Would you send your child to a grammar school ?

[HeGrewWhiskersOnHisChin]

This is going to be quite long and rambling but I wanted to find out how much of my own experiences are clouding my judgement.

Okay, where we live there are not any great schools unless you are in the correct feeder schools, which we aren't as we moved to the area after Reception.

I know people say that all the time, but it's true - I'm not a snob I promise!

There are a few grammar schools within a commutable distance, and after researching all the local schools, look like the best choice.

I say choice as they are not necessarily an option for us. DD is bright, on the top table (apparently), but as I said already we live in a really deprived area. Half the children don't even wear the uniform let alone turn up for school. If she were at a better performing school she might be more average, I don't know.

So anyway I was going to do a practice verbal and non-verbal reasoning test with her just to see if she had any natural aptitude or not, and then consider whether we should try for a grammar or not.

BUT... She doesn't want to go to a school like that, she wants to go to one with normal people.

Oh the irony! Her words are exactly I said to my very working class parents and my head teacher after turning down a place at a grammar school. My dad was angry but my mum let me make my own mind up.

Subsequently I went on to a 'normal' school and academically I achieved as well as I would have at the grammar, but but but I can't help thinking that if I'd have mixed with girls from the other school, I may have not ended up pregnant at 18 living in a council flat !

I know my DD is very easily led, even more so than me (she gets it from her dad's side) and I think when she goes to secondary school she'll be more interested in boys and makeup than getting As.

So what should I do?

I said it'd be long!

I am also ambivalent about the existence of 'ordinary' (v. super-selective) GSs in this day and age, too. But I completely understand why if you lived in a GS area like Kent of Bucks you'd be looking towards the school with the selected top 20% of academic intake: they're there because someone was interested and concerned enough about that DC to enter, and highly probably tutor towards the 11+. That in itself will ensure 'school-ready' DC.

I'd like to feel it was possible to successfully educate all DC of all ability on one campus; but I know this is rarely possible. For a start, such a school, containing suitable facilities and teaching for the top 2% and PRU's (and 'compulsory' parenting courses etc), and everything in between with SureStart thrown in as well would be huge and cost millions to run. Apart from anything else, I believe it can take certain sorts of teachers to teach certain sorts of DC (my excellent, oddball, other-worldly GS teachers would've been torn apart in a failing comp!) so you'd need heaps of teachers.

As for super-selective; well, I can see the point of them in the same way I can see the point of special schools catering for other specialised needs, but they must only be for the abnormally, hyper-bright as evidenced from 7 years of primary education as vouched for with supporting evidence by the Head Teacher of that primary, not the result of one heavily tutored-for exam. In fact, in the absence of that happening, they can be 'hijacked' by sharp-elbowed parents wealthy enough to nail the the right prep school or tutor. Which is not to say that all super-selected DC are in their schools under false pretences, but until SS's only cater to the genuinely hyper-bright, I'm not sure they belong in a modern state education system either.

"I'd like to feel it was possible to successfully educate all DC of all ability on one campus; but I know this is rarely possible. "

Seems to happen in most of the country!

My DD1 is at an all girls comprehensive with a city wide catchment and lottery system for entry into year 7. They have just had outstanding GCSE results - 5A*-C inc English and maths of 91%. There ard girls from all backgrounds and abilities there. Comprehensive education CAN work.

Especially since 'successfully educate all DC of all ability' does not mean 'have a wonderful league table score'.

You know that day in the summer when there are pictures all over the papers of girls jumping for joy clutching their exam results? They aren't all from grammar schools, you know.

If you add together the results from a grammar school and its attendant secondary modern, you get something virtually indistinguishable from the results of a comprehensive in a similar catchment.

They aren't all from grammar schools, you know.
Yes, I think everyone does know that. My niece got a stellar set of GCSEs from a comp and is now at Cambridge.

If you add together the results from a grammar school and its attendant secondary modern, you get something virtually indistinguishable from the results of a comprehensive in a similar catchment.

If that's the case is there a problem? From the way people talk about secondary moderns, wouldn't you have expected the comps to do better overall?

League tables are a pretty good way of comparing academic achievement in a selective school. They don't really seem to say much about whether a school is serving all pupils well - the ones who no matter how hard they try or how good the teachers are just aren't going to get a C at GCSE or equivalent.

"If you add together the results from a grammar school and its attendant secondary modern, you get something virtually indistinguishable from the results of a comprehensive in a similar catchment.

If that's the case is there a problem? From the way people talk about secondary moderns, wouldn't you have expected the comps to do better overall?"

Why? Isn't it more pertinent to say "from the way people talk about grammars, wouldn't you have expected the grammar schools to do better overall?" Otherwise what's the point of having such a socially divisive system?

I would send mine to a GS like a shot if I could afford to live anywhere where they had them. I went to one myself and am all in favour. (I'm a teacher btw).

Why are you all in favour?

And how would you feel about your child failing the test and being sent to a secondary modern school?

I don't even know how you would find out what a schools league table score is. With my DC's infant school and primary I have gone with the catchment school - the closest school where most of their mates live nearby.
It'll be the same with their secondary school tbh. They will be schooled with their peers unless they particularly decide they want to sit the 11+ and if they pass they particularly want to go to the grammar.
I hope I will teach them enough to know that education is what you take from it,and you need to have your own goals and focus on them for you. In a happy environment with their friends - not isolated, nor with any expectations of what they should become,because of what I would like them to become.

"I have been on MN a very long time, and I have yet to see a parent admit their child is at a poor comprehensive, with low exam results and with worrying behavioural and truancy issues."

Could that possibly be because there aren't quite as many of them as you think there are?

Why are you all in favour?

Because I don't think one size fits all, in a nutshell. We did the tours of a variety of schools and chose the one which seemed like the best fit (to DD as well as to us). It wouldn't suit everyone.

Whether we like it or not, people are always going to come up with some way of dividing schools - a method which is (at least in part) based on a child's ability and needs seems not unreasonable to me compared with various other means (money - private; money - buying a good catchment ; religion of parent ; pretended religion of parent)

It is all down to degrees really isn't it Beer.

If the school was having a problem with knife violence and massive truancy I would be trying to get my DC's into a alternative school,of course I would.

But that's an extreme,and I think some lax discipline and a number of the pupils being disengaged (whilst clearly not being ideal) isn't necessarily the end of the world.I would have thought it's not uncommon tbh purely because of the nature of the beast (come on,these are teenagers after all!)

It's back to what I was saying about the attitude the child brings to school. Self discipline and determination are skills every bit as valuable to teach our kids as times tables and english imo.

I don't get this MN mystique about grammar schools. I really really don't get it.

Grammar schools have kids that are monumentally badly behaved. Just because the kids are bright does NOT mean that they are well behaved or good influences or hard working. For the most part, they are scruffy, bad-mannered and loutish. I'm told this is normal for teenagers.

DD attends a superselective grammar school. Her manners and conduct at home are appalling, as are those of most of her peers. 76% of them will get all A*/A at GCSE. But they are still pretty shambolic, frankly.

even the best comprehensives only hoped to gain roughly 70% of pupils gaining A* to C, at GCSE.

what's with this 'only 70%' - in an unselective intake that suggests to me that they may be pushing more kids along an 'academic' pathway than is necessarily a good thing.