If you're anti grammar schools, then please answer me this:

[Proseccocino]

If your child had a gift for music, then you might send her to a school which excels musically.

If your child had a talent for sport, you might send him to an academy which excels at sport, one where he can really focus and develop in the area in which he is better than his peers.

And so on....!

So, if your child is intelligent, academically gifted... Why is it bad to say you would send her to a selective school where she can study along with other bright students?

If it's OK to separate children according to ability in sport or music or drama or technology, and send them to specialist schools which excel in these areas - why is it a different story if their talent with their academic ability?

Ah. Non -selective so long as you get Cs at A level.

Are you quite sure you're on board with the ethos of the institution you work for?

^I welcome the idea of having schools that select by academic aptitude rather than the financial ability of the parents to afford a house in the area.*

But these schools don't exist. Grammar schools are socially selective and the 'aptitude' test puts 1 in 5 students (assuming 25% selection) in the wrong ability school.

I really didn't appreciate that schools are so bad in other areas of the country. There are roughly 10,000 state secondary school pupils in my city. Of those, around 4,500 go to an outstanding school and just under 5,000 go to a good school. Not all of the children do well academically by any means, and the results of the schools tend to be a direct reflection of the number of pupils on free school meals within the school. The schools do all tend to serve fairly mixed communities, with pupils from a wide range of backgrounds in each school, rather than a single super-desirable school which all the well-off parents fight to get into. I don't know if that makes a difference. And although there is plenty of poverty, the poorer areas tend to have quite a strong sense of community and be quite close to better-off areas. Maybe that makes for successful comprehensives, and the system doesn't work when there are very distinct areas of rich and poor and school catchments are drawn up according to those areas.

Karma I didn't mean that house price schools don't exist, I meant that schools that select (solely) by academic aptitude don't exist. Grammar schools pretend to, but the facts show otherwise.

"I really didn't appreciate that schools are so bad in other areas of the country"

I know. Fascinating, isn't it? And the way mumsnetters live clustered round them- even though generally speaking mumsnetters are on the right side of the poverty line and generally speaking the most ....challenging.... schools are on the other side........

roundaboutthetown
I fail to comprehend why in this country so many people seem to think it is not possible to educate academic children effectively unless you remove them to an entirely different school from that of their more practical/less academic peers.
Probably because a lot/some people, like me, have direct experience of schools unable to do that for years, if not decades.

Would the notion of grammar schools be so appealing to their proponents if grammar schools received considerably less funding than other schools and were strictly limited to teaching only strictly "academic" subjects, without any practical component?

200% YES

I am going to have a mini rant here: One of my DCs is a fecking maths genius, sometimes he deliberately gets questions wrong because he is labeled a 'nerd', the teachers often assign him to help the 'struggling' pupils, which is ok in principle but in reality it is another way of saying "today instead of doing calculus you are practicing your times tables with people who dont want to practice their times tables". He gets punished for taking out maths books (when he has nothing else to do). He gets accused of cheating because he knows answers (he is NOT cheating)... Its like that in at least 6 subjects. I could go on but whats the point. Rant over.

At the risk of coming all over 'Bertrand' some of the posts on the various threads have been awful !

Karma obviously you believe all Universities should be highly 'selective' and deny opportunities for people who want to improve themselves !

You must be in principle against the Open University then allowing access with no academic requirements.

This means you want deny people another chance and your character assassination of your students abilities is quite telling.

There is a place in society for very selective/less selective universities , just as there is place for grammar schools or non selective schools.

The point is not to deride a student or pupil for their level of academic ability .

Another poster on the Discipline thread comparing 'child' soldiers in Africa with children in England is quite baffling !

The poster 'Long' who has been a teacher in East Africa has posted some seriously nasty posts about children.

I know children who have been tutored but didn't pass. You can't tutor children beyond their capabilities you tutor them to reach their potential and sometimes that means passing and sometimes not, it depends on the child.

mathsmum - I have direct experience of grammar schools giving a fairly lousy education to children. I do not have experience of all grammar schools. Likewise you do not have experience of all other types of school.
Making a school academically selective does not automatically make it a good school where clever children who were strangely embarrassed by their academic inclinations in front of their mixed ability peers are suddenly free to express themselves. There can also be a big difference in my experience between highly intelligent children and children who are academic - good academics can sometimes be quite dull, plodding and pedantic... As for your ds feeling the need to hide his abilities, all I can say is that my dss have never felt the need to do this in their non-selective schools. They are quite happy to be considered clever nerds - it is not compulsory for the atmosphere in a mixed ability school to be anti-intelligence.

And the way mumsnetters live clustered round them- even though generally speaking mumsnetters are on the right side of the poverty line and generally speaking the most ....challenging.... schools are on the other side........

Where we used to live some years ago , those who could afford it simply "opted out " of the local comp by going private (and I am absolutely firmly of the opinion - private does not mean "better" per se ) and therefore it did not properly represent the local demographic. It becomes a spiral. Just to say that having expensive or leafy areas nearby does not necessarily help a school. A niche point from one experience and one locale. (Or to put it another way - anecdote) .

76% of state secondary schools in England are rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding. That's not enough, but suggests that the majority of English children get access to a decent education and that this is not limited to the super-rich or super-religious.

I used to be very firmly pro grammar schools. This was because that's the system where I live (N Ireland - no comprehensives anywhere near me) and it was all I knew. All I ever saw on the news was stories about children only being able to access a good school if their parents could afford to buy a house right next to the school etc. Having read plenty on mumsnet I now understand that this is not the norm and that comprehensive schools seem very popular with pupils and parents and I'm now coming round to the idea that maybe they are a good idea after all.

Having said all that, where I live, the non grammars are very good schools as well, with good results etc. And a couple of weeks ago when the GCSE results were announced, N Ireland had a significantly better results than England and Wales which did make me question it all again, because since more people don't attend grammars than do, it doesn't support the idea that going to a non grammar means being thrown on the scrapheap...

And as a result of all that I now have no idea if I support grammar schools or not

There will always be children in grammar areas that are failed and children in comprehensive areas that are failed. I realise that, maybe I am one of them. However we have to create a system where the most children get the most advantage. I dont think the system we have at the moment gives that. The 'system' benefits the average pupil to get average results. Is that good for our country?

I'm from NI and now live in an area with good comprehensives and much prefer the comprehensive system.

The one big difference that surprised me between England and N Ireland is that private secondary education is much more common England, whereas fee-paying prep schools linked to a grammar school were the NI equivalent, and only the super-posh paid for secondary (unless they paid to get their kids into a grammar which I suspect and hope is no longer possible).

I think there's a really different culture around education in England. In NI there's the whole religious/sectarian divide still at play in the education system, and I think that there is more of a culture of valuing education as way out of poverty or as the basis of emigration, and there's a sort of pride in the rather old-school traditional education system with very smart uniforms etc for the grammars.

I think the school system does foster a very segregated society. It's probably not so bad in more rural areas of NI but I grew up in Belfast and am fairly certain that plenty of pupils at my school reached adulthood without ever having had a social encounter with a working-class Catholic.

"The 'system' benefits the average pupil to get average results. Is that good for our country?"

You do know, don't you, that wholly selective areas have on,y very marginally better results- and that only in high ability groups- than comparable comprehensive areas?

Sorry my last point was to Bertrand

This is a really hard question. At the risk of demeaning the point I wish I had seen this
www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/future-conditional-old-vic-review/

Neither of my points are specifically grammar related so apologies for derailing the thread.

Comprehensive schools are only popular with parents who happen to have great comprehensives next to them.
If they didnt have one (or ine they could get into), I suspect grammar schools would be very appealing...

I live in an area where there are no grammar school and comprehensives are ok but not amazing.
I can tell you that if there had been a grammar school in a distance that was somehow manageable for dc1, he would have gone there.

And the fact he is able academically doesnt have any renationalise ship with being gifted in music or sports. These two things are stuff you can do outside school (like my niece does. It's still allowing her to be in the top 3 nationally). At school, she gets to experience school life as any other child, despite her giftiness in sports. Fur a child who is academically gifted, it's influencing all the school life. You can't say 'oh let's do more outside school' because you would exclude them even more from their peers.
And it is also leading to the total eradication of their love of learning and their curiosity.
Of a grammar school can protect that love of learning, then, IMO, it will be a victory.

Re a system that benefits the most children....

Dies it mean it's ok to waste the abilities of these able children because actually they will not give that much back to the country? These children should be our next doctors, researchers, analysts etc no?

I would say Betrand that more than that, the system favours the average an snakebird average the aim rather than the minimum you should strive for. Being (really) ahead isnt seen as a good thing, neither by pupils nor by teachers.

Just look at the latest SATS (or whatever their name is now). Children are evaluated to see if they reach the minimum required but NOT if they are above level. Levelling to the 'average'

Caspians I've found this puzzling too. I decided to have a quick look at schools in Oldham and Rochdale - pretty deprived areas ripe for a new grammar school. Of 23 schools 4 had 5 GCSE(E&M) results in the 30s, 6 in the 40s, 7 in the 50s, 5 in the 60s and 2 in the 70s. So that makes a clear majority of schools getting over 50% at GCSE. That doesn't at first glance seem too bad. I can't believe there are that many Mumsnetters who can only access the schools in the thirties surely? They're rather scarce even in deprived areas like Rochdale and Oldham.

I

Just look at the latest SATS (or whatever their name is now). Children are evaluated to see if they reach the minimum required but NOT if they are above level. Levelling to the 'average'

Not true. The new SATs give a scaled score which ranks that student nationally. For KS1 100 is the average and 115 the top. For KS2 100 is the average and 120 is the top (no idea why they're different).

In N Ireland the percentage of A* to C grades this year at GCSE was 79.1%, compared to 66.9% elsewhere, so it's not really just a tiny difference. Although I think the difference is only marginal at A level. But it was those GCSE results that really did make me stop and think 'hang on a minute, those results don't back up the idea that non grammars fail their pupils...'

As I said in a previous post, I'm really undecided. In N Ireland the grammar school system does seem to work ok. (There is an issue with underachievement by working class Protestant males, but I think that is a social issue of some sort since it isn't mirrored on 'the other side'). However, there are different types of grammar school here. There are some that are outside the control of the education board, more like a private school, and those aren't very socially diverse. But the controlled state grammar schools (which most of them are) have a lot of pupils from less privileged backgrounds, so they truly are open to any pupil who passes the exams to get in.

Ah, I don't know. I can see the pros and cons to be honest.

If the choice is between a bad comprehensive and a good grammar, of course anyone would prefer a good grammar.

If I lived somewhere with a mediocre comprehensive and a good single- sex comprehensive for girls opened up nearby close enough for DD to get a place I would send her there, even though I knew that if everyone did that, it would leave the mixed comp with girls vastly outnumbered by boys.

If a better school opened nearby which didn't select by ability but was only open to members of my religion, I would send her there.

If a school for the children of Mumsnetters opened....I would probably be too scared of the mums from Style and Beauty and the school gate threads and the fearsomely intelligent children who could read from birth to send DD there, but I would at least have a look round on the open day and consider it.

It wouldn't make any of those forms of selection the basis of a good educational system.

If a grammar school opened nearby and the top sets of the local mediocre comprehensive went there instead, so they dropped a couple of the more academic subject options, and your child didn't get through the selection process, whether because of natural ability or just a bad day when the exam was taken, would you still be pleased that the grammar school had opened?