Grammar school tests to be made 'tutor-proof'

[breadandbutterfly]

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/9653189/Grammar-school-tests-to-be-made-tutor-proof.html

Ok- everyone. I want you to ask every friend you meet over the weekend whether they can juggle and report back on Sunday night. I bet 50% will be able to. Nothing complicated- no swords or fire or anything- just 3 balls.

I think you'll find there are more in London, Seeker !

Seeker Yes

yellowtip Yes Given the backgrounds of my peers, there can have been no middle class bias, in fact I suspect that there was such a pride in the tradition of giving bright working class pupils a chance of Grammar School education, my mother had been one, that the bias may have been the other way (though there were of course fee paying pupils). Interestingly though in a city that had a population that was 30% bme, mostly Muslim, there was one Hindu girl and one Jamaican girl, though that subsequently changed. I don't know if that reflected a fairly recent immigration, it had happened in the last ten years, there were plenty of Eastern European girls from the previous wave of immigration, or bias but we were certainly conscious of it.

Seriously- can you imagine the appeals if there were head tescher's recommendations and interviews? And the potential for nodding people through, and discrimination and......and.....and

I can imagine the appeals these days seeker but see no reason why they couldn't be given pretty short shrift. The system used to work and no-one railed against lack of headteacherly integrity then.

Seriously- can you imagine the appeals if there were head tescher's recommendations and interviews? And the potential for nodding people through, and discrimination and

It would be a nightmare for the school and.

The system used to work and no-one railed against lack of headteacherly integrity then.

Yes, but assuming the system actually did work (I have no experience) wasn't it a time of far greater deference to the likes of the headteacher? I really think that giving the appeals short shrift today would be hard. It is the attempt to be transparent that has led to this emphasis on exam/test results. Even higher up the scale, Cambridge is putting more emphasis on exam results and less on interview in order to screen in those which will perform best in the Tripos.

seeker But would it be worse than the current system, particularly in terms of making sure the brightest had a chance of a Grammar School education regardless of parental skills, juggling or otherwise. The system had checks and balances in terms of the Head being called to account both by the assessment process and subsequent feedback from the secondary school. The problem of course is how you would enshrine it in appropriate process and wording of that process given that parental abiloity to challenge at appeal, even when it gains no obvious advantage, is now a factor in selection as well.

Copthall a significant tranche of that wave of East European immigration was intelligentsia, so the daughters may have won their places on academic merit fair and square.

Why does Cambridge bother to interview vastly more candidates than Oxford then slipshodsibyl? That seems a big waste of time.

In terms of headteacherly integrity I was referring to the interviewing of candidates by the secondary HTs rather than primary HT recommendations.

slipshodsibyl There is a proven bias in the Cambridge interview process, the thorne scheme assessment process was more than just an interview precisely to avoid that bias. The more aspects of a persons skills and abilities you gather evidence on the less bias there is in the selection process, that is why many companies use the assessment centre model for recruitment / promotion.

I am not by any means sure such a process would work in the context of the 21st century, making it appeals proof for a start but also in the London context where you are having to discriminate the brightest 150 out of 1500 presumably already self selected to be bright enough I can't imagine any assessment process could be reliably that discriminating but I don't think it would work any less well than the current system.

"I can imagine the appeals these days seeker but see no reason why they couldn't be given pretty short shrift. The system used to work and no-one railed against lack of headteacherly integrity then."
Did the system work? Or was that just a more deferential age when people didn't question so much?

yellowtip millworkers? Though actually a lot of my friend's families were intelligentsia. However the school did come to reflect the ethnic mix of the city, even after it became an indie. I think there were probably complex reasons behind it not doing so in the 70s.

seeker I am quite sure middle class parents questioned, it's just there was no process via which to question. And remember the Thorne scheme was devised ti get away from an 11+ that clearly had both bias and judged pupils on the basis of their performance on the day, excluding many bright pupils who went on to achieve. I remember parents generally being grateful that our borough introduced the system. Interestingly where DB lives they only scrapped it for entry to a remaining Grammar School ten years ago, in favour of an 11+ using vr / nvr, the tutor culture is just beginning to take hold and primary school teachers say they have definitely seen a change in the profile of pupils getting in.

Copthall-I suspect it wasn't the
Middle class parents who would have needed to question it though!

I should say that what was scrapped ten years ago wasn't the thorne scheme but a scheme where Headteachers recommended who went to Grammar based on test results sat in primary schools. I seem to remember DN being borderline on the tests but Headteacher recommendation, and dyslexia diagnosis, got her in on appeal.

seeker The point is that the schools did have a wide social mix, certainly a lot wider than DDs peers at Tiffin.

Do we know that there was a wider social mix? Did anyone gather the data?

If you read the Plowden Report I linked to it quotes studies showing that the Thorne scheme was the most accurate way of selecting in terms of eliminating social bias

But oh it was a much more innocent time quote from Plowden Report 'Where intelligence tests continue to be used as calibrators, great care should be taken in presenting the scheme to parents and teachers so that they understand its purpose and do not try to increase school quotas by coaching at home or at school."

Missed that. I'll read it when I get home. I like a good Report, I do!

Actually I may have over interpreted it but it does recommend the Thorne scheme as overcoming teacher bias. Report makes interesting reading though, especially in terms of implicit focus on making selection tests fair and eliminating bias. I wish our 21st century bureaucrats had the same implicit values .

I am not sure there was more of a social mix really. Certainly at my NE grammar I was very much in the minority as a working class boy on FSM!

Maybe the whole issue of social mobility wasn't directly correlated with grammar schools. Maybe a lot of it had to do with a whole cohort of young men having been killed off in two World Wars, leaving a social and professional vacuum which had to be filled?