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?

I absolutely agree with you. You are absolutely right that more technical, vocational paths need to open and more choices other than university/degree

However I fundamentally disagree that those paths can be set at 10 years old.

Maybe the solution is actually to overhaul the system completely, and bring it line with the private school system.

Stay in primary for an extra 2 years, until GCSE choices - and then children can decide whether they want to choose a more academic route or practical/creative etc.

That would be far less dependent on parental input/tutoring/meaningless tests.

Yes tom, doing it at fourteen sounds better. but we have a system that starts secondary at 11, so playing musical chairs would be a massive reorganization.

Because we are creating massive numbers of academics with huge debts that they will never earn enough to pay back.

An academic is somebody who works in research at a higher education institution. You are using the wrong terminology.

So the tax payer has a higher and higher burden and we have a workforce who are trained for academic jobs that we don't have.

Why does the tax payer have a higher burden when the students pay back the loans themselves and the remaining parts of loans get written off?

And BTW we do have huge shortages in highly skilled, well-paid jobs in science, technology and engineering (requiring university education) for which we currently recruit from abroad. There is no evidence that grammars schools are going to solve these shortages - they aren't particularly better at getting kids to study STEM than comprehensives.

I have just come back from being out !

Just seen Cameron stepping down as a MP , i wonder if little Nancy and her brother are about to take their 'Common' Entrance exams !

Cameron is a 'Con' man happy to promote Comprehensive schools for his political means. The truth is he did not give a 'toss' about state education so he left it to 'Gove'. The ideologue who had obviously been badgering for the Education job for years in Opposition !

making them all highly academic

First time I've heard comps accused of providing a pre-16 education that is making kids too academic and we should artificially decrease the number of kids taking GCSEs in things like history because otherwise we'll be overrun with humanities graduates.

Here's an excellent argument against trying to shunt off the bottom end of kids to technical colleges aged 14:

www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/the-big-problem-with-university-technical-colleges/

Since 2010, three other UTCs have closed (rough cost: £18 million), and two more are on financial warnings. All cite low numbers. An investigation by FE Week magazine found that 40 per cent of UTCs which opened between 2010 and 2013 saw their pupil numbers fall in the last academic year. Quality indicators are also not great. Just over 40 per cent of the latest batch of schools inspections were below ‘good’.

Advocates of the system have excuses to hand. First, UTCs must coax pupils in at the age of 14. By that time, most are settled in secondary school, and UTC leaders have complained about schools blocking them from advertising to pupils. Second, pupils who do change school typically do so because they are unhappy or pushed to change due to poor behaviour and low attainment. Such pupils do not make for good marketing material.

....

But UTCs cannot guarantee a trade. Separate buildings don’t suddenly mean kids can do physics, and jazzy specialisms don’t make it easy to find brilliant science teachers. We so desperately want vocational education to solve the problem of unhappy, poorly behaved or low-attaining children that we forget this basic logic. What these children actually need is intensive tutoring, smaller classes, mental health specialists and consistent rules from the adults in their lives. They don’t need £10 million buildings specialising in entrepreneurship. In some high-density areas, where there is a strong employer need in a specialism sufficiently attractive to an unusually high-attaining few, then UTCs will work. Everywhere else, we are in danger of recreating government-endorsed dumping grounds.

I agree giraffe - I saw a presentation from the head of an engineering school and, whilst it looked great, it seemed very young to specialise so narrowly.

They do a lot of hands on work experience which sounds great but they miss out on a lot of other qualifications (history, English lit etc)

We have lots of automotive companies here so there is a high demand for highly skilled employees.

But UTCs cannot guarantee a trade. Separate buildings don’t suddenly mean kids can do physics, and jazzy specialisms don’t make it easy to find brilliant science teachers.

And, repeating what I said above, our economy is very short of science graduates (as well as non-graduates with specific technical and engineering skills). Giving only 20-30% of the population an "academic" education would likely make the shortage of science graduates even worse as kids would be pushed out of a science degree pathway at the age of 11.

haybott Mon 12-Sep-16 17:33:22 for which we currently recruit from abroad.

Would we be recruiting from countries that don't have a Grammar school system by any chance?

We recruit from countries with a number of different education systems.

zzzzz Mon 12-Sep-16 19:05:10 different countries have VERY different education systems.

How many of them have modelled their education system on the Grammar system i.e. academic seletion at 11 with the top 25% going to one type of school and the rest go to another?

zzzzz Mon 12-Sep-16 19:15:42 I don't know mum can you tell me?

To my knowledge, none. Happy to stand corrected if this is not the case.

But the pressure in the Far East is constant - it doesn't Jettison some off at 11 and leave the ready to it.

They also have a very high child suicide rate.

In China school is compulsory until 15 - then children can either leave, go to high school or a vocational school.

They also have to compete for university scholarships.

tomtherabbit Mon 12-Sep-16 19:58:25 In China school is compulsory until 15 - then children can either leave, go to high school or a vocational school.

So at what age do they undergo a test to determine academic segregation?

In Germany, they have a two tiers system that is determined at the end of primary (so age 10yo).
If you don't make the grade then, the only way is to go down the vocational route whereas those who do make the grade will carry on at university etc...
As far as I know there is no system in place for a child in the vocational system to move into the academic one iyswim.

France doesn't segregate in that way and doesn't have grammar schools. Selection happens during th secondary years, just by first choosing what sort of optional foreign langauge (incl Latin) is chosen by the pupil, then by what sort of Baccalaureate they do. The real selection is happening after Alevel (but in a way unheard off over here. Few people really understand the intensity of the selection process then) all the way through whatever training (or job)

People coming out of both these countries are and will be recruited here.

How many of them have modelled their education system on the Grammar system i.e. academic seletion at 11 with the top 25% going to one type of school and the rest go to another?

A number of European countries have grammars, including Germany as mentioned above. However their grammar systems are often criticised for similar reasons to here (many students pigeonholed too young, not fulfilling their potential; grammar selection damaging to social mobility).

But at least in Germany and nearby countries which have grammars (such as Holland, Switzerland) STEM is held in high value and a good fraction of the grammar school students go on to get STEM degrees. The second tier of schools feeds students into "polytechnic" education which is well-adapted to the highly skilled jobs available.

haybott Mon 12-Sep-16 20:27:48 Germany and nearby countries which have grammars (such as Holland, Switzerland)

So is this what current proposals are trying to achieve?

Do these Countries select the top 25% for academic channelling?

These countries have a multi tier secondary school system in which the top third or so go to grammars. The grammar school education is very deep and traditional, covering ancient languages, humanities, sciences, modern languages.

There is some possibility to transfer from the lower tier schools into the grammar schools but very few pupils do so in practice.

As an academic my children would have a 99% chance of going to grammar (combinations of schools tests, teacher recommendations are used). The children of an unskilled immigrant would have a very high chance of their children not going to grammar. Social mobility is hardly discussed in these countries.

I thought Germany had three types of school, not a two tier system. It also holds people with technical rather than academic qualifications in far higher esteem than people do in this ridiculously snobby country...

And yet Germany's education system is still old fashioned and deeply flawed. It's like the system we were supposed to set up in the UK when state grammars were first created, but never did, because so little money was invested in the tiny number of secondary technical schools that the UK system ever set up.