Theresa May to end ban on grammar schools

[noblegiraffe]

Theresa May to end ban on grammar schools, reports the Telegraph.

This is not a policy announcement, rather a testing of the waters, I suspect.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/06/theresa-may-to-end-ban-on-new-grammar-schools/

'Ah, Emily, I see you got 99% in the maths aspect but unfortunately that darned dyslexia brought down your score, so it's off to sewing school for you!'

Antique - so they generally take a Level 2 course which allows them to access the college course the following year. Don't suppose you're suggesting a resit 11+ to give them another chance?

CodyKing look at the areas that still do compulsory 11 plus tests now.

They are so scewed. affluent families benefit not bright children from poorer back grounds.

I love the ideology of a grammar system. But unfortunately reality is not the same.

Do you know if that has actually happened though Between ? Not in my experience has it.

Between - the concentration of academic children which apparently makes it feasible to provide more academic subjects at grammar schools: further maths, triple sciences, more modern languages, maybe Latin.
It would be nice if these were reliably provided within the comprehensive system but as things stand they do seem to be much easier to find in grammars.

'It would be nice if they were reliably provided' - okay so why aren't we campaigning for that? Make these available in a comp and they're options for everyone. Why is bringing in a new grammar easier than raising standards in existing comps?

Which antique? The Level 2 course? Absolutely, happens very frequently in this area.

The Emily example - hypothetical example in response to the idea that those not going to the grammar need to be tested on non-academic things such as sewing.

There are fewer and fewer schools offering Level 2 courses.

fwiw, I think 6th forms are a bit early for selection, too, but not as bad as selecting at age 10.

6th forms are selecting for results attained at age 12-16, effectively (mostly age 15-16).
Most kids who take the 11+ are only TEN yo. And their future is decided on a single exam that tries to gauge potential, from what I understand. Not yrs of results or all round abilities.

We do need cleaners & bin men. Depriving them of an excellent education is not the way to make them better at their jobs, though.

I failed if my DC showed more of an aptitude for practical subjects rather than academic subjects I would be happy for them to go to a school which was geared towards their aptitudes and offered subjects which they engaged with rather than sending them to a school which only valued academic subjects and demotivated those who weren't good at them.

We can't all be professionals. We don't all need to go to university. As a society we need to start valuing skilled manual labour again.

I meant the Emily example is what I meant. A student with spectacular maths skills is very unlikely to be denied a place at a grammar due to dyslexia.

"A student with spectacular maths skills is very unlikely to be denied a place at a grammar due to dyslexia."

Really? How is she going to pass the verbal reasoning test?

What if her dyslexia is undiagnosed and she's just a child with poor literacy skills?

I teach a good number of children with excellent English skills who would struggle on the maths aspect. Should they not go?

Government league tables are to blame in a way. Our lovely local comp used to offer nvqs at ks4 which would be the equivalent of 4 GCSEs so the whole school not only sent students to Oxbridge and med schools but also got the best out of students who got a leg up in their chosen field. As soon as the league tables could only show actual GCSEs the scheme was dropped because it looked like our school was 'failing' and now the school competes at a high level with surrounding schools showcasing Russell Group applicants and ditching non-academics at 6th form. Sad.

We can't all be professionals. We don't all need to go to university. As a society we need to start valuing skilled manual labour again.

this

I have 2 11 year olds

One will be academic loves it all

The other has no interest in this but loves sport and doing stuff with his hands - can fix a bike,

Eldest has a flair for art and photography - will never run a marathon or be bilingual -

So yes you can see their strengths at a young age -- it's not about choosing or failing at 11 but knowing your child's qualities

All schools should still push maths and English - even extra tuition - but why teach a child French who struggles with English? Why push history when there memory can't hold dates?

What about a child with a fabulous talent for Languages who's terrible at maths, should they not have language opportunities, learning Latin etc?

What about a child who's just not any good and English but a fantastic mathematician and scientist. Should they not get to do triple science then?

Can you not see that it would be better for all children to have the opportunity to access this? Grammar schools is a step away from that.

CodyKing, the children will still be taught those things, just with poorer outcomes, fewer permanent good quality staff, and fewer opportunities for children who find they do excel in academics later than 11.

Current Secondary moderns don't have a focus on those vocational skills and there's absolutely nothing to to suggest that new ones would differ in any way.

Can someone explain how this would work in practice? Would current high achieving comps become grammar schools, or would new schools be created??

CodyKing
So we need academic and non academic schools so all children can achieve

You CANNOT decide who is academic and non academic at such a young age and if you truly believe that kids should be labelled so distinctly then you can't know very many children... The majority of children are "average" (coz that's how averages work ) and therefore fit somewhere between academic and non-academic. What are those kids supposed to do?

All schools should be capable of teaching all abilities of children. High achieving DC should be catered but that provision needs to be somewhere where all children can access it if they are able. That means it needs to be in the same building.

Creaming off the most academic at such a young age is awful and so obviously favours middle class switched-on parents. It's unfair and does nothing to address the current crisis in education which is the unachievement of boys - especially white boys.

Grammar school fans: imagine you have the money. Your kid fails the 11+. Do you send them to the secondary modern because you 'value manual labour', or do you send them to the private school?

And if the secondary modern isn't good enough for your kid, why should it be good enough for any other child?

I saw this above question on Twitter, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter. People who support grammar schools think their kids would get into them.

I thought that if a school became an academy it could already change its entrance criteria to include an examination. So in theory schools could already become grammars without any change to the law. Am I wrong?

Of course it would be better if all children had those options but we don't have that now, we have whole areas where rich children get those opportunities and poor children don't.
I would bloody love it if every child in every school had a right to triple science and a proper range of foreign languages etc, but it's not going to be perceived as cost effective to provide these subjects for very small numbers - good luck with a 'Latin for all' campaign when schools often can't even afford basic help for students with SEN.

A lot of people on here seem to be assuming that a test age 11 is a good predictor of ability.

They're not. Look at computer generated GCSE target grades and how inaccurate they can be. If everyone took the 11+, using the best predictive tests we have at the moment and the top 25% went to a grammar, about 1 in 5 students would be allocated the wrong school.

From the Sutton Trust report into the effectiveness of grammar schools:
"All tests are unreliable to some extent, so a person’s score is partly a matter of chance. This means that for some, the decision to offer a grammar school place or not will be something of a lottery.
One way in which the adequacy of a selection test might be judged is in terms of its predictive validity. If a test at age 11 could accurately predict academic achievement at, say, age 16, then we might argue that such a test would be a good way of discriminating between those children at age 11 who were ‘academic’ and those who were not. The correlation between test scores at age 11 and achievement scores at age 16 is a measure of the validity of the prediction, a correlation of 1 indicating perfect prediction, and a correlation of 0 indicating no predictive ability at all. If the correlation was poor (close to 0) and a large number of those who ‘failed’ the test at 11 went on to achieve good academic results at 16, we might be less convinced that the test was really appropriate for the purpose of selection.
Fortunately, data exist for a number of different tests taken at age 11 and the corresponding performance at GCSE of the same pupils (e.g. Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT), MidYIS, London Reading Test (LRT). In none of these cases is the correlation much above about 0.7. Whether this is high enough to show adequate predictive validity is a matter of opinion.
Figure 1 illustrates how, with a correlation of 0.7 and a cut-off pass mark that selects 25% of 11 year olds, children can be wrongly selected or not selected. If, as a crude generalization, those 16 year olds who achieve in the top 25% are taken to be those who should have gone to a grammar school, we can see that about 78% go to the appropriate school for their ability, leaving around 22% wrongly allocated."

The graph associated with this data is on page 21 (electronic page 36) of this document: www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/SuttonTrustFullReportFinal.pdf

Creaming off the most academic at such a young age is awful

you're placing more value in the academics.

Look at music or drama or dance - all these are paid for via lessons - poor children may not have access to these lessons yet have a great missed talent - nobodies complaining about that

Or look at my DSis 11 a * in gce and 4 at a level

Works as a waitress -

Or my uncle left school with nothing now a multi millionaire via hard work