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 didn't mean "just because I'm reasonably academic". I meant "even though" I think. What I meant was that I don't have the skill set required to study aircraft maintenance. Or carpentry, or plumbing. I would end up with fewer than the standard number of fingers very quickly.

Soul2000
You underestimate the uses of Latin.
Gardening, medicine, veterinary, pharmacy, much research .....

And please those of you who are shocked that kids are not doing full on Academic subjects

• step outside those private and selective schools and look at the people loading up your Ocado offer or cleaning the car or the gym or sweeping up the cut hair or redoing your nails

and tell them why theatre is more important than being able to write a job application

I have not spoken French since 1996 when lost in Strasbourg .

When I asked Ou Est Le Hotel Sofitel ,Sil Vous Plait.

The answer was : ITS BEHIND YOU ... I GAVE UP AFTER THAT

Talkin. I am glad you mentioned Car Valeting. A friend of mine was a Car Valeter , who find His Niche in Buying Gold and precious Metals 15 years ago . I wish I had thought of that because he Drives a Ferrari and has just bought a 2 Million Pound house and intends to spend a Million on it .

15 Years ago he was Valeting My Dads and my cars for £20 a Car....

And arguably, French (or other languages) are - see hat salesman examples - excellent subjects to pair up with L&T (though I live near Duchesse and can attest to the shortness of our tourist season and the crap-ness of the jobs that go with it). I worked in Beijing briefly back in 2007, and many of the taxi drivers were trying to learn English in preparation for the Olympics. Languages shouldn't be thought of as "academic subjects that are the preserve of the very bright."

I didn't know that languages were seen as the preserve of the very academic.
I thought all primary schools did a language, a choice from French, German or Spanish.
I also thought languages were compulsory throughout KS3 as well.
The high schools round here even have a compulsory language at GCSE unless you really aren't able to study them, but then many other GCSE's are out of the question too.
If this is the case perhaps we should all start teaching our dc several languages ourselves. My dd has a tutor for Italian, I'm going to ask her to do French as well

Well I have experience of one child in non selective and one in super selective (both private) and they each have their pros and cons.

The main pro of having a bright child in super selective is that he/she will have a critical mass of like ability children around them. This will simply not be numerically possible in the vast vast majority of mixed ability schools.

I absolutely did not want my DS to be an outlier in a less selctive school. I did not want him sitting comfortably at the top.

The main con is that to get said necessary critical mass one needs a large catchement indeed which obviously has implications.

morethan the value of MFL in secondary education has been eroded to ridiculous levels in the state system.

MFL teachers get seriously pissed off about it!!!

MFL teachers get seriously pissed off about it!!!

Yes, yes they do. They leave and do something else.

And the content and depth and quality of the GCSE has been eroded so much that no DC with anything less than an A at GCSE should even consider doing it at A level unless they have a tutor alongside to teach the basics they'll have missed.

My skill set is going to be very much in demand for some years to come.

Oh, ok. Thanks for that.
This is probably why I found all the topics were the same whichever language was studied. I took the topics from tes and was going to go through some with dd.
So is there another curriculum that you would recommend? What do they use in super selective schools?

Also, I gather that languages aren't being taken in isolation here, are there other subjects where they are dumbed down for state schools?
Is this one of the arguments you all seem to share in abolishing selective schools.
Sorry for all the questions, don't mean to derail.

Duchesse
DDs language teacher is doing LOADS of extra grammar work with the four who are planning to do the A level so that they can cope - that and it means their GCSE A*s should be secure
but the jump is commented on by lots of the kids at the college

morethan I don't think the curricula have been dumbed down per se (though willing to be corrected by teachers here)...it's more that over successive years the methods of gaining good grades were increased. And often these methods had little to do with ability.

I also think they devalued a teacher's role in the process.

Some of these methods are now being addressed.

As for the jump in MFL A level, DD's school switched a small group of able linguists to iGCSE to help a bit.

Morethan, the problem for me is all the schools trying to meet the same government targets. The league tables have a wide range of unintended consequences.

For example until recently less well-performing schools were putting pupils for a ridiculously large number of often related and often shite GCSEs, with sheer numbers privileged over quality. There is no way on this earth that any child needs to do more than 8-10 GCSEs. yet some schools put pupils in for 12, 13 even 15. And they encourage early GCSEs to spread the load a bit, even if for an individual pupil it means getting a B at age 13 rather than an A at 16, because to the school a B is the same as an A.

I feel that the truest test of ability is for all pupils to take stretching exams at the same age and in roughly the same quantities. If a less good school cannot successfully teach 8 subjects, then why are they allowed to splurge on even more inadequately taught subjects?

Any pupils whose literacy and numeracy falls seriously short of the expected level by age 13 needs to spend a lot of time before they enter work or HE or an apprenticeship making sure their basic skills are as good as they can be. If that means, for a particular 14 yo, being on a vocational course with apprenticeship and boosted maths and English only, then so much the better. They will end up with "only" 2 GCSEs but hopefully they will be worth the paper they are written on. It angers me to see subliterate pupils entered for subjects such as catering, animal care or health and beauty, which take up a vast amount of their weekday hours. There really is a limit to how many illiterate people the workforce can bear.

So would there be a huge problem for those doing say KS2/3 French or German in a state primary entering a selective school at 13 (y8)?

word, my first job was in an underperforming school. One of my first tasks was to sort out the textbooks and work out which ones we were keeping. I found a large pile of textbooks from the 1980s, from just when GCSEs were introduced, in two levels, foundation and higher. The foundation textbook contained pretty much what by the early 2000s we were expecting top set to achieve. The higher textbook was basically AS and A2 stuff now- in fact probably some things were beyond current day A level (subjunctive and some of the whackier more literary tenses for example).

You draw your own conclusions. I did.

It depends morethan

If it's a highly selective school then the french entrance paper may be far more rigorous than a child at that stage had covered. Doesn't matter that child's ability, if they aint covered the necessary stuff.

That said, a lot of schools have entrance at 11 that requires no MFL.

duchesse

I know where you are coming from now. These were all included in the reasons we decided to H.ed. None of our dc have been particularly gifted academically, although 2 are bright but would never reach their potential in the present system.
I also agree about the idea of the less academic being pushed towards childcare, Leisure/Tourism.
I taught in FE for a while none of my students would have really opted for Leis/Tour nor in my colleagues case childcare.
In these cases though, I don't think more Maths and English would have helped as most were failed by the system and at least the qualification enabled them to find work.

I believe that the Common Entrance paper french is higher GCSE standard, although obviously there is a wide range of ability at CE.

Duchesse that's a bugger!

I did MFL at both O level and A level and remember them both as challenging. I was an able linguist but still had to work hard.

These days you could get a good grade as a fairly mediochre linguist if you milked the marking scheme etc.