Why do people get so worked up about selection in schools?

[Itisnoteasybeingdifferent]

Genuine question.
We all know selection is part of life. Last week there was a conversation about Emma Watson for getting her breasts out. But she is only famous because she was selected to play Hermonie. No one knows all the other hopefuls who were rejected. Likewise, if you apply for a job and get nowhere, it is because the employer selected someone else to do the job. Selection is a real part of life.

Yet when it comes to school we seem to think the opposite should apply.

I believe that I use a range of expletives about my local school
but
my problem is with the management not the pupils
as more than half of the catchment pupils attended the same other school as my kids with no problem at all.

I "selected" a less bad comp for my kids.
I have no guilt about it.
I told the head of my local school to his face that I'd never send my kids to his school.

The teachers at my local school (well mostly ex teachers now) describe it as shit.

In your opinion what makes that school "shit" Bill?

I'm very glad we dont have selective schools in my area. My DD was a late developer and not academic and would not have got into a selective school - though in the end after heavily streamed comp education got a good batch of GCSEs and did extremely well in creative subjects. She said she wished he'd known earlier in life that it would all work out okay for her.

She would also have felt hugely undermined by the fact that her younger brother is extremely bright and would have sailed through the selective exam into a grammar school. DS is in the top set for everything and doing extremely well - the comp caters for his education needs very well as he learns alongside other very bright kids in his sets.

Comprehensive schools when well run can cater for all learning needs - they are comprehensive. That does not mean shoving kids into all ability classes and teaching to the lowest denominator.

Wow, quite staggered that some people think the answer to troubled schools is to build a grammar. Unfair house price admissions are bad, but there are alternatives. May should reform admissions as has been suggested by the Sutton Trust and a couple of think tanks.

The idea of grammars is just flawed. Where in life is there a 'top 25%' set at some oddly exact percentage? It really gets my goat when ex-grammar school people talk like they're especially suited to their elite school. Half their class mates probably scored between 320 and 330 points, while a quarter of the kids in the secondary modern probably scored between 310 and 320. It's just a 2 hour test!

Isn't this form of admission inherently unfair because it's using such bad science? 22% of children are misclassified by the 11+ based on GCSE results. Plus the grammar 'suitable' 25% figure is at odds with the point that 40% of our kids go to university now.

I'm in Kent, and when my daughter failed the 11+ my realistic 'choice' was 3 requires improvement rated schools or a 'good' faith school (I'm not catholic.) Catchment area is a thing here too, and 'good' secondary moderns are impossible to get into. The choice if she'd passed was the 3 or 4 good or outstanding grammars, all with spaces available for pushy appeals parents. Why is there such a difference of opportunity based on a silly 2 hour test? :)

Grammars wreck their local schools. My daughter couldn't do triple science, the sixth form was full of BTECs and the number of supply teachers was a joke. I know there are troubled schools everywhere, but grammar schools clearly have a system affect on non-selective schools. The other schools find it harder to recruit teachers, there is no parity of esteem among local schools, and the non-selectives rarely offer top sets to stretch pupils.

There is one thing the 11+ doesn't judge, and that's work ethic. It turns out my daughter did better than all her friends who passed the test (straight As at GCSE.) She used a whole lot of online resources for the subjects where her teacher's weren't helping. Clearly she developed later than 10. Like loads of other children. (Did I mention how silly a 2 hour test at 10 years old is?)

It's a rotten idea to expand this silly system to other bits of the country. My son's in year 4, and year 5 is the big tutoring year. I don't want to put him through a whole load of pointless verbal reasoning practise, but what choice do I have?