New analysis - Grammar schools in England

[IntheMotherhood]

There's been quite a bit of engagement from various MNs recently over disproportionate focus on % A*/As league table and what this does to providing an actual education to our children.

There's also been discussion on super selective schools, specifically grammars and the continued obsession on 'getting in' being a pinnacle of 11+ academic ambition for many families.

Does it really make a difference if your child is of high prior attainment? Does the individual perceived benefit(s) of going to a Grammar outweigh the larger social disbenefit(s)?

Thought this new analysis published online today in the British Journal of Sociology of Education might be of interest.

Make yourself a cuppa and enjoy.

"....Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this article shows how the pupils attending grammar schools are stratified in terms of chronic poverty, ethnicity, language, special educational needs and even precise age within their year group. This kind of clustering of relative advantage is potentially dangerous for society. The article derives measures of chronic poverty and local socio-economic status segregation between schools, and uses these to show that the results from grammar schools are no better than expected, once these differences are accounted for...."

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2018.1443432

[cantkeepawayforever]

Do you believe that the KCL Maths school is necessary? As in, that those pupils couldn't efficiently and effectively been educated in the sixth forms of normal comprehensives?

Because the ONLY justification for high ability Special Schools seems to me to be the justification for other special schools - that the needs of those pupils are so rare, and so high in terms of e.g. staff expertise, equipment, access to rare resources - that they cannot be effectively and efficiently educated in mainstream

[noblegiraffe]

more common than you suggest.

I think that poor maths teaching due to a shortage of maths teachers is pretty common. The solution there is recruitment and training of maths teachers, not building a separate school, sticking the good teachers and bright students there and leaving the rest to flounder.

I think the really interesting statistic from recent years is that you only needed 79% on last year’s GCSE maths paper to be in the top 3% in the country and get a 9. That does not suggest to me that there are vast swathes of hugely bright mathematicians in the state system for whom school maths is trivial.

[cantkeepawayforever]

KCL Maths schools sounds more like, in music or dance terms, a good local dance school or a good county music service music school: it brings together and attracts the 'good' in each area, but it isn't the Royal Ballet School or Yehudi Menuhin as in it doesn't cater for the genuine outliers.

[whataboutbob]

Ice weasel, for what it’s worth I would have done exactly the same as you and so would 90% of mumsnet posters. I went to a grammar school in the 80s, it was full of kids who said their parents deplored grammar schools - but nevertheless sent their daughter to one. I’d be sending my son to a GS if only he’d been offered place, unfortunately he didn’t score highly enough so he’s off to a comp and we’ll make the best of it. So flame me.

[cantkeepawayforever]

X post. I agree that if what the KCL-type Maths School is doing is siphoning off good teachers and decent students, rather then genuinely providing for extreme outliers, then it is educationally wrong in the same way as grammar schools are wrong - it lessens the education of the many in favour of a smaller number who could perfectly well be educated with the many.

[cantkeepawayforever]

I’d be sending my son to a GS if only he’d been offered place, unfortunately he didn’t score highly enough so he’s off to a comp

Secondary modern. Not comp. Grammar scjool suypprters / those in grammar school areas never quite grasp this - that as soon as you have a grammar school in an area,. the other schoools are NOT comprehensives and CANNOT be compared to comprehensives elsewhere.

(Gloucestershire is a little odd, in that it does seem to also contain some very good 'comprehensive' schools despite these being technically secondary moderns - possibly due to the condensed geographical location of the remaining grammar schools, more of the 'other' schools are affected by them than might otherwise be the case. Each of those 'comprehensives' will still be lacking a number of their most able potential pupils, however)

[noblegiraffe]

I think there are lots of sixth forms in comprehensives which don’t offer further maths and who don’t have the ability to offer STEP. This is definitely an issue, and the KCL maths school is one solution - but as I said it only solves it locally (I know some students have quite a commute).

There is definitely an issue in this country where there is a lack of extra-curricular provision for bright maths students. Students who excel at sport can join any number of clubs. Fun classes for toddlers in football, gymnastics, cheerleading, swimming, martial arts all get competitive as the kids get older. There are loads of activities put on to get kids interested in coding and science. Maths? Not so much, unless your kid needs tuition because school is failing them. Pretty much everything to do with maths is put on schools, including what to do with bright kids. You don’t see schools pressurised to train up talented footballers so that we have enough players for the England squad.

[cantkeepawayforever]

That' a really good point, Noble. So maybe we should be pushing for 'Maths outreach' in the way that dance and music and sport do outreach?

www.rigb.org/education/masterclasses happen locally, and DD loved them, but perhaps on a larger scale / on a year round basis?

[Piggywaspushed]

I think we have one of these rarities at my school and his parents did not want him cosseted away. He is educated with the rest of his peers in a year group chronologically one above his age. He did AS l maths at 13 (got an A) and has, to my knowledge , been doing maths with sixth formers since year 9. As far as I know , all is going swimmingly. I have no doubt he could have been further accelerated but this was perceived to have been at the cost of integration with society and he is now a popular and well adjusted person, not a Ruth Lawrence type.

This took quite a lot of effort and planning when he transferred to the school aged 12 but he has been accommodated just fine in a mainstream setting and he's really not all that brilliant at English

[Piggywaspushed]

can , I abhor grammar schools but feel the need to mention that Buckinghamshire has some definite actual comprehensives in the more rural areas.

[Piggywaspushed]

Also , your one in however many mathematician would need special accommodating even within a grammar school, surely?

[whataboutbob]

Can’t keep- the school describes itself as a comprehensive so I’ll have to take its word for it on this occasion.

[TalkinPeece]

Those who simply could do GCSE at 11, and A-level at 13, so about 5 years ahead, are probably more worth designing a system around.
DD was at college with a lad who did exactly that
in mainstream comps
no problem.
He ended up with 7 x A at AS and 5 x A* at A2
and picked Imperial over Cambridge
having slotted into normal life the whole time

segregating people does NOT do them any favours

• look at the outcomes of the kids sent to Uni at 13 by pushy parents
  

Feynmann always said that even the brightest kid should be kept in normal school with their peers and stretched sideways
and he WAS a genius

[cantkeepawayforever]

Well, schools don't WANT to call themselves Secondary Moderns, with all those negative connotations, do they???

Many 'other schools' in grammar areas call themselves comprehensives, but that doesn't mean they are like comprehensives in wholly non-selective areas.

[HPFA]

There's no clear definition of what is a secondary modern and what is a comprehensive. For instance, at Bennet Memorial which is generally considered the top non-selective school in Kent High Attainers made up half the pupils who sat GCSEs in 2016 and those HAs actually got a better Attainment 8 score (65.6) than the HAs at either Dover GS for Boys (59.2) and Dover GS for Girls (64.8).

I'm sure many people would call this a comprehensive (and clearly a very good one!!) yet I would bet that many of its pupils have sat the 11+ and that many of its potential pupils are actually in the grammar schools. So there's also a sense that it's a secondary modern. It would be very interesting to talk to these pupils - do they feel they lost out by not going to the grammars even though it seems their attainment did not suffer?

[noblegiraffe]

cant a big problem with maths extra-curricular/outreach is getting kids to sign up.

My school asks for Y8s each year to do those masterclasses at the local uni, we get maybe 2-3 kids tops sign up. My DS loves maths, they had a company come to his primary to run an after school club one term. They were going to come back the next year, DS was excited, but no one else was and they cancelled due to lack of interest. DS will be doing science club instead.

I run a trip each year to the theatre to see the Maths Inspiration show, which is excellent. Really hard getting the numbers needed, even from sixth formers who have chosen to study maths.

[turnipfarmers]

Noble, what do you think of Kumon maths? We've not gone down that route for our DCs (top set maths but not maths genius material) but plenty have and have expressed surprise that we don't send them.

[HPFA]

Noble Have you ever had a pupil who you felt you genuinely couldn't challenge?

[cantkeepawayforever]

Turnip, at primary, I would say that Kumon arithmetic (because that is what it is at that level) is an expensive and boring way of achieving arithmetical fluency without challenging understanding.

I can usually identify 'Kumon'ed pupils, as they are extremely fast at basic arithmetic and fall over completely when faced with a question that cannot be answered using a standard method and which targets understanding / reasoning ability.

It may be different at secondary.

[Bobbybobbins]

Inthe

In all honesty I don't know - my own experience of grammar schools is very out of date as I left quite a while ago! Interestingly I found my GCSE presentation evening programme last week and it listed how many A-C grades everyone got. I was shocked to see about 10-15 who got fewer than 5. This would not happen in my comp (and obviously not in grammar schools nowadays!) Just a reflection of how schooling has changed. When I was there, teaching was generally dire, if you didn't engage you were ignored etc.

[Bobbybobbins]

On a separate point, my comp got higher progress 8 than my brother's former grammar school this year, showing that excellent teaching can push the HPA pupils as well as LPA!

[cantkeepawayforever]

My school asks for Y8s each year to do those masterclasses at the local uni, we get maybe 2-3 kids tops sign up.

That's a real shame - it's rationed at my DC's comp, in the sense that far more children want to do it than there are places for. DD got to do them because she is an able girl mathematician, DS missed out because he was 'merely' an able - rather than exceptionally able - boy.

[cantkeepawayforever]

Bobby, that's reasonably impressive, given that Progress 8 was rigged to favour the progress of more able pupils this year - in the previous year, a step from E to D was worth the same as from a to A, this year the A - A step was worth 3x (1.5 points) the step between the lowest grades (0.5 points).

From next year - well, actually, the year after, as some e.g. minority languages are still A* to G - it will become fairer across the ability range again, with numerical grades.

aAs Noble will remind us, though, Progress8 can be very affected by the performance of outliers, in particular when looking at smaller subgroups (e.g. just LPA or just HPA) rather than whole cohorts.

[TalkinPeece]

noble
DH has found that anything called "science" gets bums on seats but "maths" does not for outreach events
its one of the reasons that they now call it all STEM
as it means that they can slide the maths in under cover of ecology and explosions

[Bobbybobbins]

Can't

Yes we were pretty happy with that and actually 3 inner city comps in our average British city got over 0.3 progress 8 while the grammar got 0.1. I prefer it as a measure to the raw scores though there are statistical problems.