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.

wordfactory
Would you/he still like the SS if it was over an hour away by bus each way?
Would you/he still like the SS if he could not do after school activities unless you or your DH could pick him up as there was no bus to where you lived?
Would you/he still like the SS if you could not afford for him to do music / sport / DofE like the other kids?

minifingers, I think you have misdiagnosed the problem. There isn't a fixed amount if knowledge in the world. Middle class children haven't stolen education from the poor by doing well themselves. It's not a zero sum game.

The issue can never be one child getting an excellent education, but it's the children who aren't. And for the kids who aren't, I don't think the small minority of kids at selective schools is their main problem.

Doesn't selective education favour the middle class?

So if you have it reintroduced in more places, the divide grows?

talkin again, very good question .

And again, knowing what I know now, and having experienced the positive aspects of super selective education for my poor hopeless case of a non-collaborating son , I would be willing to make a lot of sacrifices I think.

But the best ones to ask, are probably those walking the walk as it were. There are kids who presumably do have to do an hour's journey, and have to be picked up by Mum etc...and they think it's worth it (otherwise they wouldn't do it I guess?).

Wordfactory
But very, very few of those kids will be below average income.

I certainly could not consider sending my kids to school an hour away without utterly reliable public transport / access to two cars.
On a work day DH could be at the other end of the country and I could be anywhere in the county.
Bus fare is over £750 a year per child - and that is if they come out of school at a time when the bus is running.
I go to collect DD from orchestra in an hour .... I'd be out of the house for two hours if she was at the grammar in the next county.

Outside large cities, SS schools are not feasible without significant council funding - which does not exist any more.

Better to have kids at local schools with clustering and support.

mini I think you're really over stating what a clever teen can bring to the party.

If DS attended the school where I'm a governor, it wouldn't solve anything. The problems there are large and varied. A middle class shy lad, with a liking for football and Pringles aint gonna change the educational outcomes of anyone.

And let's be frank. If I had to use state schools, I wouldn't be sending my DC there! I'd be rocking up at the best one I could find, right?

My daughter has just informed me that three girls from the year below - in her Grammar School - have just been expelled for beating up someone from another school in the park.

Apparently there have been fights before but these have all been internal ones i.e. just involving grammar school pupils, and so no one was kicked out.

It seems to me that human - teenage - nature is much the same everywhere. Which is either a bad thing. Or a good thing.

I am sitting in the car waiting for my ds. He has just finished losing a match against a grammar school- not our local one.
I just heard one of them on the way back to their coach say"well it doesn't really count- it's easy to beat stupid people"

A Grammar School in every town would be wonderful. We could then have 3 decent high schools achieving over 70% A*-C . The other 2 could then educate the bottom 20% of that town. The problem with selection is that the majority get left with ?... Therefore the way to make selection work would be to have three types of schools based on a 30%,50% ,20%. A kind of
Tripartite system with three types of school Grammar, High and Community offering three types of education based on pupils abilities and talents.

Grammar would obviously offer the highest quality academic environment suitable to the top 30% of the ability range.

High School would offer a high quality environment offering academic as well as high quality vocational training and employment opportunities to 50% of the population.

Community would be local schools that interact with the local society, perhaps they could have agreements with local companies for training and advice for employment. These schools could offer opportunities in Sport ,
Catering , Plumbing Electrician E.T.C .The skills the country is crying out for. This type of school could be for 20% of kids. The majority of whom find traditional schooling difficult and boring so turn to disruption. These children have "talents" away from Maths/ English and should be able to enhance what they can do in a school suitable for them.

When I began writing this post, I thought ( These ideas are going to go down like a lead balloon with everyone on here) I am going to get the usual stick ,my posts attract . I do not see why these ideas are so upsetting to posters on here.

Fantastic idea.

And your school for the bottom 20% would be - largely - full of children from poor and uneducated families, as well as clever children like my ds who has SN but isn't statemented, struggles at the age of 9 to write a paragraph, but would die of boredom in a school like that.

Jeez, the idea that there's some exact science for ranking children by ability at 11, and an assumption that intelligence is 'fixed'....

A child who does badly in an exam at 10 shouldn't be assumed to have an innate talent and liking for plumbing, smokepole. Or assumed to be certain to cause disruption in any other kind of school but a vocational one.

Of course, if someone had sent me to a school for 'the bottom 20%' at 11, and referred to my "talents", in as many inverted commas as they could spare, as being related to catering and plumbing, I think I might have turned to disruption.

You want your children in grammar schools, smokepole: how would you feel in your utopia, if they were designated Community Material?

My elder brother, as it happens, is measured as 'well below average intelligence' by traditional measures of IQ - NVR and VR. Luckily, because he went to a comprehensive and wasn't selected / not selected at all (he was in a tiny minority of really able pupils in a very very small rural comp, literally getting a third of the entire year group's O-level passes, in the old days of O-level / CSE), he went to Oxford to read Physics.

Do we REALLY believe that our measures of 'intelligence' at 11 are so infallible that we should segragate children for the rest of theri educational journey on the basis of them???

Special Needs is a different issue, Many Children with additional difficulties such as Dyspraxia ,Dyslexia ADHD E.T.C are the brightest of the brightest.
They are quite capable of achieving high academic standards, provided they get the right support and help. P.S Gove was a disgrace towards "Bright Children" with learning impairments.

There is no reason such children should not be in academic environments or the most suitable to enhance their abilities.

The private system exists like this nationwide. In every area you will have private selectives for the very bright and you will have comprehensive privates where most people who apply sit the pretty limited test and the usually most of the bright children go to the better private schools and the less bright end up at the other private schools. That seems to work okay. All people are suggesting on the thread is that the state system follows suit in those many areas which currently do not have state grammar schools.

On travel my daughter from age 5 had an hour door to door on her school journey to Haberdashers and thrived. That was a school coach system - we had to get her to the coach stop and she was collected from where it dropped off at the end of the day. It was well worth it. Do we think she would be on just over £100k (recent pay rise) today had she not been at such a good private school, had her mother not chosen a career which enabled her mother to pay school fees etc?

I'd like DC with less money than us to be able to access what we can

Ok - and what would you like for children who aren't SS material (which sounds very wrong )? Because I'm not wild about 'outreach' which is only for bright children's benefit.

[He still, by the way, as an adult with a first class degree, can't do NVR and VR - he just doesn't 'see' them. So the test was a good measure of his ability at that type of test. It just happened to be a genuinely rubbish way of measuring his actual intellgence and potential]

Greengrow / Xenia: I know quite a large mnumber of adults who earn over 100K. The vast majority of them went to comprehensives. Several left school at 16.

And I take it you feel that when it comes to making decisions about how we should structure educational provision for UK children, the needs of the most able children who also, not entirely coincidentally, tend to be richest and best supported should take precedent over the needs of the rest, even though these are the children who already thrive in any half way decent state school?

No Mini.

I just feel that rather than blaming people for people rich, blaming them for wanting what they see as the best for their DC, why not start to concentrate on making shite schools better. Why not raise everything else up.

There is a jekly and hyde attitude to state Bog schools on here, Bog meaning bog standard.

I think as a society it would be far far better for us all to plough more resources into problem schools, into child psychologists, into x and y and z, and catch children when they are really young.

I mean - they spend nearly all day at school, why are schools not able to reach these problematic children?

NVR stopped DD1 from going to Grammar School So do understand that.

The tests do not have to be NVR/VR based though?

I, on ther other hand, went to an exceptionally selective private school on a full scholarship, have a PhD and now earn a primary teacher's wage - through choice, as my family's value system is about 'giving back to society'.

Interesting teacher, I did mention earlier I think which schools the anti grammar went too because I dont think they went themselves to the bog standard comp, I think they went to slightly better schools themselves.

beyond if a 'shite' school is 'shite', in the sense that nobody really wants their children to go their, that's often because their perception of 'shite' is 'full of working class kids' (or chavs, or trouble makers, or disruptive pupils, or whatever phrase they choose).

And if that 'shiteness' obtains precisely because the middle class are all scrabbling about coaching and paying and praying, it's not necessarily in the gift of the 'shite' school to sort that preconception out.

(And yes, Lambeth school did very well, before you mention isn't again as the answer to everything).

Go there, not their!

nit I think a good comp can cater well for the majority of kids who sit on the ability bell curve. Most of us cluster in the middle and can be well educated collectively ( with some setting ). We will have like ability peers.

It's that I want to see rolled out in the state sector. Not special treatment for the bright, just the same shot at being amongst like ability peers.