"Non believers in selective education like to peddle this notion out to children This being because it furthers their claims that your pathway in life is decided at 11 !
What left wing 'Bollocks'.. "
I would have been utterly devastated if I'd failed my 11+. I strongly, fervently believe that 5 years at the SM wrecked my DB's future chances. Not a single child left that SM and came into the GS sixth form. Not one. If that statistic doesn't prove that these kids futures were decided on one day, aged 10, I don't know what does. That's 80% of the kids (we all took the 11+) who couldn't achieve the 6 GCSEs needed to access the GS sixth form, due to being 'not selective' (failed) at 10.
And why? Because we, as a society, do not believe in non-academic education. This is why we had CSEs- then we didn't. Why BTECS are so roundly mocked. Why just about no one has heard of a City And Guilds. Why the T levels will fail.
Which is why I believe in (yes, well set, well run) comps (not all GS meet those criteria!), where you can be great at Maths, but average at English. Great at Sport, mediocre at Maths. Where you can (gasp) sit beside a DC from a different background and ability in tutor time and in non-streamed lessons. The 'clever' do not have to put on a different uniform and sit in a different building.
I might have a bit more time for GSs if their intakes reflected the nation PP/free school meal profiles, but they don't, because they are largely only accessible to the clued up, wealthy-enough for prep or tutoring MCs. And if there was proper movement between the schools as DC bloomed later or fell by the wayside. (6 girls in my class of 30 didn't get the 6 GCSEs needed to get into the sixth form- they should ever have been at a GS). Right at the start of this, a poster basically said 'I love Grammars because otherwise we'd've had to continue paying for private'.
That is the crux. GSs are unfair because their admissions are unfair and are skewed by the pointy-elbowed. They are unfair because the alternative is often badly funded, understaffed and contain far too many DC who need to be helped and guided far more than the school has the resources for.
You might say 'Well, improve the SMs, then!' -til suddenly your GS had its budget cut to do so, as challenging DC require rather more input that the compliant clever. If we assume a GS has the cleverest 25%, Special School provision accounts for (a guess) 15%, that leaves the SM trying to accommodate the needs of the DC who scored 74% through to 16%. While struggling to recruit teachers and while spending rather more time in pastoral care and crowd control....
I get that none of the MN on here with DC at grammars are at all pushy, I mean, 'Natasha only had a tutor for a year or so, and her dad and I only got her to do a few past papers, the (prep) school did the rest! No, she's there because she earned her place' 
....