"I could never send my dcs to grammar school....

[winkywinkola]

...because I think it's unfair on all those children who can't get in because they couldn't afford tutoring for 11+. But I will send them to prep and boarding school."

I was a bit perplexed to hear this from a mum at the school gate. Aibu?

I guess I think it's a real shame children are encouraged to narrow their curriculum at a young age. At 13 I would have made certain choices which would have limited what I ended up being interested in at 16 and 18; the wide curriculum meant I still had a foot in the door.

I don't know much about the IB but my old school now does it. I think it sounds far broader than the choices we were asked to make, whilst allowing for depth in students' preferred areas.

I should have said that we're looking at grammar because the local comprehensive is sinking. We can't afford private so we're looking at all the state options including further away comprehensives and border-hopping grammars. I do realise we're extremely lucky to have options at all!

Nothing wrong with wanting to keep your child's options open. My dd (aged 11) has a flair for languages - her grandmother was a translator and it's not impossible she will want to do something similar. Local comprehensive where we used to live only taught Spanish at GCSE level. I don't think it's particularly pushy of us to reckon at age 11 it's probably better for her to go somewhere that offers more languages.

TheCountess - The thing is, i have absolutely no problem with a parent comparing specific schools local to them, and saying thatb they would prefer school A because it offers things that are of value to your child as an individual or you as a family.

It is the generalisations: 'There are very few bright children at comprehensives'; 'Comprehensives restrict your options'; 'Grammar schools have county / national level musicians' that get me on these threads, because they are, as generalisations, quite simply untrue, and even where they are true, the reason for them is actually separate from the school type (county level music, for example, is mainly a function of parental knowledge of / value for music, an amount of disposable income, and possession of a car and willing to use it as parental taxi, not grammar schools per se).

However, this does not mean that when comparing SPECIFIC SCHOOLS, one might be more suitable for you and your child than another. Locally, I might send a very able scientist, a musical child, a child with significant SEN and a child wanting to do many languages to 4 different schools - 1 a grammar, 3 not.

What teacher said. And the generalisations go further "there is no bullying at grammar schools" "A child would never be teased for being a swot at a grammar school".....

On numbers of GCSEs, the cleverest person I have ever met has about 6 O-levels ... and was a scholar at Winchester. Their education seemed to be about much more than taking exams - Maths Olympiad while still at school, that sort of thing, but also cookery, Greek, all kings of stuff that was not necessarily examined 'to show proof of a broad education'. Hasn't held him back at all in adult life as an academic.

The point I was making is that all schools are failing our kids by directing them into media and humanities. These subjects are fine but if we are short of graduates and people want well paid jobs then schools should address this.
Schools seem mainly keen to get the kids into university. Any university. And studying any subject. It is easier to do this with certain subjects.
State comps are particularly guilty of this.

Kennington, Sadly I have a child who absolutely excels at the humanities, languages and Maths. Not Science.

Am working on the other one, who excels at Science ... but also dances at a very high level and may want to do that instead.

There does come a point when 'intrinsic interest in the subject' does have to trump 'well, the country needs more engineers'!

"I refused to have my daughter tutored as I figured that if she needed tutoring to get in then she would probably need it all through just to keep up. She got into the grammar school with no problem and is now waiting for her A level results."

Stillrabbit - being tutored over the line or crammed at prep school and tutored on top of that is a bit of a feature in Kent and come Easter of year 7 (or year 9 in the case of one 13+ grammar) it's very sad for those children who really aren't coping and should never have been at these schools.

I am in my 50s and all of my friends are in their 40s and 50s (and a couple in their 60s) and because I am awfully middle class most of them have degrees. I could barely say what any of them got for degrees (or even where they went to University) and I certainly have absolutely no idea what they got for A levels or O levels. Thinking prior to O levels and whether they went to a grammar/private prep or a comp or not is unthinkable!

I can only hope it is the same for my children when they reach adulthood.

Haven't RTHT but wanted to add my tuppence worth.

I live in an area that has super selective grammar schools. Less than 2% of those who apply get a place. Even the very brightest will need some tutoring, to at the very least learn exam technique - either from paid tutoring which will exclude those whose parents can't afford it or by parent tutoring which excludes those whose parents don't have the academic ability. Tutoring of any sort excludes those whose parents don't know that they should consider tutoring and even the application process excludes those whose parents don't apply on their behalf.

Politicians talk about grammar schools helping the brightest children from all backgrounds to access the best education. The publicly available information shows quite clearly how low the proportion of FSM is at my local grammars - it's actually lower than at the local independents who offer generous bursaries. I genuinely do not believe that there are children from the sink estate at the grammars this is not because I think they're not bright enough.

I have friends whose children are doing GCSEs at local grammars and they reckon over half of the pupils are still being tutored to keep up. How bizarre.

DC1 is very bright. I'm confident that with a bit of exam technique tutoring she'd get into a grammar but it wouldn't suit her personality and learning style. DC2 is bright, not top 2% though. Perhaps with a tutor he'd pass but I'd prefer a more rounded education. I should add here that quite a few children at DCs school have been tutored since Year 1. So despite not being wealthy we're considering independents with our local outstanding comp as a perfectly acceptable second choice.

The irony will be that when we park up at the shops after school we'll be in my old jalopy and the grammar school children will be getting out of new Audis and Mercedes.

Teacher - yes ... It's a shame that the only way to get breadth in most state schools is to do a dozen GCSEs and then still miss things e.g DD enjoyed learning history but not the way it was examined so dropped it. Fortunately her intrinsic interests turned her to ... Engineering.

Fair enough Teacher. It is just a pain when the consequence of having a comprehensive system in your area is that there is no choice of school. It's a rural problem in particular, because you're miles out of catchment for all but one school.
I don't know what the solution is other than the obvious one of 'improve the bloody school', but several decades on they don't seem to have managed that.
The system works in the town we moved to, which is big enough for two very good comprehensives, one more academic and another (outstanding) more vocational. We were lucky to have the choice to move.

The rural comprehensive system, though, is not solved by having a grammar school, is it? If that rural comprehensive was changed to a rural grammar plus a rural secondary modern, then if you pass the 11+ you have 1 choice, and if you fail it you have 1 choice. As I said previously, that would work slightly better (at a statistical level) for a small number of high achievers, but less well for a large group of middle achievers, whose options are dramatically affected by a single mark in a single test on a single day at the age of 10 - and no better at all for the population of children as a whole.

Having all abilities together in a single rural school does at least mean that a reasonable range of subjects can be offered, even to those with 'spiky' profieles who are able in some areas but might not pass the 11+.

My DBros went to a very, very small rural comprehensive (just ex secondary modern) with an intake of 60. 8 subjects were offered for GCSE, because the school were basically only staffed at just above 1 teacher per class - with 11 or 12 teachers in a 10 class school, there wasn't much room for a variety of options.

They did, however, make active use of facilities in local colleges etc, with day release or taking whole classes by bus for afternoons so that a wider range could be offered.

The local sixth form colleges - all 10 - 25 miles away - were also used to catering for 'from scratch' teaching of e.g. additional languages, because their intake was largely from such small rural schools.

i suspect nowadays more use can be made of distance learning / technology. My local comp offers additional languages as after-school options (so a child could theoretically leave with 4 language GCSEs - 2 in school time, 2 after), so if they can't be timetabled within the school day this is another option if the school is creative about it.

You'd end up with the situation we have in our town, where what would be an excellent comprehensive school is on two sites, with all the social and psychological and economic complications that brings with it.

If you had a situation where every second rural comprehensive went grammar, no, it would be awful. But what used to happen was that the children from a range of villages went to the grammar in the nearest big town or city. Some of these schools have become comprehensives but the village children who would once have gone to them are now out of catchment, especially if they are good, because the catchment is so small.
So I think in a few very specific situations it would help a particular group of children whose needs are not catered for.
But obviously if the problem is not just that the no-choice rural comp doesn't cater for brighter kids, it's that it's crap for everyone, then it wouldn't be much cop as a solution.
I wonder if maybe every child should have a right to do certain subjects (like separate sciences and more than one language) and if the local school can't provide that they should be given priority at the schools that do.

The point is that if every child had the right to do certain subjects, the rural comprehensive would have to find a way to deliver that, and so there would be no reason to give the children priority at any other school, surely?

So it really is a case of 'improve the school that you have' - which may mean coming up with innovative solutions such as sharing of a language teacher for an after school group that brings together children from different schools, or the use of distance learning etc.

Interestingly, my local excellent comp only does double Science - a fact that I was appalled by until
a) I contacted my old Oxbridge college, to be told that they considered double and triple science awards as entirely sufficient for their science-based courses, and double science didn't prejudice applicants at all, especially if the school only offered double (they also gave stats for their current intake of scientists that supported this)

b) I realised that the school was unusual in offering 5 genuinely free options for GCSE - so yes DS will have 2 sciences - but 2 languages, 2 humanities, and a practical performance subject. A friend we met up with whose DS goes to a very academic private school was a little awed.

c) i compared the school's A-level science results with equivalent non-selective schools who do triple science ... and the results were, allowing for year on year variations, identical.

If someone made it compulsory to offer triple, I would be happy that this would force DCs' comp to do so BUT I would probably mourn the loss of the extra option slot it would entail.

Or did you mean 'every child who is capable of it has the right to access these things'? How do you identify this? The 11+ is certainly not an infallible method of identifying at 10 those who might be high-flying scientists or linguists at 14 when they choose their options?

It would, genuinely, be much better for it to be made a requirement for all schools to make these things available to their pupils - and in this environment of Multi-academy trusts being set up, force these groups of schools to supply this in a cross-school way even if a single school finds that it struggles to do so.

(It is, tbh, one of the better arguments that I can think of in favour of Multi-Academy Trusts - though of course it could also have been done in the old days of universal local authorities)

I'm not really aware of multi-academy trusts hereabouts so don't know how they operate - are some of them likely to evolve into a 'gs + tech + vocational' grouping' type of thing? perhaps that could work if pupils could transfer at various points (according to abilities/their preferred route NOT the parents choice) and crucially if the rating was done for the whole set rather than the individual pieces so that there would be motivation to be excellent across the full range?

Errol,

The best answer to that is 'I don't know'. At the moment, it is not possible to create a new selective school (though new offshoots of existing ones are allowed, as has happened quite recently in Kent), so a school within a MAT cannot set itself up as selective if it is not already selective.

At the moment, also, you apply to a school not a MAT, so transfer between schools as you envisage is fraught with difficulty.

I am not saying that some could not evolve in this way - just I think that it is not envisaged at present. In my previous post, i had merely pictured it as a way in which scarce expertise - e.g. foreign language teachers - or students who wanted to do subjects for which there was not a viable class in their existing school - e.g. Latin, perhaps Further Maths A-level, or equally car mechanics or bricklaying - would be able to pool and share resources / students in an economic way.

A lot of this is down to semantics. If you hear that a child, any child, is at a grammar school you automatically make certain assumptions e.g. that they are academic etc. Being at a grammar has a certain academic kudos (though of course that will hotly be denied by certain individuals).

Obviously, you do get equally bright children at comps in fully comp areas (apart from the ones siphoned off into private and independent schools).

But, say, the top maths set in a comp isn't going to have such a concentration of academic excellence as the top maths set in a grammar. Obviously.

The comp's top set is selected from a much wider ability base, as the comp has to accept pupils of all abilities. So their maths top set will comprise of the extremely clever down to 'just' the clever...unless the comp can have 10 seperate maths sets?

At our grammar, they firstly accept the top 20% (this would probably be the envery quota of the top ability pupils in a comp) but they then further stream them. So the Maths top set in a grammar only has the exceptionally clever...set 2 will just have 'the very, very clever'...set 5 will only have 'clever' pupils (as they're still in the top 20% academically.

Getting a critical mass of high ability peers is often a problem in comprehensives.

Which in turn can impact on resource allocation, policy decisions etc. it would be odd if it didn't.

MaQueen,

DCs comp does have 10 maths sets?

I suppose it depends what you mean by the 'exceptionally clever': DD's Maths set only has those who got Level 6 at the end of KS2 OR have reached the same level as those pupils in Year 7. DS's Maths target for the end of Year 9 - the same as the majority of his Maths set - was an 8A, and he and the majority of others achieved that. His target GCSE level is a 9.

Large numbers get Junior and Intermediate Maths Challenge certificates, and some each year go on to Kangaroo levels. Only 1 or 2 go on to the relevant Olympiad, none in a less good year, but that's the top 500 in the country from schools of all types.

10 different maths sets? Really? How marvellous. In all the comps I worked in as TA and Cover Supervisor there was never more than 3 sets.

Well, if comps generally have 10 different sets per subject then that really is marvelous