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?

Bert don't even try to list all the contradictions.

A comprehensive can't be "good enough" for my child when it has too many lower achieving and disadvantaged children.

So say there are four schools in a town in which three are considered good and one not so good. Supposedly that town needs a grammar because a few unfortunate parents with "able" children can't access any of the good ones. So the grammar is set up, all the High Achieving children and almost all the middle class ones move to that. So now you have three schools where all the children are lower achieving and/or disadvantaged and with the added burden that they all feel like failures.

So you have ended up with a situation where you now have three schools that meet the original definition of a school that wasn't "good enough" rather than one. How on earth is this sensible?

Here's an idea:

1. Why not let any school that scores over 70% in 5+GCSE set an entrance test?
2. If you get a certain score on the test and you qualify as disadvantaged you get priority admission.

Anyone think TM will go for this? Of course not - because it might not benefit the middle classes at whom the grammar school policy is clearly aimed.

I'm really not sure where the idea that "you are on the scrap heap" if you don't get into a grammar school comes from . I really don't think that's the vibe at our non selective school.

Because that is what so many of the kids who fail the 11+ say they feel.

These ideas that everywhere is the same and parents would tutor is bollocks and maybe applicable in Kent, Bucks? Other posh southern areas.

I live in a northern grammar school area, kids are tutored sometimes for years, my kids were tutored.

If the local grammars are single sex your dd will have to have a higher score than your ds to get in, is that fair?

How so?

Our local Grammars are single sex. A friend's twins both sat the 11+ last year. The girl passed, but her brother didn't. The pass mark for the Girls' Grammar was lower (just over 70%) than that for the Boys' Grammar (about 73%), and her brother would have got in, if the pass mark had been the same.

"don't want my clever child to lose the rich diversity of her primary school class when she goes to scondary school. then don't send her to a selective school. Surely the point is that your child thrives in a mixed ability class whereas other children may do better in a selective one. No one is suggesting forcing children to grammar school are they?"

Not an option in a wholly selective area.........

then don't send her to a selective school

We want to send our children to COMPREHENSIVE schools not secondary moderns. Stop telling us they're the same thing - we all know they aren't just as a Mars bar with the caramel taken out becomes a Milky Way!

What is it with all these posters who say comps can't be good enough because they don't have enough bright children in them but think if you take those bright children out of them they won't be worse schools? By YOUR definition they have to be. How can a school not be "good enough" if it "only"has 30% High Achievers but perfectly good if it "only" has 10%?

jasper

Because some children are outliers or very G*T and don't suit these schools.
If we were to have more specialist schools, I don't just mean state schools calling themselves specialists then these children could still study their specialism and still gain from the diversity of children of all abilities.
my dd school manages this really well.
It has a catchment of The World yet the dc come from all sorts of backgrounds, and abilities.

If you sit an exam at 10, and if you pass everyone says "Well done" and if you don't everyone says "Oh, never mind" how are you not going to feel a bit of a failure?

Oh, God. Here we go again. Gilly, your dd's school is not a state school.

And it is by no means a typical private school either.

"Isn't that what all parents do in practice?"

Of course they do.

But you are naive in the extreme if you think children ate taken in for a second by the "test to see which is the best school for you" narrative. And if you think children who pass are not congratulated by all and sundry, and those who fail are not, with the best of intentions, commiserated with.

I suspect this is yet another example of "I think this is best for my high ability child, and I am not actually that bothered about how it impacts on other people."

But an academic child won't get a suitable education in a secondary modern. When you create a grammar school, you also create three secondary modern schools. For a highly academic child to access an appropriate level of education at that point,she has to go to the grammar. She no longer has the option to go to a comprehensive school.

Anyway, surely if a child at a non-selective primary school passes the selection test, that is an indication that they are thriving in a mixed ability setting. If the presence of lower ability children in their school interferes significantly with their learning, they won't do well in the test and will go to the secondary modern anyway, rather defeating the purpose of the test.

So if your local school is great, why does anyone try for the grammar?

What % of local children go to the grammar?

zzzz, isn't your grammar school local then?