Do British selective schools underperform?

[justanotherdaduser]

Sorry about the clickbait title but that's exactly the question.

This was triggered after reading about Stuyvesant High School in New York in some other forum. It's a selective state high school in New York. Their list of notable alumni, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stuyvesant_High_School_people , is jaw dropping. Multiple nobel laureates, Field medal and Wolf prize winners, technology pioneers, and pretty much any other field of human endeavour I can think of.

While looking at notable alumni from the most selective British schools, there is nothing like that breadth. Eton for example, after removing the royals and politicians from their list, has a pretty short list of notable alumni given how long they have been around, with a heavy bias towards humanities - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College

Similarly others, in the state sector, say, Queen Elizabeth Boys en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth%27s_School,_Barnet

Same in the girls' schools too, short list of notable alumni mainly in media and humanities. Though with the girls' school I understand that the historical bias against women having careers will naturally limit the numbers.

So the question is -

Given that the top selective British schools are apparently getting around top
5% of the students by abilities in a cohort, and top 5% in either UK and US will have comparable potential when they start their academic career, why do British selective schools produce so few high achievers in a field, espcially outside politics, media and arts?

Possibilities that come to my mind -

The Wikipedia pages of British school are incomplete (probably unlikely, as the schools and their alumni are quite motivated to edit these to fill missing information?)

The British selective schools are not in fact getting top 5% of the students in their cohort. They are just getting children whose parents have prepared them really well for eleven plus. These children "underperform" eventually. They are still high achievers, will go to good universities, have good jobs, but unlikely to make path breaking contributions in their fields compared to their US peers (or elsewhere?)

The school outcomes reflect the nature of British economy and society. There isn't enough incentive in the field of sciences, the economy does not demand much either or at least not as much as the US economy. So the schools do not produce pioneers.

Something else?

What are you actually trying to achieve?

Just wondering why do the highly selective schools here produce so few major contributor in the fields of various sciences and technology

But I have good answers here

-- that selective schools don't exist everywhere across the country. So most children, including the very talented ones, don't go to selective schools. Looking for them in a few selective school wiki entries is pointless.

-- there is a cultural preference for humanities, especially in the private selective schools maybe?

-- my sampling is bad, many grammar schools folded and those don't have websites

-- probably some others too, yet to go through all the responses

it illustrates the dominance of humanities in British selective schools in the second half of twentieth century.

Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures"

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

Dr Brian Cox : Hulme Grammar School (state)
Maggie Aderin-Pockock : La Sainte Union Convent School (state)
Sir Chris Whitty: Malvern College (private)
Jonathan van-Tam: Boston grammar School (state)

Perhaps in the UK there is less 'old school tie' / need independent means towards getting on in science, so scientists can come from everywhere, rather than relying on contacts or being able to survive on limited earned income in early years (actors, barristers)?

That's a brilliant quote! Thanks, I haven't read this, but will do.

Reminded me of recent leaked WhatsApp chat where Johnson had to be explained difference between mortality rate expressed as a probability and the same expressed as a percentage.

My famous school alumni are a minor pop star and a comedian who got big on TikTok.

Take that, Eton.

I suspect you are looking at the wrong peer group here. Eton is not the right comparator for Stuyvesant. The US equivalents of Eton are East Coast elite boarding schools like Groton, Philips Academy Andover, Choate etc. They were set up to produce leaders in the worlds of politics, the law, finance, military etc and that’s what they do. Schools like Stuyvesant High School in New York emerged to educate clever children of immigrants and the urban middle classes. As the upper class dominated fields like law and politics was not an option for them, they focused on the sciences. If you want to compare the UK with the US, compare Eton with Groton/Phillips Academy, and Stuyvesant with UK selective grammar schools (many of which unfortunately were closed in the 1970/80s).

Because the people who promote and celebrate success most publicly are those from arts and humanities.

Science is not so good as self promotion or celebrating success. We should be. Science is bloody awesome.

As others have said, the UK has nothing halfway comparable to the Stuy school, where tens of thousands of kids sit the entrance exam, it's the standalone best of the best in the whole city; each cohort is c 700 kids strong; there are no fees.

Somewhere like King's maths school, mentioned by others, isn't really the same at all: it's new; the entrance/aptitude test isn't at all widely sat [this is by far the biggest difference]; its curriculum is too narrow for most tastes; it's only a sixth form; it's very new and not established.

None of our private schools are anywhere near comparable, mostly because the fees block nearly all would-be applicants.

Out of interest, I just counted the SPGS alumnae in their science list and it has 13 people in it. The Stuyvesant one has 32 across Maths and sciences. So there are a third as many notable alumnae listed in this area compared to Stuyvesant alumni. But St Paul's Girls' is a much smaller school, less than a quarter the size of Stuyvesant. So those look initially like fairly similar rates of high achievers. I would imagine every British school you are looking at has much much smaller numbers than this very large American school. There are no schools in the UK with 800+ students in a year group.

However, as well as the size of the school in total, a British school will have students spread across 7 school years whereas American high schools are just four grades - basically GCSE and A Level years in the UK. So in fact the comparison isn't with the size of the school, but the size of the intake. One grade at Stuyvesant has more students in it than the whole of St Paul's Girls'. The intake there is around 100 to 110. So in fact, using just the top four school years as a comparison number, we are talking about roughly a seventh of the numbers of students. If you look at it like that, St Paul's Girls' is doing rather better than Stuyvesant.

Valid point, yes, few other posters mentioned this.
I live here now but grew up elsewhere and didn't have that background about Eton and the now closed grammars. So was comparing apples and oranges.

And for my next trick, I will demonstrate how Matt Hancock was the best Health Minister...

Not really true, we never had an equivalent, there were never grammar schools in urban poor areas like Stuy , it would have been the equivalent of opening a grammar school with no fees in the 1900's in the middle of the East End of London. (Hint, it never happened)

US high schools take pupils from 15 studying for 3 years before entering college. There are no equivalents in the UK. State grammars admit vast majority at 11, where many pupils enter following intense tutoring, while entry at 16 is very limited (plus a large number leave school at this age). Even the new selective sixth forms (such as King's Maths School) are never going to have the scale and breadth of Stuy.

I can't remember the exact percentages but I'm pretty sure that more GB Olympic competitors, actors, journalists, Drs and engineers, were privately educated than for the population as a whole.

I'm inclined to reserve my pity (and my anger) for people who didn't get those opportunities.

The only one of those that surprises me is Engineers.

Olympic competitors - getting to that level costs a lot of time and money from parents in formative years before any external funding kicks in

Actors - need financial backing and to be able to fail until you make a name for yourself

Journalists - traditionally a not what you know but who you know profession, especially in broadcasting

Doctors - very long training so benefits from family money to support you through longer university time

Engineers - ?

I'm pretty sure the raw stats wouldn't be in my favour there if I tried that!

Can't see that quote without thinking of this!

“Pointerdogsrule
Not really true, we never had an equivalent, there were never grammar schools in urban poor areas like Stuy , it would have been the equivalent of opening a grammar school with no fees in the 1900's in the middle of the East End of London. (Hint, it never happened)”

The equivalence is not in the location of the schools (i.e. whether they were urban or rural), but in the fact that both schools (Stuyvesant & UK grammar schools) educated clever children from non elite backgrounds who went on to make careers in the sciences (instead of politics, the law, finance etc, which were dominated by the upper classes).

Engineers.... to get into the top courses, need to go to a school where Further Maths A-level is offered.

that's a decent narrative but I'm not really sure it's at all true. it's only one measure, but at the really elite level, state schools these days do much better in terms of Oxbridge admissions than than they used to in grammar schools' heyday, it's not even particularly close.

Someone said it was only recently UK schools helped the poor. In fact some of our most famous schools were set up in the 1500s or 1600s to help the children of the poor, not just the rich.

Anyway the thread seems to be suggesting the 12% of sixth formers at fee paying schools do not produce enough scientists. I don't think the UK does too badly - Chinese parents even choose UK schools at times for our freedom of thought and scientific ideas as we tend not to learn by rote in private and state sector here. The UK technology sector is pretty good, so good some countries like to copy our technology.

Grammar schools were called that because they did grammar and it was Latin and Greek that was largely taught in the 1800s in many british "best" schools until all the other subjects started to be taught. That is the history. Today fee paying, state grammars and comprehensives all do a fairly good job at teaching science A levels. My daughter at an all girlsfee paying school (founded in the 1800s by Miss Buss and Miss Beale) did science A levels as do many of the girls there.

However we only have about 70m people in the UK whereas US is about 330m and China and India are many times that size at about 1.4 billion so we certainly punch above our weight in the UK - we do massively well for science and technology - even just looking at covid vaccines we are world leading.

@Xenia ,

so we certainly punch above our weight in the UK - we do massively well for science and technology
Actually this is really not true anymore. This belief is quite widespread, probably because it was true sometime back (quite sometime back!), but not true anymore.

One test of whether we punch above our weight would be number of patent applications. And adjust for population by counting patents per million residents.

Our World in Data has a good comparison chart here for this ourworldindata.org/grapher/patent-applications-per-million?tab=chart&country=GBR~DEU~FIN~USA~CHN~FRA~KOR~JPN~SWE~AUT~CHE~ITA

Also posting a screenshot here.

The countries that clearly punch above their weight are South Korea, Japan, USA, China, Germany, and to a lesser extent Finland and Austria.

UK clusters around several other similar advanced European economies, France, Sweden etc.

It's not bad to be at that level at all!

But no one would describe it as 'punching above our weight'

Second thing to note would be UK's declining performance as it's falling further behind in technology areas that are seeing large number of new patents.

Second chart just shows US, Germany and UK (to stop super start Korea shadowing everyone else!). You will find UK patents per million had been falling for over two decades now while Germany remains flat and US racing ahead.

As for considering some Chinese parents' decisions to send their DCs to British private schools as evidence that everything is fine with the private sector, I would say that's a pretty low benchmark.

Are the Finnish, Americans, South Koreans, Japanese or Germans sending their DCs here?

Sorry, my screenshot upload didn't work :(
Posting it here again -

@PhotoDad
That is not true about engineering. Not many years ago few did FM. Or needed it. It was seen as something mathematicians did. Few others bothered. You also really don’t need to go to a “top school “ to be a very good engineer either! If you look back over many years, outstanding engineers have maths. Their university courses weren’t about computer programming! Far more about being practical engineers. Sheffield certainly didn’t ask for anything more than maths. Few went to Imperial or Cambridge so working engineers went to places like Sheffield. All courses were BEng or Bsc. DH has employed engineers for decades. I would be amazed if more than a handful of employees have been privately educated.

The privately educated minority we do know, who all did general engineering at Oxford, Durham and Cambridge, never became engineers at all. They went into the City instead, or became accountants, which is still a massive trend. They are not engineers though. Far from it. The stats don’t reflect this.