Fiona Millar on grammar schools in the Grauniad

[samsonagonistes]

This article here is doing my head in on a number of levels, not because I necessarily disagree with it, but mainly because I don't know what I think and I don't know enough about some of the research/thinking behind it to come to a conclusion on my own. So I'd be really grateful for any thoughts and/or pointers.

She's working from the premise that grammar schools are inherently bad, and that this is a clear thing for all right thinking left wing people. Now, when I read MN, I can see that plenty of parents want grammar schools and are fighting to get into them. So I end up feeling about this pretty much as I do about UKIP, that the point is not only/necessarily to condemn them outright, but what would be more useful would be to find out why people feel this way and what is actually going on for them right now. So what's the gap between theory and experience here and why?

Also, she seems to think that the main argument against grammar schools is that they are not engines of social equality. Now, this may be one argument against them, but surely the point of school is to deliver education, with equality of opportunity in achieving that. Lots of other things do not deliver social equality - like private schools, expensive clothes and London house prices to name but a few - but that's never part of the argument against them.

Also - and I am aware that this is going to be controversial - but an argument against their social mobility is that they take reduced numbers on FSM. Now, for this argument to be valid, we would have to assume that IQ is spread absolutely evenly throughout the population.* I would like this to be the case, but has this theory ever been tested/proven?

• and yes I am aware about the cultural relativity of testing, etc etc, but then schools are also culturally relative in that they privilege theater and art over other activities and there are so many knots in this problem that it's hard to disentangle.

Sorry, Clavinova - looking up on the internet, the over 50% of secondary moderns "failing" relates to an initiative of quite a few years ago, now, called the "National Challenge," which targeted schools getting less than 30% of their children 5A*-Cs in their GCSEs and which described those schools as failing, with a deadline of 2011 to have got those schools above that baseline. Nothing to do with their Ofsted ratings or whether they were actually failing the children they served, they were just rather disparagingly described in the national press as failing the children they served. Which makes it hardly surprising that parents wish to avoid them, given that it is intensely offputting to send your child to a school where YOU may think it is offering more appropriate qualifications for your child, but the government says those qualifications are a load of old tripe and the school is failing.

ps I think the National Challenge was a Labour government thing?

Individual teachers serve individual students, surely? Even the least ambitious school, which doesn't send a busload to Oxbridge every year, can occasionally manage it, just not consistently. And if schools, and parents and students, are happy with mostly aiming at second-tier destinations, is that not reflecting the ordinary ability distribution curve of most postal codes?

MN contributors, especially on these boards, are not IME very typical of the whole population. I bet most of us have looked at the O level thread .

Ok rabbitstew.

If a level 7 will be the same standard as a current A grade but a level 4 is the same as a C today but considered a "fail". The outcome is going to be that the current percantage of 50%+ of students that gain the requirement of 5 A* -C grades is going to drop down below 35%.

Surely no Government wants to be in charge of a education system , that apparently "fails" the majority of its pupils. I therefore think the grading system with the exception of 8 or 9 will remain exactly the same 4 will still be a C grade equivalent 5 will be a C+ 6 will be a B and so on.

rabbit you asked me earlier if I felt comprehensives can't serve the most able well enough or aren't.

I expend far too much energy on this as you can imagine . Energy which doesn't pay the bills ( as regularly pointed out to me by my agent and husband ).

My honest opinion is that comprehensives will always struggle due to lack of critical mass of like ability peers and economics of scale for resources.

Selective schools have the advantage here.

However, as a steely pragmatist I do think there are many things comprehensives could do ( and many do do) which certainly improve matters.

And this tends to be where I concentrate my energy. I am very unlikely to influence the government to introduce more super selective schools but I can try to influence the comps I visit to take up relatively small measures.

So true CamelHump.

TheWordFactory - what sort of critical mass of like-ability peers is necessary? A class of 20-30 in each year? Or at least 15? What sort of ability range? And from what age would separate teaching be necessary? (If you could do what you wanted with state education, that is!).

Also, do you think part of the problem is a lack of teachers of suitably high ability to cope with the high ability children; or just lack of numbers of high ability children in each year group in most schools? How big would schools need to be to make the chances of a critical mass more likely?

If you look at any diagram of an IQ bell curve you quickly conclude that attempts to educate the very brightest within a comprehensive school are going to run up against problems of critical mass - unless you have cohorts of about 800 children...

On that basis, surely even state super-selectives are failing the absolute brightest, then, as there is a limit to how far people, even the most keen, are willing to travel to school?... And fee paying super selective schools are seriously limiting themselves, too, not so much by geography, but by expense.
Btw, the top 2% of IQ is actually already a very big range of IQs. Are we failing our brightest by letting them be educated with a big cohort of top-2% IQ dunces (comparatively speaking)?... Let alone, say, the top 10%...

It's not about failing the brightest by 'letting them be educated with...' whoever at all. It's about providing an education which meets their needs, which is easier to do if you have more than one of them in your school. Although a good school can and should be able to do it even with one.

Having said that, there is research to show that gifted children work better and are better socially adapted when they have a peer group, but for all the reasons above, that can be hard.

And I will say it again, until someone answers me, what is wrong with having one school in the area with the gifted magnet class? You don't need a whole school for them necessarily at all.

I don't think it is helpful to think of educational solutions in some sort of binary model of either working for or "failing" DCs.

There are, and have been other, DC in my DD's year at school with IQs of 150+. They haven't been "failed" by being educated with the hoi polloi with IQs of 125

Wot they said .

I would also say that there are some true outliers who possibly will not be best served academically in any school.

However, there parebts may feel that it is still a good idea for social reasons.

My friend has a son like this. He attended a selective London school. But they were smart enough to understand that they would struggle with him in done respects and set up a part school/part university week.

My friend felt that this was a reasonable compromise.

But most high ability children do not fall in the genius category. And they can hugely benefit from the appropriate resources and curriculum that can be made available to them if there are enough of them in the same place.

I have a cousin who was a true outlier.

She lived in a America and went to Catholic school, which in the US is never a state funded school it is always private. Luckily, the Nuns had a lot of confidence in what they were doing and no one was breathing down their necks and second guessing their decisions.

At 15 they let her teach the Freshman Latin class, to keep her challenged. They researched the right undergraduate schools (first 4 years of University) for her. Together with my Aunt and Uncle, they picked a small school that would be nurturing and cozy and cover her subjects of interest. At 16, she was off. No one forgot that while she was very capable intellectually, she was still a child. Then, still very young, she went to another school to get a Master's Degree in Electrical engineering. This school was also small, and geared towards meeting her whole needs.

How does the story end? She went out to Silicon Valley, invented some of the hardware in your home computer/printer today. She sold out in the early 90s for small multiples of millions, retired at 30 and just enjoys skiing, hiking, camping, kyaking, and travelling.

Moral of the story? Everyone took into account all of her needs. No one questioned for a minute that maybe it was her duty to march through 4 years of high school bored to tears, in the vain hope that her presence would have some magical affect on the rest of the class. She was treated as an end in herself, not as a means to an end.

The adults responsible for her were not over-awed, they were confident and empowered to make the necessary decisions for her. Sometimes when watching MN threads, I feel this is what is missing. Everything in the state school system is so controlled and prescriptive that it is very difficult to "go off piste" and do what is right for a particular child. Also, no one was hung up on sending her to MIT, Cal Tech, etc. They matched the child to the school and didn't chase glory.

samson And I will say it again, until someone answers me, what is wrong with having one school in the area with the gifted magnet class? You don't need a whole school for them necessarily at all.

Nothing wrong with that imo but they should still have the opportunity to do drama, games, art, music with other members of a mixed ability school.

Samson, wouldn't some place like Dame Alice Owen's in Hertfordshire be what you describe? I think in most people's minds, it's a defacto grammar school with a few places available for siblings and those literally on the doorstep.

I can't see any benefit to going to university very young which outweighs the benefit of having a normal and healthy social life with peers one's own age.

That was why my friends son only went a couple of days per week. Essentially he was allowed to attend lectures and have tutorials for those subjects in which secondary teachers simply wouldn't be able to help him.

But he remained at school . A normal ( ish) pupil who played in the hockey team etc

Samson There are students who will be very high ability in only one area. They need to be with like minded peers in a top set and in average sets for their weaker subjects - this cannot happen in a grammar or in your gifted class concept.

"And I will say it again, until someone answers me, what is wrong with having one school in the area with the gifted magnet class? You don't need a whole school for them necessarily at all."

I don't understand how that would work practically- how would you do the selecting, for example, and who would pay for travel? And would the chosen school then have to dp reduce its numbers of "ordinary" entrants to make space?

Interestingly something relevant to this thread happened to my ds at school today. He isn't a genuine outlier, but he is in his school -particularly in some subjects.(I hasten to add, he wouldn't be in either a comprehensive or a grammar). His English teacher gave his form piece of writing to do, and said to him "I know you can jump through the hoops, I've seen you do it. So I want you to ignore the hoops and produce a brilliant piece of writing" If she can do that for him, I see no reason why real outliers can't be accommodated in top sets.

I agree with samsonagonistes - I don't see the need for entirely separate schools from what has been said so far. Nobody has made it clear what a "critical mass" is, or what sort of people make up that critical mass, anyway. Apparently, it's good for people with an IQ of 150+ to mix with the 125+ comparative dunces... so who is dragging down whom in the comprehensive schools? Why is it so hard to get together a critical mass of people with an IQ of, say, 120+? That's got to be at least 10% of children, surely? The comprehensive schools around here are pretty big, so if it really were 10% of children in the school, that would be a whole class-worth of such children.

And, as also pointed out, not everyone is gifted in every area. Which begs the question whether anybody has the faintest clue, really, about how intelligence works and what it's useful for.

That's great Hak, but I somehow don't think that approach would work so well preparing y13s for Oxbridge. I am not in the top 2% (measured IQ around 132 consistently) but I only really started to achieve when I left my 3 form entry comprehensive (where I was one of a group of 5 or 6 with mostly As- no A*s then) To go to a sixth form college with 5,000 students. So that we could have nurture groups for medicine, vetinary science or Oxbridge to explore things outside of the curriculum with like minded peers.