Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

ivyleaf

Pyxis wrote: »

I would say that it has either grown into a huge amount, or like Bleak House, had been eaten up by the fees for keeping it in trust.


Might be worth looking into, because, even if the tree is huge, depending on the category of descendants, you may be entitled to something, even if small!

Which post was this in reply to, Pyxis? Has the post been deleted?

Pyxis

ivyleaf wrote: »

Which post was this in reply to, Pyxis? Has the post been deleted?

Oh yes, PN said she was going to delete it, so I'd best not say what it was about!

LydiaJ

ivyleaf wrote: »

Sorry, I did say it was complicated

Don't apologise! I am geeky enough to find complicated schools admissions systems really interesting.

Warning: NP who find schools admissions systems uninteresting should not bother to read the rest of this post.

Our few remaining grammar schools here are super-selective. Some people do get a bit upset about families from miles away choosing to send their children on long commutes to our county's grammar schools, but it's not a huge issue, and there's no angst at all about people who put their kids in for the test with no intention of sending them here because with a super-selective admissions system they don't make any difference to anybody else's outcome. From what I gather from reading online forums about the 11+, anguish and resentment about out of area candidates is a much bigger deal in Kent. It's not just children like your DGS who might genuinely apply to a Kent school who come and sit the Kent exam. There are people from much further afield, who have no intention whatsoever of attending a Kent school, who come to do the Kent exam as practice for the 11+ in their own area. The problem is that these children are inevitably the ones with the most driven parents, so they tend to get above average scores. This pushes up the score required to be in the top 25%, which was the GS cut-off last time I was reading about it. This leads to the ridiculous situation of Kent GS having empty places, while children who are genuinely in the top 25% of Kent children are not in the top 25% of exam sitters, and so don't qualify.

At least things are a lot fairer than they used to be, now that we have the prohibition on schools giving priority to children who put them as first choice, the requirement for test scores to be released before the forms have to go in, and the unification across the country, so that each child has one CAF regardless of how many counties' schools they want to include.

I can't help feeling they should also have unified the structure of the CAF when they unified the rest of it. Why do residents of some counties get to put down more options than others? Here in Gloucestershire we can put 5. This means that GS hopefuls, even if their test score is borderline, have space to put the mixed grammar, the 3 relevant single sex grammars, and a nearby comprehensive that they feel certain of getting into. Other counties only give you 3 spaces. For many people that'll be enough, but I think 5 is better. It's not just GS. The birthrate has been rising, and the number of school places available doesn't always match the number of children. Add in the variation in admisions criteria these days (fair banding at school A, faith critera at school B, aptitude test for languages at school C, some schools with sibling criteria and others not, etc) and the possibility of living near the point where catchment areas for several schools meet, it's easy to see that many children might have more than 2 "not sure if I'll get a place" schools to put down before they end with their option for "if all else fails I'd rather go here than get allocated whatever place is left over even if it's miles away". The computers can handle 5 options - why not let everybody have 5 spaces on the form? If they don't need them, they can leave them blank. (I only put down one school for DS. We we in the happy position of being certain he would get a place at his first choice school, so there was no reason to put any others.)

(From her post, I can tell that ivyleaf already knows the jargon, but for the benefit of other NP (if any have read this far) perhaps I should explain. The usual grammar school technology is to use "selective" for a system where all those scoring over a threshold can then apply to any of the grammar schools, which then have catchment areas and other distance based criteria for choosing between candidates who are above the threshold. Meanwhile "super-selective" refers to a system in which grammar schools have no catchment areas or distance criteria, each one admits children from the top of the results list downwards until all their places are full. I hadn't previously heard of the hybrid system you mention, in which the highest scores will get you in regardless of distance but more moderate scores will only get you in if you life close. Thank you, ivyleaf, for enlightening me. )

ivyleaf wrote: »

He has only just had his tenth birthday and is the youngest in his year.

In Gloucestershire the 11+ results are statistically adjusted for age to remove this effect. I hope they do that in Bexley too. If so, he will need a lower score to qualify than anybody else!

PasturesNew

I deleted it pretty quickly; I believe the people involved just had the same names as the ones I'd started to look into.

It appeared, upon a closer look, that the couple had gone to the US in 1810 with 3 children; my couple weren't even born for another 30 years and had no children I am aware of.

As the original Trustee money recipients, there was an advert placed in the newspapers 100 years after the event, asking for the descendants of the 1810 party to get in touch.

Odd name too .... looked like a "winner" on first spot; closer investigation proved otherwise.

I knew there was another fella with the same name, but I also knew he was long dead.... so the sudden emergence of documents and such posted 1878-1914 made me think it was "my chap" and not the long dead one.

But it was more complex than that.

I'm sure, by now, somebody's claimed the money. It's so easy to spot these things these days with all the online transcriptions and websites and trees etc to easily spot somebody's "yours" or "might be" and narrow it down, depending how close a relationship it might've been.

For me I think, from memory, it was something like my Great Great Great Great Great grandfather's brother's son and his wife

I am still debating the idea of the beheaded man/line .... I can't see any connection or evidence whatsoever of him being my direct upline. But it's been published on a "website that should know what it's talking about before it opens its mouth on matters" ... and all they've produced is a simple list of names of descendency. So "I'll believe it when I see it" on that one.

Still found nobody murdered and no murderers in the tree. Just lots of early deaths and b4st4rds.

This lot I am currently poking around with are my paternal line.... I'd left it before as my aunt had done it ... but she got overwhelmed, got in an online spat - so pursued her maternal line instead.

There are a lot of people that just "disappeared" - but I know from what I've done so far that they could've gone to, say, the Channel Islands, or America.

There are also orphans; you have to be lucky to find an orphan again as all sorts of things happen to them and they could easily be dead or married or anything. You can only really spot them if there's a DEFINITE tie in with other family members clearly spelt out in the Censuses. If they've gone into service, or gone to live with a maternal aunt who has married 3x and has a name you couldn't possibly trace you're stuffed unless you pursue every maternal sibling/line possible (which you end up doing over time, not in one hit).

ivyleaf

Pyxis wrote: »

Oh yes, PN said she was going to delete it, so I'd best not say what it was about!

Oh, no probs I'm sorry to have missed it though!

Lydia They do adjust for age here but if he does pass I think it will be very hard for his parents to decide whether he'd struggle with his English too much at a grammar school. Also, of the two that don't concentrate on rugby (he's a footballer), one specialises in languages, so perhaps not the best choice for a child who struggles to remember English vocab never mind Latin/French/ etc? One of his cousins has just had her first year at this school and has started Latin and French, and this coming year she'll be starting Italian as well.
And the other one is where the very bright boy who was the ringleader of the group that bullied him unmercifully at his old school is likely to end up, and we wouldn't be able to find out if this was the case until it was too late. The bully's older brother is already at this school too.

DGS has had a brilliant year at the primary school he moved to :j The best sentence in his report was "He is polite, kind, and sensible, and has made many friends."

vivatifosi

Herts, N London and Beds peeps... do you have Amazon Prime? They've offered me a two hour delivery slot for my Herts postcode, or delivery within 1 hour for £6.99. This is very handy. I think they may cover michaels's and silver's areas too.

Doozergirl

Interesting stuff, Lydia. We have a three choice form in County but thankfully test results are issued before the forms are due in. We also have a three tier system so could put down all 'over the border' grammars without worrying about non-selective schools.

Ivyleaf, my one piece of advice would be to practice the format of the test. We weren't putting big pressure on DD but the test paper is separate to the answer sheet up here and it's a multiple choice computer read object.

I think it's terrible as any child is as likely as another to start marking in the wrong boxes as there is no immediate visual differentiation of which question you're answering on the sheet.

Skip one question and you can easily end up with several correct answers in the wrong rows as a result. Lots of rubbing out ensues - if the child realises!

michaels

I am not really in favour of grammar schools, in the past they may have been a route for bright but poor youngsters to progress but now they are all about parental spending on tutoring. I also think we should educate our children with all their peers (including no public schools please) with streaming and setting within schools to manage different abilities.

It has been a mega solar month 127% of expected

Don't do amazon prime, I think it is a brilliant piece of marketing tho!

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

That post was a work of art.

silvercar

vivatifosi wrote: »

Herts, N London and Beds peeps... do you have Amazon Prime? They've offered me a two hour delivery slot for my Herts postcode, or delivery within 1 hour for £6.99. This is very handy. I think they may cover michaels's and silver's areas too.

Same day 2 hour delivery now available her. That's new! Thanks viva, I have looked in the past but it wasn't then available.