Edited from info I sent to a friend having gone through this all last year when my son "passed" the second stage. Remember 624 passed second stage for Wilsons, 809 passed for SGS, and the majority of those will have passed for Wallington after the first stage:
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What this means is that when we fill in the CAF form we can list SGS, Wilsons and Wallington as schools, but we still won’t know until offer day in March whether he has a place or not! It is further complicated of course by the fact that many of those 809 will have no intention of going to SGS but want to go to Wilsons yet are still included in those 809 who have qualified for SGS, some will be preferring Wallington but have SGS and Wilsons as backup, some will go to Independent schools or Tiffin, and some are exam tourists using it as practise. Across SGS, Wallington and Wilsons there are 465 places. Apparently SGS said in a letter last year: "One unfortunate aspect of open testing at an early date is that there are lots of boys who use the tests as practice for selective schools in their own area. This school used to hold its second test in November and last year was the first time our second stage was in early October. Significant numbers took the second stage who lived in places that cannot reasonably access the school without moving and virtually none of these boys came to the school in September. We can see a similar pattern in the post codes of applicants this year and so although we have passed more boys this year we think that there will be a close balance between the total number of selective places for boys who live within reasonable travelling distance and the numbers who have met the selective standard."
So whilst 809 seems a huge number for 135 places at SGS, maybe experience tells them there won’t be too many on the waiting list by the end of it.
I guess the key point is that these schools use their experience to ensure that when the allocation of places sorts itself out, they will have a waiting list, but I suspect plan for that waiting list to be reasonably small. I doubt very much whether there are hundreds of kids who passed but don't get a place, what would be the point for the schools? Why pass 809 for 135 places if you know that you will have a 300 person waiting list? That makes no sense, so I can only assume that they knew they would have to pass 809 to get their 135 and a spare few just in case.
In our own case, fabulous school that it may be, we never considered Wilsons for our son as it is just too far/difficult to get to. Nevertheless, due to the joint second stage, he would still have been counted in their 624 eligible boys. I can't imagine we were the only ones in that situation.
Hope that helps a bit.
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