New Grammar Schools: good or bad?

[thing47]

I see Liz Truss has announced she is in favour of creating more grammar schools (Rishi Sunak has opted for saying he will allow existing ones to expand, which is in keeping with current Conservative philosophy). What does everyone think of this? A good idea, or not? I know we have quite a lot of teachers on this board, be interested to hear what you all think.

@HPFA - maybe that’s because secondary moderns have not been funded as they should be (ie more per pupil than grammars due to greater need)? I agree that unless they can provide an attractive alternatives, they shouldn’t expand the grammar system.

people get new bikes for getting an apprenticeship and getting onto further education college courses. People compete to get into sports or performing arts specialist schools. Why not have ones for specialisms where U.K. has a lack of people? Or maybe give kids at secondary moderns an extra year of education to do their gcses - so they can consolidate their learning and have a higher chance of passing. They can then join sixth forms or further education colleges.

fairly terrible idea, wouldn't play well at all with the wider voting public but certain to play well with the tory membership i.e. couple of hundred thousand home counties bigots with an average date of birth that's somewhere in the 1940s or 50s.

I disagree with segregation, my child mixes with a more diverse group now he's at grammar. He is on FSM and our local comp doesn't have any diversity- everyone is from the same area.
SEN children and children in care are given priority at the local grammar- they are given allowances on time during the test and take priority during allocation of places.

How is it that you have a local comp and a grammar school in the same area? Surely the comp would be more diverse if the grammar school children weren't creamed off?

Grammar schools tend to be ethnically diverse, but if your ds's grammar school is genuinely more socially diverse than an average comprehensive in a non-grammar area, that would be incredibly unusual and a massive achievement on the part of that particular grammar school. How have they managed to buck the national trend in this way? I presume that there must be an army of academics studying the school to see how they have achieved this.

@Anothernamechangeplease places like Reading which just have one super selective grammar taking a small number of children from a wide geographical area also have comprehensive schools - it is 100% selective counties like Bucks which have grammar and upper schools.

I disagree that grammar schools are ethnically diverse - and certainly not representative of the ethnic mix of their catchment area.

OK, the ethnic diversity thing may differ in different areas.

I grew up in an area with super selectives, and agree that there were fully comprehensive schools in that area, not least because the so-called super selectives were so bad at identifying the brightest pupils. There were plenty of kids who "should have" got into the grammar and didn't, and plenty who did get into the grammar but shouldn't have done!

What definitely isn't the case in any of the super selective schools that I've seen is that they are socio-economically diverse. They were packed full of middle class kids who had been extensively prepped for the 11+ exam, either by one of the private primary schools, which seemed to exist solely as an 11+ factory, or by kids who were heavily tutored (sometimes by their parents). I therefore assumed that @Itiswasitis90 was not talking about a super-selective, but I could be wrong.

If there is genuinely a super selective school out there that has somehow managed to crack the longstanding problem of creating a level playing field for disadvantaged pupils with regard to its admissions process, then I would be very interested in hearing about it, but in the absence of any evidence, I remain sceptical that such a school exists.

Because both the schools are in the catchment area of a large white working class estate. The grammar school has children coming from out of area up to 40 miles away and much more ethic minorities attend the grammar school.

@Anothernamechangeplease
How is it that you have a local comp and a grammar school in the same area?
Grammars in our county do not select by distance from the school, so kids travel, including from other counties. I think the grammars take about 10% of secondary kids in the county and the test is only for those who opt to take it. Some kids come from private schools and would continue with private if they didn't make the grammar. So I would call the other schools comps.

We are a low income working class family but DS's friends parents I've met seem better off (and about 10 years older than me!).

Sorry what is a super selective school? Aren't all grammar school the same?

Here is a snapshot of the schools allocation policy. In the registration process children you notify them the child had sen and extra support is put in place. I know other grammar schools that go the extra mile and give disadvantaged children priority etc.

Yes, I have already acknowledged that grammar schools may be ethnically diverse, but that wasn't really what I was talking about. When I mentioned segregation in a previous post, I think I made it clear that I was talking about segregation along class lines. You responded saying that this wasn't the case at your ds's school. Consequently, I was asking how that school had managed to achieve socioeconomic diversity, but as you clearly didn't understand what I was getting at, I'm assuming that it probably hasn't.

Without a catchment I think. Ours don't have them, you could apply from anywhere then move into the area if you wanted, or commute.

Ours seems quite middle class and the FSM percentage is low, but I don't know what percentage would be low waged working class but not FSM.

OK, so pretty standard stuff then. I think it's extremely unlikely that this kind of admissions process would eliminate the massive advantage that wealthier pupils have with regard to getting admission. Of course, it's easy to say that you'll prioritise kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who meet the selection criteria, but how many disadvantaged kids are actually able to meet those criteria without having access to the extensive prep for the entrance tests that their wealthier peers enjoy? It simply isn't a level playing field, and the stats back this up. Even after adjusting for KS2 attainment, far fewer pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds gain admission to selective state schools. Segregation by class.

Not all children with SEN have an EHCP though.

Some grammars have a far higher number of kids sitting the test relative to the number of places available and therefore greater competition and a smaller chance of getting a place. So not all the same.

Is there information on household income for schools available, percentage of students in each income quartile/quintile or similar?

its not that.

In Bucks (non super selective but 100% selective) there is a qualification score of 121 - this is a standardised score. Everyone who gets 121 or above is deemed qualified. Places are then essentially offered within catchment by distance from school (catchment siblings and the like having priority) - so you are either qualified or not qualified and one qualified score isn’t better then another.

Superselectives select by score - some have catchment some don’t but basically all scores are ranked and if they have 150 spaces the hugest 150 scores will be offered places - if one declines then the 151st highest is offered and so on.

I'm not aware of any official stats on this, but there is a lot of academic research. All of the studies that I have seen seem to confirm that grammar schools substantially favour children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This is true even after KS2 attainment has been adjusted for.

People like to argue that grammar schools would promote social mobility, but all of the evidence seems to suggest quite the contrary.

I was just curious about our school. There's info on FSM but nothing to differentiate working working class families like ours from middle class that I've seen. So it seems kids like DS (low income lone parent family) are invisible on the stats.

Yes, this is how ours works, no catchment means they do need to select by score.

In Australia there is info like this online

Yes, he will be invisible on the school's published stats, but this is the sort of thing that researchers have looked at.

I don't seem to be able to post the images, but there are some graphs and stats here.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X18787820#:~:text=For%20those%20from%20median%20SES,distribution%20attend%20a%20grammar%20school.

Thanks, that is interesting. The distribution seems similar to the Australian selective school DS would have gone to (other image was his primary, stark difference!). It seems like selection used to help (my grandad was a working class grammar school child, as were some of his brothers) but at some point stopped working?

I don’t know whether it ever helped in a ‘mass’ - statistically significant - way. A few ‘deserving’ cases were ‘saved’, but I suspect the class / income split was not very different. The difference may have been the existence of well-paid long term jobs in heavy industry - mining, factory work, steel works - for those who would typically have attended secondary moderns and left school for jobs between 14 and 16 depending on the date. Also perhaps more ‘catch up’ education - night schools, working men’s institutes - for those like my grandfather who needed a second chance at education for employment in the difficult late 20s / early 1930s.

Remember that a very small proportion of 18 year olds in the 1950s /60s went to university, and there were plenty of respectable ‘white collar’ as well as ‘blue collar’ work for those who left school at 16 or 18. With today’s ‘employment arms race’ meaning that graduates now take jobs previously open to school leavers, education to 18 that at least gives a shot at university entrance for far more of the age group (far more than attend grammars, even in wholly selective areas) is important.