Worst forms of selection in schools: Views of M'snetters

Talkin I have OCD tendencies for facts and therefore have a compulsion to correct inaccuracies and intellectual dishonesty

molio
the results have neither been published nor finalised so no, of course I can not. Any parent from any school who says they can is a liar.

The A/A* table was started by the Torygraph for private schools : why are you upset that comps have jumped on the bandwagon?

BUT MORE TO THE POINT
Selection by god and gonads creating silos, paid for by the taxpayer : are you happy with that?

Latin literature is a separate paper not GCSE unless the school is double counting the short course and full course.
I don't really know about what IGCSE maths includes but it obviously does n't hold those at my DCs schools and others from getting 40-50+% A* further maths A level or equivalent. That may be because they do further maths 'GCSe' or go well beyond the syllabus before starting sixth form.

But Molio that sounds as though you're saying all comprehensives are selective by expensive catchment, or at least that it's a really really common situation.

Actually, I have nothing to watch until the Jo Brand bake off show; I'm going to see what the FSM is in the schools near us....

and its so sweet that yet another private boarding school parent cares so much about the results in the sort of school they pay to avoid.

I try not to comment on the oh so cliquey A Level / Pre U threads
brag city, just phone each other FFS
and yet folks who have never darkened the door of a comp see fit to know what is on the results sheet I have in my office.

I'm being lazy Mum, and using a shorthand. The point I'm attempting to make is that whereas grammars have pretty much the correct number of FSM children according to their academic criteria, the comps - or the well heeled parents at the comps - are being rather more sly in refusing to acknowledge their social exclusion by wealth. So I think perhaps time to climb down from their high horse.

Talkin MN can be childish, but you're taking the biscuit. It might possibly be better things to do, rather than idleness. I'm not sure a MN 'Advanced Search' should define intellectual ability either . As Word said, let's cut to the chase: can you give us the results by A, without conflating A/ A? All I'm doing is to try to respond to your challenge, but you're very clearly now not making this easy. If you insist on a challenge, at least have the bottle to carry it through.

Latin is OCR BTW : check "the student room" for discussion thereof

TBH until this term I'd not heard that IGCSE Maths did not include an "non calculator" paper so is not deemed adequate preparation for the A level : you live and learn

summerends
You'd need to take that up with AQA then : I have the exam results sheets

Talkin, trivial point but I've never heard of Latin lit / lang being treated as 2 separate IGCSEs. Most would n't count further maths as a whole separate GCSE either.

PS
FSM at DCs school is 15% : within 3% of the four nearest schools in its LEA
but a lot less than the 60% FSM at my local school
even the infamous Thornden still has 3% FSM

BUT
FSM is a measure of household income, not the intellectual capacity of the children if they are given the same opportunity term in, term out, year in, year out
rather than missing out on the 11+ because their parents were too broke / disorganised / at work that night/day

molio
Oh FFS : you are clearly too idle or too thick to read what I posted on the big GS thread the other week, or the GCSE results thread, or the comp / grammar threads ad nauseam I've been bored enough to post on.

~300 per cohort, fully comp so a fair few do only the bare minimum of GCSEs
in with their NVQ
the top 60 do
Eng Lang, Eng Lit, Maths, Further/Stats or in three cases further and stats, Latin Lang, Latin Lit, Phys, Chem, Bio, Geog, Hist, MFL, tech/music/RE
All GCSE/iGCSE (the Latins)
the moderated results are still ongoing due to a massive re-mark in two subjects : but most of that 60 got more than 10 A/A*
so its pretty average for round here TBH

Molio And what's your take on the leafy comp FSM intake? Molio this is not directed at you in particular but people keep referring to "leafy comp". Which schools are they, can anyone given any names for such schools.

The point I would raise on this is that if the "leafy comp" is surrounded by properties with a hefty price tag then it is unlikely to actually be a comp as there will have been selection by wealth. I make this point as the selective schools in my area ride under the banner of comps. but they are quite simply grammar schools with a different name tag.

Talkin you're ridiculous. What on earth is the silly cat and mouse about? You keep posting 'CBA' posts which take longer to type than answering: a) how many kids? And b) are the 13 subjects full GCSEs? It's quite sad tbh, especially since you posed this rather pointless 'challenge'. Instead of requiring me to scan through your prolific number of posts, could you at least give me the name of the school in question, the one where your DD sat her GCSEs? Why be so petulant about it?

And what's your take on the leafy comp FSM intake? Not such a social idyll after all, I wouldn't say.

It does not make much sense, that on the whole most posters are anti state school selection, but have no problem with private schools

Smokepole your 'eureka' moment is a little premature, I think - which posters are you even thinking of here?

Molio
DDs school and courses are easy to find for anybody on MN with the analytical skills to do a search. I CBA to help you out.

smoke
no country has abolished private : its a different - and non taxpayer funded -battle

Talkin can I take from your silence that you've conceded the point that the results of the top forty students at least at some selective schools, including some state selective schools, are distinctly better than those at your DD's comp (whichever it was). And that's on the basis that the 13 exams they take at your DD's old school are all full GCSEs - though you're quiet on that point too. I'm not quite sure why you issued that challenge; it was bound to fail.

Going back to the FSM, isn't it more worthwhile to focus on why certain comps have such a low % of kids on FSM when they're intended to be entirely inclusive? Given that the representation in grammars matches up fairly well with the numbers on FSM getting high L5s, I'd have thought the concern about discrimination should shift elsewhere.

It does not make much sense, that on the whole most posters are anti state school selection, but have no problem with private schools.

"Hang on a Minute "EUREKA" I've worked it out, It must be that posters who are anti state school selection are in favour of "Double Jeopardy" . This of course allows them to try the Comprehensive (spout out all good Socialist theories and feel "nice and warm inside" that little Sam is friends with Tracey or Heaven).

This despite Heaven being Poor and in set 9 for Maths/English. The Double Jeopardy though is of course there should "god" forbid the Comp is shit and against all their socialist "principles" but because of the Evil Tories, (GOVE, Sorry Morgan) They had to send Samantha to the Private Girls School, not out of choice , but out of desperation!.

Dad164
whoops : my spelling is normalley better than that (thanks to my private school education

Private schools are as they are : if you dive down into the detailed economics they are in fact useful for the redistribution of wealth ( I'll save the details for another thread but the combination of several Economist articles shows such )

It is the fact the state schools actively and deliberately impede equal access that should be dealt with : not only by the 11+ but also by religious and sex selection, let alone the nasty covert stuff that the OP was so in favour of.

State funded schools should try to offer equal chances - even if outcomes will not be equal.

Whilst I agree that private schools are for the wealthy, if we set aside the 10% that get bursaries (it should be more like 50%), I don't understand how their ever increasing fees makes a difference. They were not affordable for 99% of the population 20 years ago and they still aren't - the price is immaterial - £1 per term is too much.

As discussed ad nauseam, it isn't schools that perpetuate privilege, but parents. Abolish private schools and grammar schools and what you will discover is that wealth and success will continue to be inherited. The utopian ideal of perfect social mobility is false. Chucking Tarquin into the local comp will neither increase the prospects of the other 29 kids nor stop his accelerated progress in society. Parents do that, not schools. The only way to overcome that sort of privilege is to cap wealth and aggressively redistribute, like Marxism.

PS - can't help it but "privilege" has two "i"s .... soz, mega-petty of me ....

LaVolcan my second paragraph was completely unconnected with anything you might or might not have said, so there was no construction.

I'm assuming that your own second paragraph, likewise, is not a construction on anything I've said, because that would be wrong.

Molio - your second paragraph is totally your own construction on what I have said.

I am not in a grammar school area, but I am absolutely sick to death of hearing how all comprehensive schools fail. Clearly my own children don't exist, nor the friends' children who are Cambridge graduates, one Harvard graduate, doctors, plus a sprinkling of teachers, because all comprehensive students are thick, and all comprehensive schools only teach to the middle, so they can't possibly have got to those places or positions. (Or they were lucky, the rules must have been bent for them, or somehow getting all As, or A*s is just a fluke - grade inflation of course, but not if they had been grammar educated.)

When I talk of my own grammar school, I know it wasn't nearly as good as it thought it was, or should have been, and I know that there were a lot like it. My own two children did go to fairly average comprehensives, and on the whole had a better education than I did.

The Grammars themselves are not trying to entrench priveledge
( we'll leave that to the private schools that have raised their fees by double inflation every year for the last 20 years and allowed themselves to fill up with expats and NonDoms )
But the perception of failing at 11 has resulted in an arms race among ambitious parents to avoid the alternative schools.
They do not choose for a grammar, they choose against the sec mods.
Some of the SecMods (like the one that Haks son attends) are getting great results from some of their kids
Others are little more than holding pens

The grammars have little control over them and are not forced to work with them (esp with Academy status rolling out).

And despite what the state Superselective supporters say, the kids left behind are probably VERY aware and demotivated by the fact that the four or five who would have made good headlines for their school are elsewhere.

No you're quite right about the A LaVolcan. Of course it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. I simply picked up on what you said because you mistook the GCSE grades for A level grades and the situation wasn't as straightforward as you suggested. Cambridge made a concession in that case. Cambridge won't make concessions in the majority of cases. That's where able comp students who don't reach their grade potential miss out. Given that the mum said the kid had 3A at GCSE and no A* at A level it was completely fair to ask whether or not she felt the kid might have done better at a grammar.

Incidentally, it's pretty insulting to ordinary grammar school kids who get in on merit that their places are 'bought'. It's also insulting to suggest that they don't know how to mix with a wide cross section of people. And it's insulting again to suggest that the top grades they get fall out of the sky, with no particular effort from the DC involved.

I would say the social mix at my DCs school is pretty good, particularly given the crass stereotype portrayed on MN. It's certainly way different from the private schools in the county. The knee jerk re-action of 'But what about FSM students?' is slightly missing the point. Only a tiny proportion of those on FSM reach high L5s at the end of primary, so in a sense the grammars aren't doing too badly. I certainly believe the tutoring issue has become a problem in disincentivising the large numbers of kids in the band above FSM , but even attempting to articulate support for the changes to the tests provokes ire on MN, both from the tutoring classes who are worried about the threat and from the anti grammar posters who won't have it any way other than that the grammars themselves are trying to entrench privilege.

No one is saying that everything in the comprehensive garden is rosy, but nor was everything in the grammar school system.

So if the person achieved their objective of a Cambridge place, does it really matter that they didn't get the extra A*. It didn't matter to my niece, once the anxious moments of whether she would get in or not were passed.

I would certainly argue that for someone studying medicine, having to mix with as wide a cross section of people as possible can only be a good thing.

LaVolcan it's clear that Cambridge made an exception for this DC one way or the other, given the grades the DC got in with. And Cambridge isn't known for its leniency with slipped grades. If Cambridge makes an exception that's because it recognises a problem which has been overcome but which drags down achievement. So possibly the DC had personal difficulties or possibly this is Cambridge's recognition that a school is crap. Either way, this wasn't a normal case and certainly it isn't a case where one can extrapolate that everything in the comprehensive garden is rosy and that the sky is the limit for every child there.