The 11+ was a eugenics test to weed out genetically "inferior" children, created by a classicist who falsified his research

The church schools in central London, i.e St Marylebone, Cardinal Vaughan, Greycoats, Oratory etc are also socially selective. Do you think schools should stop selecting on the basis of (parents) religion too?

Of course it wasn’t about race. In the 1940s there were more schools than there were black people of all ages in the UK.

No. Smaller academic schools suit some children.

I went to a grammar school (in London just before they were abolished) and that was originally founded as a girls’ charity school. Many of those schools have a long history and it is incorrect to say that they represented part of a eugenics movement.

One of my children went to a grammar school, one to a comp with streaming. The latter (Holland Park School that bastian of fashionable comprehensive education) DID write off lower achieving children. Children were also made up to line up in assembly in order of their parents’ occupation. Children who were non academic were punished and written off. Hardly egalitarian.

If it’s about race, how come a large proportion of the (so called) super selective grammar my daughter attended were non white?

I took and passed the 11 plus in 1966. In my primary school at the time there were 4 classes of children. There were about 40 odd kids in my class (A class) about the same in the B class and then 2 smaller classes of kids who needed a bit of extra attention. Most of the kids in my class passed and another 2 from the B class. There were 2 options for grammar school in our town, 1 co-educational and 1 each girls and boys only. There were kids from all kinds of backgrounds at the co-ed I went to, it wasn't elitist at all. (I think the single six schools were probably a bit more elitist to be fair). I also had lots of friends from out of school who went to the local secondary modern and a lot of them did just as well as I did in the long run. We all did 'O' levels and anyone at the secondary moderns who did well enough and wanted to do 'A' levels could join the 6th form at one of the grammar schools. There were also kids who joined our school in what would now be the equivalent of Year 9 after taking the 13 plus which was available to anyone who had failed 11 plus who wanted to have another go later. The system went comprehensive a few years after I left in the early/mid 1970's.

My mum failed hers but added six inferior children to the gene pool anyway.

I am talking about selection for sixth form. Why should sixth form be A levels and not more qualifications accessible to those without good GCSEs?

Yay my kid passed the eugenics test!

Everyone is talking of the impact of selection at the 11+ as if that is the only point of selection and that selection only applies in a few council areas. Selection is much broader than that and takes place in nearly every school across the country - at sixth form. If you don’t have the grades to study A levels, how many school offer much by way of a range of alternatives? How many are forced into college.

Colleges are not schools; they expect a higher degree of independence and maturity. They are a new environment to have to become familiar with and a broader mix of ages to negotiate with. And yet it is the children who struggle the most who are the ones most expected to leave school for college at 16.

Completely agree.

This is the real issue. Behaviour in schools.

Calling it eugenics loses you all credibility and puts you firmly in tin-foil-hat territory.

If you actually wanted to debate the cons of the 11+ with sensible claims, people are generally more receptive. The hyperbole in rants like these is almost always because the person feels 'wronged' somehow.

What makes grammar schools appealing is the behavioral issues often mentioned on mn disruptive students.
disruptive disengaged students deserve prompt psychiatric assessment and support not a 3 yr wait or ineffective mh system.

It was the case in the era of the man whose system you are describing as eugenics.
My post disagrees with your first posts. If your first posts aren’t what you want to talk about, that’s on you.

If you consider today’s education system to have areas which are flawed, then I won’t disagree. It isn’t flawed because of the 11+ though. It’s flawed because it’s crap, because we aren’t investing in more tailored opportunities for children. It isn’t flawed because some areas offer a highly academic opportunity to children who can perform brilliantly at academic tests aged 11.

Yes, I think that's another problem. There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about grade inflation. I can't find it now, but the punchline is the university tutor saying: "they've all got As these days, but the rich children were expecting to go to university, so we decided we'd just give the places to them -- it seemed kinder that way".

I think the 'rich' isn't precisely correct there. But if you remove meaningful academic tests then you advantage candidates who understand the system and what's really being tested for. e.g. that an admissions essay for Harvard needs to be very different from one for Oxford. And that's a question of cultural capital not brainpower, so disadvantaged students remain disadvantaged. (Or you end up selecting the privileged members of underprivileged groups, which looks good on paper but isn't really helping)

Do people honestly not think the system has been completely gamed by tutoring though? I know lots of very mediocre students that spent 2 years and lots of money getting a place. Outside of maybe NVR, with enough time and money you could get most students in. I do think some secondary schools don’t help themselves by having limited sets/streams which is a massive negative for the genuinely brighter students and makes grammar school even more appealing.

When my DC did SAT, they were extremely easy and could not really differentiate for the elite universities.

@ParentOfOne

The problem is that these tests penalise the poor kids who have a high potential [compared to those with] the money to afford the tutoring

I think the key question here is "compared to what other system?".

I'm strongly in favour of streaming and tentatively in favour of grammar schools. One reason I favour grammar schools (or at least, having highly selective streams within the state system) is that it provides a path for bright-but-poor children into 'elite' institutions and occupations, and I'm not convinced that having streams in comprehensive schools do to the same extent.

If the only way to receive a highly selective education is to pay for it then we shouldn't be surprised if the rich dominate our academically-elite institutions and occupations, with bad effects down the line.

And in practice, removing testing can often remove the ladder. iirc, when elite US universities stopped using SAT scores a few years back, thinking they would get more socioeconomic diversity, they ended up getting, if anything, less. Applications from low-socioeconomic groups rose, but admittance from those groups didn't. Because although test scores can be to an extent bought, they are harder to buy than impressive extracurriculars, buzzword essays, polished interview performances that replaced the SAT. So the universities became even harder to get into, and poorer students were deprived of one of the measures that came closest to an even playing field when competing for those even-scarcer places.

Regarding " Again: the crux of the argument is that bright kids born from parents who are poor or don't care are at a disadvantage, because the current system rewards a combination of innate talent + external help (like tutoring)", I get your point, but honestly I don’t see much need to argue about that “core issue.” Any kind of competition — whether in school or in sports — is basically a mix of talent and training. And training always costs something, either money or time. Even when parents do the tutoring themselves, that’s still a kind of investment.

So yes, kids from families with fewer resources are at a disadvantage, but that doesn’t automatically mean the whole system is broken. It’s a bit like the Olympics — most top athletes have access to coaches and facilities that others don’t. We don’t call for cancelling the Olympics because not everyone can afford elite training.

In short, every competitive system inevitably involves unequal access to training resources. Such systems can take those inequalities into account, but they are never designed — nor suitable — to solve them. If the real concern is fairness, maybe a better focus is when or how selection happens — for example, moving the 11+ to a later age or having a two-stage process (like 11+ for junior high and 14+ for senior high). That could be a more balanced way to support all types of students, instead of focusing only on tutoring gaps, which are really just a symptom of a bigger issue.

I think ultimately there is a low-level hatred for grammar schools and a desire to force all children into bog standard secondaries for 'equality'. By keeping gifted children back, they are then forced into the same level as the other children. I think that's as cruel as forcing slow kids to learn faster and it breeds mediocrity, as in every child is the same and should have the same opportunities. Kind of like the theory that everyone is the same and something of a blank slate.

Not necessarily easy of course, but at least possible, and a lot more so than getting into a grammar school later if you failed the 11+.
All my children successfuly moved up sets in maths actually. Their primary school was excellent in many ways but maths teaching wasn't it's strongest suit. But the maths teaching at their secondary was superb and the best teachers taught the lower sets in KS3 so quite a lot of the children, mine included, made huge progress in years 7 and 8. My middle child went from next to bottom to top set in year 7 to top by year 10, did maths A level and has just graduated with a 1st in a STEM subject. If we lived somewhere where his attainment aged 10 had been considered a reliable indicator of his potential I think that wuuld have been much less likely to happen.