to really regret the whole grammar school thing.

[newrecruit]

DS1 is in year 4 (DS2 in year 1).

I went to a girls grammar school and loved it. So when we moved out of London one of the reasons we chose this area was the schools. I don't think we are super selective (don't quite know what that means)

However, I was explaining the schools to him this morning as we drove past one and had an impending feeling of doom.

He's bright but can't be arsed. Resists pushing and I am against tutor on principal. I don't think he'd suit an all boys school.

What have I done! We should have just moved to a comprehensive area with a decent intake.

Some parents are already talking about tutors and its 2 years away. I want to hit them quite hard.

Please pile in and tell me to get a grip.

Talkin you're talking rubbish.

Denying the problem re segregation by wealth is frankly appalling.It's there and Sutton,Wilshaw et al are concerned about it.It is widespread and far more concerning than a tiny number of grammar schools.

I'll let you stick your fingers in your ears and pretend it isn't so,bed calls.

Sorry, LePetit I may have misunderstood your stance. Is it that you are anti-grammar AND anti the unbalance between different comps that occurs because of the specifics of their catchment areas?

OhMy, you jest, but I've known boundaries to be re-drawn by a school to avoid the house of a particular pupil and family. Leafy sought after comprehensive. Makes me very angry.

Teacher I'll have 2 kids in grammar and 1 in comp and frankly they can cream off as many bright kids as they like as my dc will get more attention and focus as a result.Said comp will be chucking everything at my dc who will now be in said hallowed top sets with fewer kids for company.Bring it on.

smokepole I don't think you understand. I abhor the system of selection at 11. I'm distinguishing between the places and the system that creates them.

My stance is anti posters who big up comps as being the bastion of educational fairness- huge numbers aren't.

And now I really must go to bed,school tomorrow.

I do, in many ways, support you in the latter concern. It isn't the education system that 'creates' this imbalane, of course - it is simply that virtually all towns and cities have less and more pleasant / wealthy areas, and schools, drawing as they do from the areas around them, seldom have a tryly equitable mix of children from all possible backgrounds (otherwise we might well have children from poor coastal towns having to commute hours to wealthy commuter villages to make up the 'deprived' quotient, of traveller families split up one to each school country-wide, to make it statistically fair).

The Pupl premuium, clumsy as it is, is a step in the right direction here - a school's income should be adjusted to take account of its intake - those schools with high indices of deprivation getting more money, those with lower, less.

London does have much starker geographical division by wealth, in places, than most other places in the UK. And that's a problem for all kinds of reasons. I don't see it as an argument for more grammars.

Well you'd posted the half truth, I posted the whole truth.

in every story there is your side, my side and the truth and none of us are wrong.

Exactly, Steaming. I am quite happy to acknowledge that not all comprehensives are equal, in the same way as saying that, say, Virginia Water is not exactly the same as Port Talbot. I just don't get the 'so we must have grammars' - the two statements just aren't logically connected.

'Happy' is not quite the right word. I mean 'I do believe this to be so' (I also believe, as a poster stated upthread, that many, many comps are a world away from the schools they were for our own generation), though I would, in a perfect world, prefer it not to be the case. Equally, I might wish that the residents of Port Talbot has as little derprivation as Virginia Water, in a perfect world.

Beyond Repair, I can't elaborate because I will be accused of being "identifying", but put it this way one of us was being economical with the truth!

I also don't think that comprehensives have to be 'perfect' to be 'better than the selective system' - it is a comparison, not an absolute.

I can, for example, believe both that comprehensive education, as it is at the moment, is better than the fully selective alternative, AND that comprehensive educatio could be further improved.

It's a bit like 'democracy is better than dicatorship' - but that doesn't mean that democracy, any democracy, is perfect.

I would not have gone to a grammar for a million reasons, the most obvious being:

1. My parents did not really care about me, they cared even less about my education. They would not have been interested in sending me. They would have wanted me at the same school as my siblings.
2. Even if they wanted me to go, they would not have been able to afford bus fares, uniforms.
3. I had very very low attendance because of my home life. Those gaps in my learning may have prevented me from passing the exam, despite natural ability . As I matured I closed that gap.
4. nobody would have coached or tutored me. We had no books in my house other than the ones my teachers have me or that I nicked from the library. I am not sure that would have been as much of an issue back then.
5. I was intimidated by clever "posh" kids. They were intimidated by me, I may not have wanted to go anyway .

LaQueen, I would go further and say that I have never heard of any scool with NO negatives

school. I hate this keyboard.

davidTheGnome the Birmingham Grammars are super-selective. Fewer than 4.5% of Birmingham children go there, many of the children they take live in surrounding authorities, and indeed conversely, many children in Birmingham also sit for grammars outside Birmingham, in Wolverhampton, Walsall, Stratford-upon-Avon etc.

LaQueen, I would go further and say that I have never heard of any scool with NO negatives

YY and its brilliant that we have the internet now and can usually refer each other and tell good and bad things. You can garner so many more points of view than a few word of mouth recs.

One very academic private school near us, quite a well known one is reputedly cut throat, the arts are not valued, tough academic environment, very dry. Some of the Grammars have reps for students struggling with the pressure.

Its wonderful that these things are less of a closed shop than they were and people can share the good and bad things about schools.

Did you not decide to move there because of the grammar schools? Just as when we built our home we built it just outside of the grammar area - deliberately