The other thread will no longer accept messages but I wanted to make some more points

[fivecandles]

Lequeen, I do find it utterly bizarre that, as a parent, you or anybody else, would accept that if your child missed getting into a grammar school by a couple of marks you would be perfectly happy to accept that meant your child was not academic and therefore should pursue a more vocational route whatever that means.

One of my dc would almost certainly fail to get into a GS. This does not mean I think she should take up a hairdressing course and stop learning GCSEs. I see no good reason why she shouldn't get a good academic education with as much support as possible and go on to university. She has suggested she might enjoy primary teaching and I think she'd make an excellent teacher. The idea that she shouldn't be able to go to university or learn languages and should settle with her lot just because she's not ever going to be a nuclear physicist is absolutely staggering.

I also find your idea that it would be better to segregate underperforming students into an entirely different school for their self-esteem staggering.

Why can't you just be honest about it lequeen. There are no advantages whatsoever for the majority of pupils who do not get into the GS. All the advantages go to the kids who DO get in and these are the pupils who are already doing well (and the research indicates most likely to be well off).

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that privileged and clever kids don't deserve the very best education and I absolutely agree that they should be challenged and supported but this can and should and is being done in the same school as students who are struggling academically and are likely to be from very different social backgrounds are also supported to achieve.

Exotic You said:

"I have 3 very different DCs, DC1 is academic, DC2 is unacademic but very practical and DS3 is the middle of the road, artistic dreamer. I fail to see why they have to go to different schools."

I agree that students should not sit gcses early. I agree it is wrong to chase C grades at the cost of other students. I suspect it does have a lot to do with the fact it is in a grammar school area. This is a secondary modern trying to attract parents by artificially boosting it's figures. It is wrong of course. But having to compete with a grammar places unique pressures on schools.

It is important to make clear that some comprehensives do these things , many more don't.

I also don't teach in a posh area at all. I actually teach in am area where access to higher education is very low.

TT, the chasing Cs and sitting GCSEs early is widespread. It isn't something particular to grammar school areas.

Our grammar schools have no catchment and one is on the border of another LEA. As a consequence of this our local comp loses less than 5% of pupils to the grammar. That is far less than many comps in non grammar areas lose to faith schools or independent schools. It is absurd to say that these are secondary modern schools.

Even 5 per cent can be a significant figure if that is your brightest 5 per cent.

Having a significant impact on a school is not the same as making it a secondary modern.

Schools shouldn't be 'competing' against each other in league tables anyway. They should be doing what is in the best interests of the pupils they actually have.

And none of this changes the fact that very many comps are chasing Cs. It isn't something that is linked to grammar school areas.

I accept it happens in non grammar areas. But it does not happen in all comps, in fact I doubt it happens in most.

Schools just don't work like that. Pupils have individual targets, if it was suspected that I ignored those students with A star or A grade targets I would be collecting my p45.

I agree that schools should not compete and I certainly want children to go to the school that suits them. However the reality is that good schools whether you call then comps or secondary moderns do have to compete with Grammars. That can ensure that the comp/ secondary modern has to aim high.

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/24/gcse-results-rise-in-students-taking-year-early

community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/298766.aspx?PageIndex=1

Kids can develop at different rates - just because they don't get into a school at 11 shouldn't affect the outcomes of the rest of their life.

My uncle only got into his local grammar school because somebody moved out of the area and he got his place, it was all done on exam score and he happened to be the one that would have got the highest mark going into the secondary modern school.

Roll on 7 years and he got his school cert or whatever it was in those days with flying colours but still had to stay at school for an extra year as he was very young for his year and too young to leave (in the days when September 1st was not the exact cutoff date for splitting years, you could join the class even if your birthday was the end of september, you just ended up doing an extra year in the 6th form) and so did a couple more completely different subjects.

Roll forward a good few years and he was at the top of his profession, (which is one that is acknowledged as being full of brainy people, think law/medicine/chartered engineer/rocket scientist), written lots of books, headed up organisations, recognised world expert in his field, etc etc.

But - had that other little boy not moved away, thereby opening up a space for him at the grammar school, would he ever have been able to get to uni - who knows? They certainly didn't go to uni as routine from the school he would have gone to.

So if your child is borderline I can see exactly why you would worry that some doors were being shut too early for them when so much can happen to a child in those secondary years!

The school suited all 3 jackstarb. They have all done exactly as they wanted from it. Had they gone to Eton their choices would have been the same.
They were not disrupted Milly, disruption was dealt with.
That is my whole point zipzap-I was the DC 2 places under where the line was drawn and I can't see that I was much different from the DC 2 places ahead who got the place.

OK there's another thing I don't get.

The highest achieveing kids are supposed to not be bothered by attending a comp, because setting takes care of everything. They're in their own top sets so don't have struggling or disruptive children in the class, and can get on with high level learning just as they would in a grammar school.

Yet at the same time, the sheer presence of these children in the same school supposedly inspires all the others, leading by example and spurring them on to greater efforts. Even though the others are in the bottom sets and don't mix with the geeky kids anyway.

This makes no sense. Either both sets of kids affect each other or they don't. If the smart kids are supposed to pull the struggling ones up, then the same interaction will include some of the smart ones being pulled down. If they're sufficiently segregated that the smart ones can't be compromised, then they're not going to have any positive effect on the struggling ones.

I wonder if anyone has ever researched whether this idea of the brightest kids in the school inspiring the others, "leading from the top" and raising the achievement of everybody, actually has any basis in reality. ie, does it correspond to the actual experience of lower ability kids in comprehensives, as opposed to those in secondary moderns. And do the lower 75% of those in comprehensives get better results than those in secondary moderns where the top 25% have gone to grammar school?

Or has the effect just been assumed based on idealistic adult reasoning that has nothing whatever to do with the actual experience or perceptions of children.

I went looking for research, and rather liked this final line from an LSE paper written in 2006 (which basically debunked the methodology used in a whole raft of previous research, rendering the conclusions of such research unsound):

"We conclude that we probably do not know very much about the effect of
comprehensive schooling in Britain, or elsewhere for that matter."

!!

Exoticfruits, I'm not sure why you keep responding to me if you don't want to answer the question.

There are children who, often due to home background/wider social events outside of school, do not respond to school management policies concerning discipline. They are not criminals and so do not fall under the remit of youth offending teams. They have serious emotional and/or behavioural issues. What do you think should happen to those children in a comprehensive system?

Milly,

What do you think should happen to them in a grammar school system?

It should not be any different whether a school is comprehensive, secondary modern or a grammar school how disruptive children are dealt with, because the well-behaved children of all abilities in any school system should not have their education disrupted by such children.

So for ALL schools, of ALL types - comprehensives or secondary modern, what should happen to such children includes:

• Clear, consistent boundaries and high expectations
• Educational opportunities that are relevant to them, including apprenticeships, work experience, basic skills, or A-level Further Maths, depending on the child.
• Trained staff, sometimes including a specialist smaller unit with the school
• Access to support and interventions as appropriate to address the root causes (including family support, social services, drug dependency support for child or family etc)
• Clear, consistent discipline policies, including internal isolation and fixed-term exclusion.
• Referral to specialist facilities such as PRUs if appropriate.

I really don't understand why - except for they 'well, it's all OK because they won't mix with MY precious children' - you believe that the approach should be any different between different types of school. If your child was an excellently behaved low achiever in a grammar area, would you feel it acceptable that other parents were thinking 'well, it's OK, I like this grammar system because MY child doesn't have to mix with anyone who behaves badly, I can fob them all off to another institution'??

TW2K, I think those children should be in special schools that meet their needs with staff who have a particular aptitude and training to teach those children. I have already said this. Part of believing in grammar education is believing that appropriate schools should exist for all children.

I don't think low achieving children who do not have serious emotional and behavioural problems should be educated with these children. I have already said this.

I am asking people who believe in comprehensive education, who want all children educated together, to explain what they would do with these children. I have already said this.

I consider it totally unacceptable to put such students in pupil referral units. Anybody who does think these children should be put in such units does not really believe in comprehensive education. They are quite happy to educate disruptive children separately but then complain if very able children are educated separately. It is hypocrisy.

Internal isolation of children that the school can't deal with is pretty appalling too. Is that what comprehensive education means? All kids can attend the school but if you have problems you can't go to class with the rest of the kids.

I don't know if you read my post a long time ago that said that I do have some sympathy with the 'special educational needs' model of separate education for those at the very extremes of the ability curve.

So currently c. 2% of children attend special schools because their needs cannot be met in mainstream settings. Because the numbers are so small within this total 2% when it comes to looking at each particular difficulty (e.g. profound multiple learning difficulty vs ASD, vs sensory or physical disability vs behaviour, emotional and social difficulty), it makes more sense to group these children into specialist units where a group of children with similar needs can have their needs met efficiently.

It could be argued that exceptionally academically able children also have a special educational need, as their ability is so far from the norm that it is hard to meet their needs in a mainstream school. However, the percentage here is almost certainly smaller than the 2% of SEN, because there are not the same wholly different 'types' of being exceptionally able academically - you only need one type of 'special school'.

So there is, possibly, an argument for the type of grammar school that takes 2% or less of the cohort, because it is a way of efficiently providing a suitable education for a group of children whose educational needs lie so far outside the norm that it is most efficient and effective to educate them together.

This does not, however, make an argument for the type of grammar school that takes 25% of the cohort. there is no significant special educational need of these children that marks them out from the next 50% or even 73%.

Pragmatically, LeQueen, there has to be some limit to the fragmentation of the secondary school system.

There also has to be an acknowledgement that groups who may remain quite separate for parts of the day do still have access to resources - teachers, facilities, libraries, labs - that would not be available in a wholly fragmented system in which each little group was educated in a separate school (some ASD children may, for example, benefit hugely from access to a teacher of a suitable level to teach A-level Further Maths, not something one would find in a special school should they be isolated within one).

And I am not suggesting that my list of ways to deal with disruptive children is perfect, in any way - the only real solution being intensive intervention with child and family and there is not enough funding in any schoolto deliver that full time (except perhaps, ironically, our best-endowed grammar schools and our most prestigious private schools). However, the point I am making is that that list is THE SAME for both secondary moderns and comprehensives - the creation of comprehensives does not suddenly create a problem of 'uncontrolled disruptive children' that magically disappears in areas with the 11+

I agree that having grammar schools that take 25% of children is too high. I also think that 2% of children in special schools is too low. Grammar school intake should perhaps be around 10%, made up of 5% who need it and 5% who would do equally well in a grammar or a technical school (if we had grammar, technical and secondary modern). I think the 10% is because exams are always a blunt measure, and taking 10% makes it more likely we have the top 5% within that group.

This is going a bit off topic, but I wouldn't support always putting children with an ASD in a school based on having an ASD. The grammar school DS is at has a disproportionately high number of ASD children, and I think it particularly benefits those children.

Absolutely agree with your last point, Milly - and it was what I was trying to say in response to LeQueen: that support which enables the vast majority of children e.g. with ASD, or sensory impairments, to be kept in mainstream school means that those children have access to the 'all round' schooling they need to cater for what they CAN do, rather than being 'defined' by their impairment.

My children's primary had a specialist hearing impaired unit attached to it, which was an excellent model - a nucleus of expert staff based in a room available for intervention work (e.g.some children came from schools for the deaf and spoke only sign language - intervention by the unit's staff included developing more verbal communication) and then supported access to the mainstream classrooms for the majority of each day. Children came from long distances because it allowed those children who were deaf but very able academically to flourish in the 'best of both worlds'. Nurture units or special behavioural support teams within other primaries are another example of this approach - not aimed at segregation, but supported integration.

From a completely different perspective, I did for three years attend a genuinely comprehensive school (apart from being in the 80s before they closed a lot of SEN behaviour issue schools). The classrooms were open plan, so 90 of us were in one big room organised into form areas. There was no setting, no time table apart from where it was needed for practical reasons (CDT in a wood work room etc), little separation of subjects and a reasonably free choice of what each pupil wanted to work on that day.

I loved it and I think it was very successful. I then spent the next 4 years in the kind of comp we all know now with setting. I found that hugely divisive and stressful - where you are constantly in competition to keep your set place, and where there was a lot of resentment between bottom and top sets. It was like constantly sitting the 11 plus day after day for years, with the animosity within one building of people who rarely mixed with other groups because of setting and subject choices at GCSE.

So I think the problem may not be comprehensive education as it exists in parts of Scandinavia and how it was meant to be set up here. It is the hotchpotch in schools that has been set up here, with constant government tinkering.