Anyone know if the % of low income kids going to grammar is any different to historical levels?

[tricot39]

That's it really..... Following from the other thread aboout the sutton trust report it struck me that bright low income kids have probably always had a hard time getting into grammar. I just wondered if there was any difference in % now that tutoring is more widespread amongst those with more disposable income?

I went to a direct grant grammar school in the "old days" T get in I had to sit the 11+, the entrance exam. the scholarship exam and get through an interview! 1/3 of the girls were "scholarship girls" and possibly half the scholarship girls wouldn't have been there without it, the other half just didn't want to pay the fees! My sister ( who passed a year earlier, was the first of any of my family to go to university, I was the second.
My dad passed the 11+ many years earlier but couldn't go because his family couldn't afford the uniform. There was no way he was going to let me NOT go, even though I had second hand uniform all of the way through school .

I now live in a grammar school area ( but not super selective, roughly the top 20% pass) but the grammar school now needs an SEN department to support the children who passed with extensive coaching ( one of the children I teach managed to get in with level 3's in SATS- although most are straight 5's!) A non coachable exam might help the brighter, less well off children. But good secondary schools all round would do even more.

No to improving comps? Why wouldn't you want better comps?

Not against improving secondary but I am against the assumption that comps suit all kids and should be the only option. We loathed our comps.

I think if you improve primary education,standards in all secondary schools would go up and give the non wealthy kids more of a level playing field as to getting into selective schools.

The comps in our town are all outstanding, 20 years ago one wasn't but it's improved dramatically and is a truly fantastic school. The grammar I went to still exists but the local shitty high school that used fail kids is now fantastic too. I don't believe poor kids in general are helped by more grammar schools, poor kids did not go to our grammar school and it doesn't sound like that was unusual.

poor families couldn't afford the uniform so that was a way of keeping them out

My dad was poor,he went.He had a fantastic primary education(he despairs at the education my 3 are getting),think his primary must have prepared him for the exam and fewer rich kids went to grammar(they went private).Rich kids now go to private primary and buy a place.

Said report acknowledged grammar schools are here to stay.

My dad was so poor the big family provided him with hand me down clothes.The uniform didn't keep him out.

RiversideMum, I'm puzzled when you say London doesn't have comprehensive education. There are no grammar schools in inner London and only a few super-selectives in some of the outer London boroughs. All state-funded schools in inner London are (nominally, anyway) comprehensive schools, and have been for about 40 years. Of course, their intake is badly skewed by the high percentage of children who are sent to private schools and by various quirks of the admissions system - faith schools taking most of their children from highly observant families who are far more likely to be middle class or at least extremely aspirational, schools selecting a percentage of the intake on aptitude for music or similar (ditto), high house prices and vigorous short-term rentals market in the immediate vicinity of good schools, and so on and so forth.

Personally, I think if comprehensive schools are good they are by far the best solution to this. My parents live on a Scottish island. Every child on the island goes to the one and only high school. The only other options would be to send them to the mainland to board or to home educate. As far as I can judge from what I hear, that school does jolly well by its children, of all ability levels. That's what's needed - a genuinely comprehensive intake and full parental support. In Inner London, what you see so often is that some schools are effectively secondary moderns because they get so few children from the top ability levels.

I am appalled that the surviving grammar schools seem to have become the preserve of those who can afford tutoring. The old grammar school system was far from perfect (as far as I can judge - I didn't go through it myself) but my impression is that tutoring was rare and the majority of children who passed the 11+ genuinely did so on merit. Nowadays it seems that many children only pass the test because they have been drilled relentlessly for years in the techniques required to answer quickly and accurately. Then when they get in they find the academic work very hard so the parents start paying for tutoring all over again. No wonder so many flounder when they get to university. Please tell me that there are no parents paying for private tuition for undergraduate students to help them keep up!

His grammar education gave him a degree,an officer military career and an MBE.

Doubt very much he'd have had any without it.

Tis ironic his grand kids who are nowhere near as poor now have less chances than he did.

I don't doubt there are here to stay, I just don't think they are effective enough at improving opportunities for poor kids.
The boys in my family especially struggle with concentration and schooling, in the primary years especially. They have been fortunate enough to attend comps which have given them the opportunities to excel in their teens and go on to attend Oxbridge and Russel Group Unis are the boys in my family unusual?

Not why the report says,they acknowledge they are.

Also recent research has shown results in all schools are higher in grammar areas even non affluent areas.It was reported a couple of months ago.

I went to grammar in the early 80s, some kids did get tutored - these were the kids who were thought to be of middling ability. From Sept to the last exam in Nov, we did verbal reasoning and intelligence tests in class for the first hour of everyday! teaching us techniques for every style of question...by exam time, the top tables were scoring almost 100% on every test. Out of 45 kids, 13 of us went to grammar school.

We left London because of the situation London Mum describes. Tutoring and pressurising a child through the whole of primary to get into a good secondary school is too awful to contemplate, the grammars were top of the wish list, followed by private with entrance exam, faith schools and bottom of the pile was the sink secondary - which bused poor kids in from outside the area because local parents refused to send their kids there.

Yes they are Oxbridge and Russell group unis are trying to raise the numbers of state educated kids.

20% of London children go to private schools, so there's not really a comprehensive system insofar as there's a greatly reduced pool. There is also a much higher % of faith and single sex schools. So no London may have non selective on ability schools, but the pool of children isn't comprehensive.

Of course, social mobility needs movement down as well as up and that is one of the reasons it's stalled now.

Fictional example:

Mary comes from a family where everyone went to elementary schools until they reached school leaving age and then they started work. Mary is the first one with the good luck to be born in the era of free secondary education. She passes the 11+ in 1960 and goes to grammar school. Her family are not all that well off (father a garage mechanic, mother a shop assistant) but they can afford the uniforms and the fares and they want their children to do well, so they seize this wonderful opportunity for Mary.

Mary works very hard and does extremely well. She stays on well past the school leaving age (15 then) and takes O levels and A levels. She now reaps the benefit of the other huge change in education and goes to medical school - no tuition fees to pay, generous maintenance grants. In due course she becomes a consultant obstetrician and marries John, who has had similar good fortune in the education system (father a miner, mother a cleaning lady - John has qualified as a solicitor).

John and Mary have a daughter, Claire, born in 1989. They choose to live in Inner London because it's convenient for work. However, it's not so good schoolwise. They send Claire to private schools all the way through. Claire is not as high-achieving as either of her parents, nor as driven. They pay for her to have private tuition so she can keep up. She gets reasonably good GCSEs and A levels and finally gets into a Russell Group university where she studies English and has a lovely time. When she graduates with a 2.1 (just), her parents fund her through a gap year travelling, and then a series of unpaid internships and low-paid jobs until she is finally able to get a job in publishing when she is 24.

Now, this is fictional, but there are lots of people like John and Mary. They have (entirely understandably) done their level best to keep Claire from falling down the social ladder. But the inevitable result of that is that their own counterparts in Claire's generation don't get the opportunities that they had a generation ago.

The Sutton Trust is doing its best to draw attention to this kind of thing. The middle classes have a stranglehold on the best state schools. It is a lot harder now for children from poor families to move up the ladder than it was 40 years ago. This is depressing.

I went to grammar school in 1976 and had never seen any test similar to the one we did. I think everyone was the same. The amount of preparation and parental support now is very different - for example I worked quite hard to get my DC into their local faith secondary (with very good reputation) I think, as Quakers, it does suit them well BTW, and not just academically.

" I think comprehensive education is fantastic. "

The (unavoidable) difficulty with it is selection by mortgage.

Very interesting reading with lots of different experiences, but no figures.... I will have to do some digging. I am guessing that the percentages will not be terribly different (for the grammar areas that still exist).

The middle classes have a stranglehold on the best state schools. It is a lot harder now for children from poor families to move up the ladder than it was 40 years ago. This is depressing.

I am not sure it is that simple. There seems to be a narrower definition of what social mobility is or a reduction in routes to get there - my DF failed his 11+ but ended up earning more than many professionals via apprenticeships and on-the-job training.

I don't think that the issue just relates to schools or the vilified middle class. The employment landscape has changed and a whole host of young people "expect" to go to on to further or higher education when they would not have considered 30+ years ago....... I also think that the "education industry" seems to have pumped itself up at the expense of routes to training and as a result have proliferated inappropriate courses and have lowered entry standards to accept students who might have been better served by less academic routes........ {ponders}

Completely agree - dh and I both have degrees - dh from Oxbridge and mine is from a respected Russell group. We no longer feel university is la ticket to a successful career. We are encouraging our kids to work hard and pursue their passions but We are not encouraging them to go to Uni, if they want to then that's fine we'll support them in their decision but even our comps send 95% of kids to Uni - it is no longer a point of difference. I think many kids benefit from Uni but many use it as a delaying tactic rather than face the world of work.

The problem is that in Bucks, and it is the only Grammar School County I know well, going to a good primary is not the only solution to getting a grammar school place although it definitely helps. Having been associated with a primary school with very low success rate at the 11+ but a good sprinkling of well taught children attaining level 5's across the board, why is it that children with level 4's at other schools can get a grammar school place whereas the level 5 children do not? They have been taught a similar curriculum and the level 5 children have been judged to be better at it. So why are they not at the grammar schools? There is a gap between education at school and 11+ success that the middle class children have a better chance of bridging. Luckily in Bucks no-one was ever interviewed so it has always been about passing tests but it is a flawed system when so many deserving children are excluded from a place because their less bright peers get all the breaks in life and no-one makes any attempt to ensure that this does not continue to happen.

To answer the OP, I do know that nowadays neither of my poor parents (very poor in the case of my father and with disinterested parents) would have got in as their parents would not have had the money to have them coached even though they are both bright. That's why I feel angry about the way modern grammars are going- with people having their children coached to pass the exams, shoving out children who could really do with those places. Social mobility is virtually non-existent nowadays as poor children simply do not have the same chances as richer children to access the best education, especially if they have disengaged parents. Plus they are dogged by the questionable dogma that comprehensive is best for them.

60 years ago it was possible to succeed despite your parents and background. Nowadays background and parents are the biggest factors in a child's success, and that's a pretty screwed up version of a state education.

I should add that my father failed his 11+ but was encouraged by his sec mod teachers to take the 13+, which he passed. His teachers simply could not understand what he was doing in secondary modern. He was saved from a life of unhappiness by those men (there was no chance of him ever being any good at manual work- he couldn't even screw in a screw straight). His mother simply didn't care where he went.

My mother's parents believed that she was too pretty to be any good at school so failed to encourage her much either. She still passed hte 11+ and went to GS.

'Today's state primary education system is practically useless for most children - it's even worse for poorer children because the default position from educationalists is that they are automatically disadvantaged academically simply because they are poor, therefore automatically placing these children at an academic disadvantage!!'

That's a very odd statement, Float62. Do you have any evidence for your assertion that the state primary education system is practically useless for most children? And what do you mean by the second half of your statement - that recognising that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to struggle at school increases the chance of this happening?

I find both the continually denigration of the state education system and the obsession with grammar schools on MN really depressing.

My parents didn't go to grammar schools and managed to do much better than their parents. My mum could have gone (and wanted to go) to university but her mother persuaded her to go to teaching college instead because 'university isn't for the likes of us' (back in the days when teaching was not a university subject). My dad became a surveyor which was a big step up from the manual labouring my grandfather did. I went to state school (in a fully comprehensive system) and went on to university and got plenty of degrees. I could have gone to bloody Oxbridge (since MN seems to think that's all that matters) but I didn't want to, and even turned the buggers down.

The point is not that grammar schools = social mobility, but that the post-war period was remarkable for the (upward) social mobility in the population generally, whether people went to grammar schools or not. Now we're experiencing the effects of that period, and realising that mobility can go in any direction.

The reason there now seems to be so much less potential social mobility than there was in the 70s (for example) is because, as LondonMother's example shows, all those who benefitted from the opportunities to become middle class in the past (and there are loads of them) are now determined to do whatever it takes to keep their children where they are in the class system. It's got bugger all to do with the state system being awful (there may be some terrible schools, but the majority are not) and even less to do with grammar schools, and a lot to do with what happens to the second generation of those who've been socially mobile.

This is completely understandable on an individual level, and in some ways inevitable. DH and I have acquired the right kinds of cultural capital (and know enough about the education system) to give our children advice and support despite what is on offer at the local schools. My grandparents couldn't do that (otherwise my mother would not have become a teacher), but most of their contemporaries weren't any more knowledgable. Kids in equivalent situations now are up against kids whose parents know how the system works and have the resources to work that system. No wonder it's so bloody hard.