Is everybody happy with their choice of a NON-selective secondary education over a selective one?

[AdventuresWithVoles]

Genuine question.

Not simple. What use is IQ in isolation?

Do they test for IQ in school? I mean accurately rather than just assuming.

Sorry that should have been @exotic #Do they test for IQ in school....

IQ tests are meaningless as they are so racially and socially biased
also excellence in schools is not just the 3 rs
sport, music, art, drama, design : none of them are in IQ tests

Q : what are the things where the UK utterly leads the world?
A : Design and precision engineering
not in IQ tests, not in the grammar school tests and not in Gove's centrally planned new curriculum
only in a non selective school with wide resources will those skills be found

Whatever test they devise -one that takes the very top results. Selective schools are not supposed to be for the average or the moderately above average.
I wouldn't expect more than 2-5 DCs per primary school to get a place.

Ideally I would just abolish all grammar schools but if we have to have them then taking from a huge catchment so that most are at comprehensives.

"top results"
in what subjects?

I think IQ tests measure intelligence to some extent, if the test sitter comes to it cold. As with all things, practice makes, if not exactly perfect, a lot better. Forget creativity, what an IQ test does not measure is communication skills, either verbal or written - something that would surely be expected in a superselective school. Someone asked upthread what was the point of a school that takes the top 2%. While I don't really know the answer, the one obvious benefit is that it has very little impact on all the surrounding schools.

Much the best idea is the have them all in the same school until 14yrs and then choose whether they do the academic route, technical route, practical, vocational etc etc route.

I agree with Cecily. Above all I would like one that they all do cold-the first test being can they work out what is wanted-for themselves.

"Forget creativity, what an IQ test does not measure is communication skills, either verbal or written - something that would surely be expected in a superselective school."

I disagree. Some people with the highest intelligence don't have particularly good communication skills, but they are thoughtful, analytical and academic. And there are some people who aren't bright at all, but have the "gift of the gab".

I know what you mean, StepOut, though I am not sure how many not at all bright people have good written communication skills, especially at 11. But in terms of a superselective school, I think it would be very hard going without good writing ability.

In a super selective school you are looking for those with the highest intelligence-those with other skills can be well catered for elsewhere.

Instead of separating DCs on either side of a line (impossible and unfair in the middle) -it is like picking an Olympic squad-the very, very best make it under intense competition.

Part of the super selective process would have to be writing skills.

You would have to have some sort of handicap system to give the disadvantaged a level playing field.

However it is 'pie in the sky' and not possible. The sensible thing is just to have them in one school, with movement up and down the sets.

Top two percent in what is an interesting question.

If you use two, IQ tests and assume both tests are highly reliable, properly scaled, and correlate 0.7 (which is at best how well conventional IQ tests correlate). Assume you set the pass mark for each test so the top two percent from the general population pass. Then

1.8 percent of the population would pass one test but not the other.
3.83 percent would pass one test or the other (or both)
0.2 percent would pass both tests.

For those who have already passed one test, only 10.27 percent will pass the second.

So for a super-selective trying to select the top 2% using one test it will really be a lottery amongst the brighter children as to who gets places and you couldn't really say it was the top 2% of IQ that ended up there - just the top 2% of scorers on that particular test on that particular day.

Much better to be fully comprehensive and not have to worry about it.

I wonder what range of IQs can be found amongst academics, doctors, lawyers, politicians, journalists, engineers, architects, nurses, teachers, bankers, scientific researchers, inventors, plumbers, builders, policemen, accountants, entrepreneurs, firemen, etc? And whether those with the higher IQs are considered better or more successful at what they do? And what IQ measurement is counted for people who have specific learning disabilities, such as dyspraxia, or dyslexia, or mild autisitc spectrum disorders?

Is this country's biggest problem its failure to do a good job educating the "bottom" 75%, or its failure to make the most of the "top" 25%? What constitutes making "the most" of someone's education? What are we actually looking for that we aren't getting? Are those educated in the super selective grammar schools and private schools going off to do a wide range of useful, pioneering and creative things for society, or are a large proportion of them attempting to go for the "safe" professions or the best paid jobs, where they can guarantee a good standard of living and high status for the least possible personal risk? The number of such people being represented in the law and medicine, for example, indicates that they are excessively focused on a rather narrow range of careers and nobody has attempted to widen their horizons - are their schools letting society down by encouraging this herd mentality? Is making the most of your education simply a matter of getting yourself into a position of personal security and prosperity so that you can move away from your social "inferiors"?

As the army found when it first introduced IQ tests nearly a century ago, cognitive ability tests are only useful if they are a screening mechanism used to discover what teacher assessment has failed to find. In other words, we should be testing children to find out what skills and talents they have that might be hidden or unrecognised, that have been otherwise overlooked by schools and parents. For example, a child might have the potential to be a successful dancer or linguist or engineer or teacher, but because nobody in their family has particular experience of such occupations, this may go unseen unless every attempt is made at school to dig out what is best about the child. Otherwise it is all a pointless exercise.

One of the reasons that educational provision in the UK appears to underperform is that it is not clear what its purpose is, and it is trying to do too many things at once. I would argue that if teachers worked with smaller groups of children, along the lines suggested above, we would all be a lot happier with the outcomes.

I agree, exoticfruit, and this should apply equally in the independent sector IMO.

I think that we ought to work out the purpose of education as a priority.
Life is very different from 19th century and yet education seems stuck in that rut.
Good tests IMO would be ones that find the hidden potential, but at the moment if a DC is disadvantaged from birth any talents remain hidden and they can remain hidden even if they have all advantages. I have no idea how you set them!

More and more reasons for educating children together so that they get to show their actual potential by doing rather than by being able to see which reversed jigsaw piece fits into the puzzle!

Since no one seems to know what we should be testing for it makes far more sense not to test!

But do they really show their actual potential in comprehensives? Not necessarily.

In a good comprehensive school, yes of course.
In a chaotic one, absolutely not.

In terms of testing, we need to ask better questions, such as:

Which sports is the child physically best suited to?
Is it worth really encouraging them to learn an instrument, if they don't already?
Will they need extra help picking up foreign languages, or conversely should they be given the opportunity to learn lots of them?
What type of science are they best at and interested in?
What would we need to do to maintain and extend the child's interest in mathematics?
Does the child have marked visual/artistic ability? How might this best be expressed?

That kind of thing. At the moment we spend so much of our time filtering kids, not nurturing their learning.