his three S levels but was not wanted by Uni so he stayed on to get a further 3 "S" levels. That of course reduced the number of available places when he was reasonably expected to leave but didn't. I was put in the 5th form which was extra O levels before leaving, but at the end of the year I was switched to do two years for A levels (an unusual occurance which blocked one place for two years)

Antinous1 wrote:Last year's 2nd form was unusually small though, wasn't it? That was what always puzzled me so much about poor Bosty94 and her daughter, who didn't get a place from the waiting list. Surely the point about the waiting list is that you are saying 'if only we had room we would take your child. If you wait then a space may become available,' and clearly they did have room to take all the waiting list and then some! I can only assume that places were being held back to be filled on an 'as and when' basis by full-fee pupils. It might have been fairer to parents of children applying for places that year if the school had actually made clear how many places were really available to children sitting the entrance test, rather than letting them assume that it was to be the same size intake as in recent years.

Antinous

Is this correct that last years 2nd form (year 7) was smaller than usual? I'd be VERY interested to know by how many pupils.

My daughter thinks that there are 96 in the year, and there was one pupil who dropped out in January. When we went for the residential assessment the headmaster said that there were 112 places, but as sejintenej said, there may have been many reasons for not offering all those spaces. In a letter from the headmaster in December he did say that it was an unusually small year group. Like this year a lot us us had no idea how much the fees would be until we had accepted the place, and were then quite shocked. Last year there was no ready reckoner, just example scenarios, which turned out to be very inaccurate.

Sejintenej wrote:

I suspect that you have misunderstood: the number of places available depends on the number of pupils who leave in the previous July. This will depend on how many stay on to take A levels, perhaps even the number who stay even after that, and the number who leave after GCSE.

I imagine that the numbers of pupils leaving after GSCE might affect places available in the sixth form, but I can't see why this would make any difference to the intake into the school at second form. It is usual for 112 boarding places to be offered, 56 to boys and 56 to girls. Last year, for reasons which have not be made clear, the number of new pupils admitted to the second form was substantially smaller; my own children seemed to believe that this was in order to keep spaces open for full fee payers, but this suggestion has been refuted elsewhere on this Forum. Certainly it is clear that there were still children left on the 'waiting list' who were not offered places, which must have been a conscious decision on the school's part; and even more curiously, some of these appear to have been contacted again and invited to reapply for entry one year in, which would indicate that experimenting with a small year group has not been an unqualified success.

On the topic of class sizes, I have searched the school website and couldn't find any specific info. However, I downloaded the prospectus and found the following:

Our small classes (no more than 18 in the lower years and 10 in the Sixth Form), give your child the attention and teaching quality he or she needs to flourish and the valuable opportunity to work with fellow high achievers.

So the maths group sizes reported on here of up to 24 are somewhat larger than prospective parents are being told! I've never previously given class sizes much thought myself, but with increasing numbers of families being asked to pay full fees of nearly £25K I guess this is an issue which the school might have to address.

sejintenej wrote: I suspect that you have misunderstood: the number of places available depends on the number of pupils who leave in the previous July. This will depend on how many stay on to take A levels, perhaps even the number who stay even after that, and the number who leave after GCSE.

In my final years there were O levels, A levels é years later but to get to UNI you needed "S" levels a year after A level. One boy in Col A got his three S levels but was not wanted by Uni so he stayed on to get a further 3 "S" levels. That of course reduced the number of available places when he was reasonably expected to leave but didn't. I was put in the 5th form which was extra O levels before leaving, but at the end of the year I was switched to do two years for A levels (an unusual occurance which blocked one place for two years)

You're right, I clearly don't understand at all. I always knew that the various presentation places worked in this fashion and that a place only became available once its current holder had left, but I didn't realise the remaining places were allocated on the same one-out-one-in basis. It must be a nightmare to administer, especially since the total financial aid required by a group of leavers might be vastly more or less than that which the entrants replacing them require (since Howardh has made it clear that the amount of bursary a child needs forms no part of the decision whether to offer them a place). I still can't grasp how it all fits together and I really would like to. Presumably there's a document somewhere which explains all this and which I've missed. If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be grateful. One of the reasons that I'm interested is that a couple of out-of-school groups my younger child attends are full of children from central london primaries which clearly have links with CH and are encouraging parents to apply for the school. As I'm known to have a child at the school I often get approached and asked questions and an awful lot of these are about the admission process and the bursary system, which appear baffling (especially to parents with poor English). Obviously if I'm not sure I tell them to contact the school and ask directly, but I think they are often too shy or tongue-tied to do so, and I would like to be able to have confidence in a few basic facts to help encourage them.

Antinous

When I was at the school, there were 110 - 120 per year making about 800 pupils.

The school has a theoretical capacity, I believe of 850 which would be just over 120 per year but I don't know if they run with a larger 6th form these days. 95 on a year seems very small.

Just had a quick count up of the pupils in my son's house and there are 40. I presume the others are of a similar number, 6 going into 2nd form. + grecians