Benefits of selective education?

[AmberTheCat]

I'm aware that I've been cluttering up the 11+ tutoring thread with discussions the OP said she didn't want, on the merits or otherwise of grammar schools in principle, so I'll stop doing that and start my own thread!

So, I genuinely don't get why so many people think separating children by ability (or potential, or however you try to do it) at 11 or even younger is a good thing. Why will they benefit more from that than from properly differentiated teaching in a comprehensive school? And what about the children who aren't selected? How does a selective system benefit them?

Genuine questions. I'm strongly in favour of comprehensive education, but would really like to better understand the arguments against.

I think that even if you fixed the problems in poor schools many parents of the ver able would still want ss. You just want them educated with their same ability peers. You just want them to be normal.

I think one of the underlying questions not explicitly articulated is the question why do you want to be competitive?

The answer, I am afraid is that life, jobs are competitive, even if you bury your head in the sand and declare that you opt out of competition, it is still going on.

Bright kids need to be pushed to the limit of their talent and be nurtured in their confidence. Part of this is to see tangible signals that they are good.

Bright kids need to be pushed to the limit of their talent and be nurtured in their confidence. Part of this is to see tangible signals that they are good.

And this never happens in the top sets of comprehensives? So bright children in Hampshire/Oxfordshire are never pushed to their limit?

word

Totally agree there, this is why we are looking at specialist school for dd in the future. She is extremely gifted and her talents would be wasted at any other type of school than the one she has opted for. It is extremely selective and a very small school.
Her words to me that she wanted to go to be with people the same as her, people who find her life normal.
Couldn't agree more.

"Bright kids need to be pushed to the limit of their talent and be nurtured in their confidence."

Why the qualification? Doesn't this also apply to less bright kids? Or are we back to bright kids being a different species again?

"If a comprehensive has disruptive culture of low aspirations and poor quality of teaching, the bright students will suffer rather than benefit.
You can't benefit from a bad school."

No shit, Sherlock!

It applies to all DC martorana but those at the ends of the bellcurve will prove more problematci in terms of providing a collegiate experience. Or is what you're saying, that these kids don't matter so long as the middle is well catered for?

Education Policy should be based upon evidence.
Currently it is not.
THAT is why ministers get to lie to the press about what goes on in comprehensive schools
and why people like vanillachocolate deem it appropriate to write things like
^If a comprehensive has disruptive culture of low aspirations and poor quality of teaching, the bright students will suffer rather than benefit.
You can't benefit from a bad school^

while probably objecting to the corollary comment that
Kids in private selective schools are spoon fed and spoilt so that they have a grossly overinflated view of their own abilities and rightful ranking in the intelligence hierarchy

wordfactory
I'm still waiting for your evidence that parents in non selective areas use private school more than those in selective areas

and please remember that the EVIDENCE shows that Selective LEAs do not get better overall results than non selective LEAs

Hmmm. Looking here www.telegraph.co.uk/education/leaguetables/10590223/League-tables-local-education-authority-results.html it would seem that of the top 10 LEAs, 7 of them are ones with selection (either full or superselectives). Sutton, Bromley, Kingston, Barnet, Slough, Bucks and Trafford.

" Or is what you're saying, that these kids don't matter so long as the middle is well catered for?"

Of course I'm not! But we need to find a way of catering for them that does not have negative consequences for everyone else. Or are you saying that everyone else doesn't matter as long as the right hand tail of the bell curve is well catered for?

Catering for the kids at the right hand tail of the bell curve does not have negative consequences for everyone else. Unless of course you think acknowledging that there is a right hand side, some kids are in it, and the majority aren't, is in itself a negative consequence (which some people clearly do).

It does if the only way anyone can think of catering for them is via the 11+ and selective secondary education....

Hercshipwright
How about the reasons for Medway, Essex, Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, or Bristol, all of which are selective areas?

Herc I don't think you can just look at crude league tables like that. After all the Isles of Scilly come top in the GCSE tables. What does that tell us? Well, just as a matter of geography, we will know that they are only educating the children of the islands, and that children aren't being bused in from far and wide to a handful of super-selective schools.

This is not the case elsewhere. Some children on the Bucks/Oxon will be sent to Oxfordshire comprehensives rather than go to the Bucks Sec Mods, which is going to affect the results.

There is no negative consequence for anyone at the comp that DD1 would have gone to, flowing from the fact that she went to the superselective instead. Similarly with DD2 (there is in fact a markedly positive consequence for DS and his best mates since they are quite relieved that DD2 won't be bugging them at school in September. They are also looking forward to no longer having to share the car with her on the way home).

I still fail to see how hiving off 10% of children into separate facilities negatively affects the remaining children, unless the remaining schools are not very good. This is surely not caused by grammar schools though?

Unless one viewed it strictly as a numbers game and took the view that all children barring extreme special needs should be educated in the same buildings to save money by creating economies of scale?

Or, unless one took that view that the only thing that mattered in a school were the number of As it produces? By this measure of course a secondary modern in a selective area would not almost certainly do as well- you have to be clever to get As wherever you get them. But would putting the same 10% that in all likelihood get most of the A*s back into those schools actually boost aspiration of the hitherto 90% to the extent that they too begin to gain top marks in a way they somehow didn't before?

28 per year group roughly. Thought so. I can't imagine they'll be offering a giant range of GCSEs so they'd better be well-taught ones... Also very likely to have very small classes for each subject.

LaVolcan Talkin wanted to use crude league tables to 'prove' her 'point'. You can manipulate any stats in any way you want, these stats are particularly easy to frame in many differing ways, that's all. I suspect very few LEAs other than, as you point out, Scilly, actually operate a rigid boundary. For all the rest it's probably quite porous and of course then there is the interplay of the posh schools, which are not evenly distributed across the country either.

I don't think it's very helpful to compare 'selective' and 'non selective' areas for this reason, because apart from the types of school available there are also issues around other different characteristics of specific geographic areas - which may not match their pupil population anyway.

It just bears out my point though, that you can't just look at crude league tables.

Some schools are noted for 'gaming' the league tables; others are more concerned about getting the best education for their pupils.

There is obviously an argument for super selectives taking a handful of the super bright- personally I think there are other non academic arguments against such schools,but that is a discussion for another thread. But most grammar schools are not "top 2%"- they are "top 20 or even 25%". How can this possibly not have an impact on the remaining 75%- academically, socially and psychologically.

"I don't think it's very helpful to compare 'selective' and 'non selective' areas for this reason, because apart from the types of school available there are also issues around other different characteristics of specific geographic areas - which may not match their pupil population anyway"

And they also don't show that selective areas do better than non selective.....

And they also don't show that selective areas do better than non selective.

.....but just looking at the GCSE tables, what they did show was a high correlation with poverty.

do you have a link to that correlation set?
(numbers fan )

No, I don't, but they are areas, some of which I know from personal knowledge e.g. Bradford, Stoke on Trent, are not wealthy.