Justine Greening grubs around for grammar school support after disastrous consultation

I take the point about childrens' backgrounds and home life having a huge impact on results - it's why I hope my DS, stuck in a fecking awful school, will be ok. But it's not just about that. My other son is in a 'best comp' and the difference in the schools themselves is absolutely palpable. Better teachers, better organisation, better facilities. Incredibly systematic focus on attainment for the bright kids with really high targets. Living breathing examples of children who went on to great unis. Brilliant enrichment opportunities. The whole place is thriving, purposeful and calm. There's no question that if children from DS1's school went to DS2's school instead, they'd do better.

Trying to manage a school in which ~50% of the parents did badly at school themselves, aren't interested in education and/or aren't providing a calm, loving, stable home environment is a pig of a job and leads to a horrible downwards spiral of bad behaviour, high turnover of staff, poor staff and low expectations. The kids don't have a culture of hard work and acheievement to motivate them. Only those who have it within themselves do well come out with decent results - and how many teenagers are that organically motivated to get their heads down while chaos reigns around them and getting a 4/5 at GCSE is thought to be a reason for huge celebration? (Obviously a 4/5 is a genuinely brilliant result in some circs but you get my point)

Comps only work if they reflect the local community in all its breadth, including the clever kids (from all backgrounds), the middle class kids, the kids with incredible talents. It creates a community of respect and motivation, and it's just a lot more bloody fun for everyone.

Maybe lotteries in areas where it is a particular problem? But that would be seriously messed up by the existence of any kind of official selectivity in the school application process - so it's out with grammar schools, for definite, and out with parents of any level of wealth objecting to unaffordable journeys not even on bus routes.

Gosh the 'better comps' line annoys me.
My child attends a comprehensive with way more than the Nat Av PP and is avoided by the middleclasses in favour of another nearby school.
The other school is not 'better', It simply has a more 'advantaged' intake.
It gets rid of certain pupils in year 9 to a vocational college.
It has expensive school trips and insists on ipads for all children [school dictated].
The school my child attends works bloody hard by ALL children but its bottom line not as good as the low PP, advantaged intake school.
Does not make it a 'worse' school or the other 'better' though.
I do wish the demographic was more even so other school had a bit of challenge rather than relying on advantage/ tutored children etc.

My children are quite happy and doing well in their one of the 2,500 comprehensive schools, GreenGinger2. The fact is, the majority of people live nowhere near the top 500 schools, bus or no bus, lottery or no lottery. And there is no way on earth government is going to subsidise thousands of children's long bus journeys to get to schools the far side of town from where they live, complete with accompanying pollution and congestion. It is not a model that has proven successful in other countries, so far as I'm aware? There is nothing particularly desirable about forcing long journeys to school upon more people.

How HPFA?

Pushing aside the view that kids on fsm aren't the only kids that matter.There are far more comps so far more top comps schools excluding kids on free school meals.

I love the blanket refusal to except that parents buy houses to get into the catchment for the top and better comps, the huge school bus industry whare parents pay £1000s a year to bus their kids to preferred and better comps and the lack of desire to,push for a lottery system. Posters have time and again shown their own experience of this to match Mini's anecdotal experience.

Posters start thread after thread bemoaning grammars yet never once do you see the same posters campaigning tirelessly for a lottery system even though it is obvious that it would benefit far more children.

The fact is the parents who bemoan grammars like their naice comp on the right side of town which excludes the riffraff and have no desire for a system that takes away their choice.

Green the Sutton Trust is confirming Mini's views not contradicting them.

Roundabout - excellent point.

There are several thousand comprehensive schools in the U.K., not 500. There are not 2,500 or so failing comprehensive schools, just several thousand schools of less interest to the Sutton Trust. It is hardly a surprise that the majority of schools getting the best results will have more children from wealthier backgrounds in them, as with wealth comes easier access to any extra help required, higher donations to the schools themselves, and in all likelihood, exposure to a wider vocabulary, more investment in education in general, and more "mind broadening" experiences in the home. The schools don't actually have to be better at teaching, so widening access will not necessarily result in the maintenance of high achievement levels - more likely a flattening out of differences.

Sutton thinks otherwise Mini

www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/top-comprehensives-socially-selective-half-national-average-proportion-pupils-free-school-meals/

Oh yes, and also pay for private primary schools, because they are not entirely confident that their genetically superior children will pass the eleven plus if they attend state primary schools.

And yet so many of these intelligent parents with intelligent children do not have confidence in their own genes and coach their children rigorously in exam technique for the 11 plus, and get their kids to memorise lists of vocab etc from an early age.

More intelligent people tend towards better paid jobs
More intelligent people pass their genes on to produce more intelligent children.
Therefore parents with better incomes will tend to have brighter kid overall.
That is the main reason grammar schools are skewed towards higher socio economic groups

There was a lot in the consultation about faith schools and other education options. Talk of any of that is all very quiet... I wonder if the non-grammar school stuff is the govt's real agenda to push thru.

"Would love to hear the plans on getting the poorest kids into the best comps."

The four good/outstanding comps nearest me have between 10% and 40% FSM.

The nearest grammars are between 1.9% and 2.5%

People have got to stop insisting that there is just as bad a problem of access to poor children in good comps as there is in grammars - the data shows this just isn't true.

Grammars are in a league of their own when it comes to social exclusion.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the current administration do indeed think that the best schools are those with the highest proportion of advantaged pupils, hence all the latest proposals being focused on getting a token few marginally less privileged children into grammar schools and private schools. In other words, getting the taxpayer to cover the cost of largely maintaining huge divisions in society and underfunding education for the majority.

Part of the problem is that when people talk about the "best comps" they always seem to mean the ones who have the highest number of advantaged pupils. The school with the highest Progress 8 score in Oxfordshire (one possible definition of "best comp") is actually situated in the most deprived area of the city. I bet you any money it will not be flooded by applications next year from pupils who would otherwise go to Cherwell, the Oxford comp that does qualify as a "house price school".

Not all comprehensives are socially exclusive... You would have to be mad not to see that an entrance exam is not hugely different from attendance in Church or all sorts of other middle class wheezes for getting your children into the school you want. All you need is a reasonably able child plus tonnes of extra preparation to demonstrably improve your chances. Theresa May went to a grammar school, but is from as middle class a background as you can possibly imagine (plus partly privately educated). She is just the sort of person who would have got into the comprehensive of her parents' choice, too. I think she just likes grammar schools, because she personally thinks they are better than the best comprehensives, not because she believes they will make a big difference to social mobility.

In the days when bright working class children got into grammar schools, a far higher percentage of the population was classified as working class; tutoring was unheard of for state schools; there was a massive expansion of white-collar jobs, and the school leaving age was 15 up until 1975. The situation is very different today, and those older people who look back to the 'golden age' when they were young seem to have forgotten those points.

Don't like grammars on principle, but my son is at one of the worst 100 comps in England and Wales (discovered this sad fact recently) because of house price selection. He'll be ok, I hope, but 65% of kids leave the school without 5 decent GCSEs. So I'm rather less starry eyed about the comp system than I used to be. In too many areas they aren't genuinely comps because they're not taking a genuine cross-section of the local kids. In areas like mine where affluent parents either go private or monopolise the best comps, there are some truly shit ones and they ruin children's chances.

Imo Giraffe is right - comps + lotteries is the only solution. Stop rich parents being able to monopolise the best comps. Oh, and abolish private schools of course - there's no genuine long term solution without that. But it's all cloud cuckoo land because no politician would ever have the guts. So on we go, ruining children's life chances.

Not all counties with grammars follow the Kent model.

Grammar school entrance exam tutors and private schools boasting 100% success in the 11 plus do excellent business in Kent. People are paying for extra tuition for their children from as early as year 1 of primary school in their bid to ensure their children pass the 11 plus when the time comes. I do not see this as a healthy model, just another attractive hoop for the middle classes to jump through.

Don't hear many plans or enthusiasm from Torys for it.

Is an article from 2010 helpful? And one which, as you point out yourself, only appears to be interested in the poorest and richest and tells us very little about the majority in between? Besides, that article clearly advocates access to schools via lottery, not entrance exam.

King Solomon Academy looks like a fantastic school and is often named as a model school to copy - but no one seems to have noticed that there are only 60 pupils in each year group. To quote from its website, "We are a uniquely small secondary school where pupils are known and cared about as individuals." It's also an 'all-through' school now and so almost all the year 7 places will be taken by the 60 pupils in the junior school - how is this model easily replicated?

It's a myth that grammar schools don't do well for value added/progress - which grammar schools are likely to be classed as 'coasting'?