A thread to discuss state selective education.

[Hakluyt]

I am conscious that this debate is clogging up other threads in ways which are not helpful and must be annoying for those threads' authors. I tried to channel the debate to a separate thread yesterday, but got it badly wrong. I hope this will work better, and will be allowed to stay.

I was talking about the old system - there were appeals then, but precious few were accepted. Similarly there was a 12+, again precious few if any got in to the grammar via that. Thankfully, I didn't have to suffer the Kent or Bucks system for DC, but it's good to hear that it isn't quite so black and white as it was before.

The problem with a selection progress is that it only selects the top 5%, 10% or 20% to be given an opportunity that 30% of the population could benefit from. Children should not be fighting for opportunities that most children can benefit from. Every child who is capable should be allowed the opportunity for an academically rigorous curriculum.

If we are going to have selective education then surely we should be selecting the children who are absolutely certain will not be able to cope with challenging work for an achievable curriculum. (Ie. the bottom 5% for an enviroment with smaller classes, better qualified teachers to make sure that these low ablity children do achieve the skills necessary to function as adults.)

@TalkinPeace

Setting seems obviously more desirable than streaming. where I was the system was setting students. I don't immediately see any advantage to streaming.

I should say, however, out of all the ways of sorting kids the one that makes the most sense is by ability (whether that be sports ability for a specialist school etc) as that is the only criteria that is actually a property of the child. Money, location, religion, are all properties of the parents.

Not that I agree with selection based on ability. Of course, the huge flaw in that is that late bloomers get penalized. And frankly, nothing at all about education should be decided at 11. Any sort of selection should (say within a school) should be extremely flexible.

"When posters state their DC's educational expereineces in selective or private education are better then their own in comprehensives, Hak always observes that the gap of twenty/thirty years makes such comparisons invalid.

Or does that not apply when it is ye old grammar schools found wanting?"

Sorry- I don't understand...........

My kids are getting a much better education at their comps than I did at my selective fee paying school

"I agree movement should be easier as I believe it is/was in the traditional German system."

I think the age of transfer was later in the German system?

Moi - I've attended a German grammar school. After the equivalent of GCSEs, many teenagers joined my school from the "second tier school" (it's a three-tier system), and those who somehow got in at a younger age and weren't performing chose to leave (no one kicked them out). However, if you ever planned to jump, you must ensure you take all the classes that in the "second tier school" we're merely electives, e.g. two foreign languages on top of German rather than one (yes, even the second tier school ensured you learned at least one foreign language).

In my days, Grammar school selection happened at age 11-12. Might have changed though (younger now?) as my Alma Mater opened up a subsidiary that teaches kids at the age previously thought of as Middle school.

I have a question about the 11+. Do the primaries in the area teach an 11+ prep curriculum?

I live in town A, in a comp area, but only 12 miles from a well-regarded grammar in town B, over the border in the neighbouring secondary modern/grammar area.

So each year, 5 or six kids in each town A primary cross the border to sit the 11+.

Now, the 11+ exam cut-off is set at the 28th percentile for town B residents. Yet many town A kids who I'm pretty sure are in the top 28% for ability "fail" even after tutoring.

Town A is wealthier than town B and I think town A folk are as clever as town B folk.

So I wondered, have town B kids had an education shaped towards the goal of the 11+ all the time?

Just wondering :)

Just to correct something waaay up thread. Buckinghamshire has secondary moderns (it's not just Kent), they are called Upper Schools these days.

I can only speak authoritatively about Kent- and particularly East kent- but here Primary schools are epressly forbidden to provide more than two familiarization papers. Many, however, do. And people tend to know which primary schools offer "maths clubs" and "puzzle clubs" for selected year 5s.............

Talkinpeace. If you mean that getting an education that allows you to "socialise" and understand "plebs" is better than one that teaches you how to live a luxury life , you might have a point. However, the truth is I bet all your school friends are living "very comfortable lives" now. It only matters having a "high flying" career so that a comfortable life is possible. The school you attended whether it did it in academic way or not allowed your friends to live a "Comfortable" life (through networks, marriage or associations) This is probably a more comfortable life than your DC will have.

Hakulyt. For the record, did you pass the 11+ .?

There are puppies getting a better education in their training classes than DH and I got at our comps .

I am curious - how many people who went to a Secondary Modern want the same education for their own children?

BTW I went to a grammar, good in parts, but by no means special e.g. in 7 years it never sent anyone to Oxbridge, and only a handful each year to university. I am quite satisfied that my own children had as good an education at their comprehensives, and as far as DD was concerned better science teaching.

I have to say... smokepole has a point. Being educated in a selective environment very often results in a "comfortable life" you often take for granted later. You know, the kind of life that might well fit into a Richard Curtis movie...

TheWord factory. Unless you were educated at the infamous "Riddings" school in Halifax "my school was worse than yours" so there ..!

La volcan. Actually despite my worst fears DD1s Modern school came up trumps and delivered for her.

smokepole - that doesn't quite answer my question - saying that it came up trumps rather suggests that it wasn't what you wanted.

There were always better Secondary Moderns which served their pupils well - I have no idea how widespread they were and I am not sure what these schools did to make them better than the other Sec Mods.

smoke .

It is the Gods honest truth to say that my a school had a better record of getting pupils into prison than university!

I was the very first to ever go to Oxbridge. And I retained my title until 2001 when a lad whose parents owned the Chinese takeaway got in to do maths. But I was robbed because he did a large chunk of his schooling in China!

I had no idea how many grammar schools were left in the UK until I joined MN - I thought they belonged in the old-fashioned stories I read as a child. Where they exist, I think they are wrong, and that the system is unfair particularly to those who miss out narrowly, and that they are socially divisive and invidious.

I do agree that religious selection and selection by gender, which are both much more widespread, are at least as much of a problem.

On the other hand TOSN - reading MN you would think that there were 10 or 20 times as many Grammar Schools as there are, and you would never in a million years get the impression that there are something like 4000 comprehensives in the country.

You would form the impression that all comprehensives went for mixed ability teaching, didn't teach triple science or MFL, never ever got a child into university, let alone Oxbridge. The fact that up and down the land there are a lot of good comprehensives that educate their children well would completely escape you.

Well, certainly the fact that those schools aren't exclusively populated by leafy children from expensive leafy homes would....

You're right: given the multitude of problems one would think comprehensives have, I'd expect to see almost nothing but threads in secondary education about dc getting panned in the refectory or forced to do Hair & Beauty BTecs. And yes, you do see people asking about problems they're facing, or their children are, in non-selective schools as you do in selective schools - but the overall impression, even here, is not of catastrophic or endemic failure.

smokepole
My kids get a better education than I had. Full stop.

Better academically - more choices of subjects, better teaching, better feedback, better results.
Better extra curricular - sports, music, art facilities all much better than my school. More and better trips.
Better socially - DCs friends and their parents are far better off and much nicer people than the parents of most of my friends - not many swimming pools, ponies and yachts at my school.
Better pastoral care - much less bullying, self harm and untreated eating disorders than at my school.
Better outcomes - out of my year group, hardly any are on Linkedin or have other internet presence. Three of the girls I know are already grandmothers (out of 60).

TalkinPeace

May I say that your DCs are likely to be in a "leafy" comp in a nice area than one in the dodgy side of Hull? (nothing against Hull in general!)

I'm not sure about Talkin's third 'better' - more ponies and yachts doesn't obviously equate to education! But I don't see why the other 4 wouldn't be better, even in a school on the 'dodgy side of HUll', than they were a few years ago to be honest.

The social one is a tad of a red herring actually : I went to school in London.
The catchment for DCs school includes very rural areas and we are near the sea
Even my decorator has a little fishing boat after all.
BUT
My school was not good.
There were un-addressed issues which came to a head the year after I left.
There is absolutely no way that what went on would get past MN nowadays IYSWIM.
My kids school has its issues - it sure as heck ain't perfect - but DD left there in excellent shape to excel at 6th form. If DS starts to work he will too.