Labour to reduce number of Grammar/Selective school places?

[Another76543]

This thread is not about private schools. It’s about the Labour Party’s dislike of state grammar/selective schools. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has, in recent years, stated that she wants fewer children in selective schools, and more in comprehensive education. Angela Rayner has also expressed her dislike of the grammar system.

Does this mean that, under Labour, the number of selective places will be reduced? Will parents have less choice over the type of education their children receive?

m.youtube.com/watch?v=OW21Tu38Txo

Exactly, if you live in an area with houses worth multiple millions and all those kids go to a nice little comp around the corner it’s practically the same as sending them to private school. Looking at you Starmer.

For those of us from less salubrious backgrounds grammars were an opportunity to access an education we would otherwise not have had. It’s actually embedding more inequality into system. Only those who can afford afford the school fees or the big fuck off house can go to the nicest schools.

Not sure you can compare Finland (wealthy country with a population of less than 6 million) with the wealth per capita of a very populated country like the UK and many many more kids to squeeze into a classroom.

I also wonder what Finland's curriculum is like…

What is the problem if there are some parents who want the freedom of choice, for their children, to go to a school of their choosing. At a price. There are parents who work every hour god sends to send to private schools. That is their right in a democratic society. These are the people that would be most affected by these additional taxes. Putting pressure on our state schools to place these children, (like they are not overstretched as it is). Our schools are in enough of a mess, without this additional stress. The problem with labour, is money/success envy. Their idea of levelling up, isn't to bring people in the lower brackets up, but bringing those on a higher bracket down. It's like there is no room in our society at the moment for wanting hope, positivity and success in our, or our loved ones futures

What's the average size of a class in Finland?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1078190/students-per-class-in-europe/

UK primary school class sizes are the highest in Europe. Finland, similar to most other European countries, has class sizes around 20 (like a UK independent school). For what it’s worth, even the US (not shown in the figure, but which is not known for its thriving public sector) has smaller average class sizes than the UK.

Once you add in the tens of thousands of unfunded private school children should Labour get in, then we are going to be off the graph! I am sure that is going to assist no one in securing a decent education for all.

Pupils won’t know if they have an interest of ability in a subject if they don’t have the opportunity to study it. Schools are increasingly only offering 1 modern foreign language. 3% of state schools offer Latin. Some schools don’t offer computer science. Others don’t offer the opportunity to study triple science. Removing pupil and parental choice can never be a good thing. Some state schools manage to offer a wide range of subjects. Others don’t. A varied education should not be a postcode lottery. That applies to academic and more vocational subjects. Surely a better system is to tailor education for all children.

I had a similar experience. Because it was a small town where everyone knows everyone and my family still live there I know that many of my classmates/peers have died from drugs/alcohol/violence/suicide. A few others are, or have been, in prison. if you wanted to see what people had been up to you read the "court report" of the local paper. This was a "comprehensive minus" - nominally comprehensive, but most of the bright kids were siphoned off by nearby grammars. You were mocked if you read a book. 90% left school at 16. Nobody even thought of applying to oxford or Cambridge. Hardly anyone applied to a top 20 uni.

I wanted something better for my children. Our closest schools are religious / for the other gender / out of catchment due to council boundaries etc. So we had the choice of a failing comp a significant distance away or paying for private. That is no choice at all.

Finland do allow fee paying private schools. Private schools are not allowed to profit from the basic element of education though. The state funds that part. Private schools in Finland are state subsidised.

Concerns have also been raised about increasing mental health problems in Finland so I’m not sure we can argue it’s a perfect system.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/7d8fd88e-en/index.html?itemId=/content/paper/7d8fd88e-en#:~:text=At%20some%20point%20in%20just,1%20in%205%20are%20affected.

That's an argument against catchment areas (and I agree with you completely about the fairness issue there), not comps. My DD goes to a superb comp, one of the most deprived areas in the UK. They use 'fair banding' - everyone takes an entrance exam and they randomly select from each decile of scores. So genuinely comprehensive. They offer 3 languages and three sciences and get similar number of Oxbridge offers to the grammar. As well as a lot of kids going on to decent apprenticeships. My DD turned down a place at the grammar to go there. It's about funding and excellent management, not the system as such.

Bring in on. Abolish choice! Let’s put ourselves in the hands of the government to educate our kids. May be they do not even try to brainwash our kids or lower the vote to 16. We have read the opinions of state school teachers here. They are not loonies hard left at all.
Angela Rayner what an icon. What we need really 🤔🙄

God help the souls left in this country.

Excellent news. I’d have loved for my child to have had access to the facilities that the local grammars have. Look forward to the removal of faith schools too. A decent comprehensive system whereby kids all have access to the same good education.

Grammar Schools are still State schools and get funded the same way so why do they have better facilities?

What facilities? My grammar didn't have any better facilities than the local comp.

Just happen to live near some of the best grammars in the country, and the facilities are superb.

Exactly this. The 11+ was my ticket out of sexual assault and daily bullying hell when my parents could not have afforded private and autistic girls weren't diagnosed. Don't take that lifeline from autistic girls, the high-achieving ones are still underdiagnosed and will not get the extra safeguarding protection that they need.

Possibly parental contributions? My ds' grammar requested these. Generally a more middle class demographic so more likely to pay.

Grammar status doesn't mean extra State funding. It might mean that Old Boys and Old Girls have remembered the school in their wills, and if the school is old then that money will have built up over decades and centuries.

My school would have been sixtyish years old when I went and it had nothing that the comp down the road didn't have too.

There are a number of reasons why specific grammars may gave better facilities:

1. Some are very old foundations, and have kept original buildings whereas secondary moderns are often housed in buildings from more recent, lower quality, school building eras.
2. Some have historical endowments.
3. Some have a wealthier pool of alumni to call upon, and may also be able to attract sponsors for buildings and equipment more easily due to their higher prestige.
4. All will have (on average) a wealthier pool of parents than their local secondary modern equivalents - FSM/PP data tells us that - so fundraising and parental contributions are likely to raise more
5. Lower % SEN than local secondary moderns - as each school has to fund the first several thousand £ of provision for each SEN pupil, and often has to pay much more than the LA provides to actually meet need, less funding goes on this in gtammars
6. Much lower levels of family deprivation mean that, again, less funding us needed for pastoral, nurture and family support workers

This does NOT mean that every grammar has better facilities than its local non-grammar equivalents. But it does explain why some do.

Spot on. Scary too.

The thing is, the vast majority of areas of the country already have no grammars, and the world has not ended in those areas. The children there achieve as well as they do in grammar areas.

This isn’t some ideological ‘of the world as we know it’ moment. It would be, if it happened, a case of bringing a few outliers in line with the rest of the country.

I do, absolutely, understand the concern of those in grammar areas who look at secondary moderns - incorrectly referred to as comprehensive - and say ‘that’s what my child’s school would look like’, especially in areas like Kent which are dully bipartite. But children in Oxfordshire, or Worcestershire or Herefordshire do not perform disastrously just because they don’t have grammars like Gloucestershire or Warwickshire.

Change would be painful - my sibling was in one of the first years through an ex secondary modern comprehensive, and some aspects weren’t pretty - but the end product isn’t an educational disaster.

What IS an educational disaster is the critical shortage of SEN school places and EHCP funding. And the haemorrhage of good teachers.

international studies like PISA show that the students in the UK reaching the highest levels of attainment (by international standards) in maths and science are almost entirely coming from grammar and private schools. Tearing down grammar and private schools without building up an equally good training ground for the brightest will harm the international competitiveness of the UK.
As a nation we should be focussing on bringing comprehensives up, not tearing grammars and privates down. Grammars are largely a distraction - only 3% of pupils attend them.
More funding from general taxation (not from taxing one part of the education system to fund another - that's at best a zero sum game) and a resurrection of the previous labour G&T programme are both needed.
Attacking private and grammar schools is likely to be counterproductive in the long term. Labour must offer something more than tearing down. Tearing down private schools was a long-held aspiration of the hard left of the labour party, mostly recently the Corbynistas. But protesting and tearing down is all the Corbynistas were good for. They never built anything.

Might as well keep them. They are hugely popular and oversubscribed so dont wreck something that people like. In fact, build more. . They don't harm anyone else as there's no such thing as a "level playing field" in life anyway and you can't socially engineer one by banning things.