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 am sorry Volcan, but you seem to need external references to reassure you that you / your DS education is doing OK by putting down those whom you perceive below in the food chain. It is an illusion. Most low skilled and high skilled middle management and professional jobs could be outsourced to the East and to anywhere with better skills and lower wages.

We need to improve education rather than indulging in denial.

Hmm.. you are likely to have less social problems of all sorts where you are dealing with a privileged group. It is not that the school in inherently better, merely that they are excluding all but the already privileged

The school is selecting by ability from a large area.

You know what you would also find that mortality figures would look better in the hospitals that could exclude patients post 45 or with serious health conditions.

A particular issue with the Chinese sample:
www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2014/01/08-shanghai-pisa-loveless

'The school is selecting by ability from a large area.'

The key word there is 'selection'. The larger the area the more selective surely.

Why are you surprised that the school has less problems when it sets out to exclude the pupils who do have problems? Why do you see this as a strength of the school rather than the inevitable correlative of exclusion?

It's a bit like the achioevement argument Vanilla has already made - a school is better if its results are vbetter, even if the results are only better because children who would have klower results are excluded.

Equally, children who have been selected through a test which favours children with no behavioural difficulties show fewer behavioural difficulties. Amazing! Must be the school!!

The poor and Low Skilled in China have nothing to envy of the poor and low skilled in the U.K.

How about for

1. having your house forcibly taken by corrupt local officials.
2. Facing a firing squad for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and set up by officials for crime clear up statistics.
3. Working 12-14 Hours a Day in a sweatshop making European Clothes for no More than £25-30 Per week.

The vast Majority of China's 1.7 Billion Population are living in worse conditions than the poor did in the Uk in 1850.

I am not surprised, I was answering the question about selection.

I was arguing throughout that the real issue is to solve the problem with behaviour, discipline, aspirations, culture and attainment in bad schools and to improve the attainment of the least able.

If that happen, there won't be sink schools and parents would not be voting with their feet against them.

No Vanilla, I don't need reassurance that my DS (and DD) would be OK with a comprehensive education because they are adults; their comprehensive educations served them well, despite the apparent disadvantage of not being able to go to a grammar school.

But how would reintroducing a grammar school system for the 20-25% who passed help to improve things for the disadvantaged that you purport to be concerned about? You know, those bullies who went to the sink school.....

Mmm but schools do not exist in a bubble - they both reflect and reinforce social divisions. You are not going to improve aspiration, tolerance and social mobility by 'segregating' kids as you suggest.

Vanilla, about what percentage of true comprehensives (so not the 'other' schools in selective systems) would you say are 'bad' schools?

I think everyone would agree that there are some bad schools. You seem to conflate 'bad schools' and 'all non selective schools' rather a lot - I would welcome a view as to whether you think it is 5%? 10%? 50%?

It is also worth considering the imopact iof the wider enviriobnment of a school. My DS's ciomprehensive is green and leafy,. If exactly that schools was transplanted to the most deoprived area of the country, with exactly the same facilities and the same staff, I suspect it would struggle.

Mmm... there are widely different mortality rates in different parts of the country. Hospitals and doctors are blamed, it is understood that wealth and education play a part in general health. People, by and large, do not eschew their local hospital on the grounds that if they take in a larger proportion of patients with poor health and have less positive outcomes it must be because they are poor hospitals. Why is it different for schools?

I think it's different for schools because it's something we have nearly all experienced and we spend such a long time there. Anyone born after about 1932 will have spent at least ten years in school.

By contrast, it's perfectly possible to go through your life and have little contact with a hospital, so we wouldn't know whether it was good or bad.

I don't think you should change anything about selective schools. It's the wrong focus.

We should improve pre-school education, especially in disadvantaged areas, introduce good discipline early.

Improve attainment in primary schools and establish good discipline and the culture of reaching to the stars

Improve the teaching methods, discipline, aspirations and culture in secondary schools, so they work for all ability ranges, including low ability.

The benefit of selection debate is a red herring, a distraction.

Improve the teaching methods, discipline, aspirations and culture in secondary schools, so they work for all ability ranges, including low ability.

The benefit of selection debate is a red herring, a distraction.

So, if you found such a school for your DS you would be happy for him to go to it? Even if it was a genuine comprehensive?

LaVolcan, I don't know because you can only make this judgement when you see such a school, where the bottom doesn't drag down the education of the top and compare it with alternatives at your address in your circumstances. I haven't seen such a school yet, so I made an appropriate choice for DS.

As I was arguing throughout, fix the bad schools, and then see what happens. The improvement needs to come first.

Yes, but Vanilla, you bang on and on about 'bad schools', but when it comes to specifics, you are remarkably silent. I have asked you where you are - which you didn't answer - for the simple reason that with so many comprehensives in the country neither of us is in a position to make an informed judgement about whether an individual school is good or bad.

I suspect that you are in an area which has selective schools, and therefore you don't know what an area with genuine comprehensives looks like. I did send my children to Comprehensives (2 DCs and 2 different schools); it doesn't make me an expert on the whole country's schools, but I can definitely say that your caricature of 'comprehensive=bad school' is just that, a caricature.

Vanilla- how many "bad, dysfunctional" comprehensive schools are there?

LaVolcan, if you don't have any idea of grammar schools why do you argue against them?

Don't put words in my messages. They are there to read.

I believe good schools are those on top of league tables and that is that. Other schools are less good and therefore less suitable.

Numbers please. How many "bad dysfunctional" schools are there?

Vanilla: I do have an idea of grammar schools having attended one myself for seven years. Ditto my brother, ditto my DH, ditto DF.

But here's the caveat - I am not arguing that 'all grammar schools are bad'. The ones we attended were none of them any great shakes, but I am more than happy to admit that what schools were like 30+ years ago, (60+ in DF's time), is not necessarily how they would be now. What I am arguing against, is the stance that 'all comprehensives are bad'.

You on the contrary, have argued that:

You need to address the problem with poor results, teaching methods, culture in the comprehensive schools, not to debate about grammar schools.

of course not all of comprehensives are failing, but a very large number...

Tackle the poor education in comprehensives and address the issue of discipline, aspirations and standards for the students at the lower range of ability.

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.

I don't understand why people channel all their passion to castigate pupils in selective schools instead of sorting the mess with bad comprehensive schools.

Need I give any more quotes. Forgive me if I infer from that, that you consider 'all comprehensives are bad'.

When you are asked for numbers of these dysfunctional comprehensives, you are strangely reticent to give any. When you are presented with information about successes in comprehensives, you avoid answering.

So those who think many comprehensive schools are fine why does it matter if some parents want to educate children at home, some use very selective private schools as I do, some use comprehensive private schools which take anyone however low their IQ, some pick a specialist music schools or a boarding school in the UK or abroad or in some areas where they exist state grammars or state religious schools. Only 7% are going to private schools and not all those children are bright. There are more than enough bright children in the 93% left in areas with no grammar schools to ensure any local comprehensive school will have a good spread of the ability range.

( Perhaps we could also get the difference between fewer and less right on a thread about schools? "Fewer schools" (never "less schools") as it is plural. There endeth my lesson for the day. I hope all comps and grammar hammer home that distinction to pupils every week).

Because Laura, the OP posed a couple of interesting questions about what were the benefits of a selective system for children who weren't selected, and what did selection offer for those bright children who were selected that a properly differentiated comprehensive would offer? I think they are valid questions because comprehensives are the default option for the majority of children, in a way that home ed., or independent schools, or 'superselectives' are not.

As far as what is offered to the non-selected child in a selective system, more than 600 posts on, no one has really come up with an answer.

Personally I can see that there is some argument that for the really really bright, the 'superselectives' could offer something that other schools would not offer: as you say, in the same way that we might want an especially musically gifted child to go to a specialist music school. For the vast majority of people though, superselectives are a complete irrelevance because we don't live within commuting distance of them. Whether they are really reaching really able children or whether they are just catering to well-tutored is a subject which has been covered at some length on other threads.

It really doesn't matter on an economic level if the Chinese workers are happy and well-treated because our businesses are perfectly happy to byu goods from China due to their high quality for low cost. Of course this is achieved by riding rough-shod over human rights but the point is that will soon be no jobs in the UK for low-skilled workers because they are simply more expensive.

When you are standing in Currys looking for a toaster, I doubt "made in the UK" comes very high in anyone's list of choice criteria. Which is why more than ever it is important for children from traditionally low-skilled families to focus on education and try to exploit the excellently creative aspects of our education system to upskill themselves into a niche market.

And the point is we should as a country be spending a lot more time, energy and money on ensuring that truly no child is left behind because ought to one of our major strengths as a country- the ability to pull together and ensure the wellbeing of the greatest number of citizens possible.

All around me I see solidarity values disappearing, with the poor (who will always and necessarily exist in a pyramid-shaped capitalist market model) being blamed for their own poverty and pushed further into the mud. We actually have close on a million people actually routinely going hungry in this country FGS! But this is actually the logical extension of globalisation- it spreads the poverty, as well as the wealth, across the globe, including into richer countries. Unless the richer from those better-managed countries choose to re-distribute the income generated by the beneficiaries global capitalism more equitably, this will continue to get worse.