11+ test: I think it's unfair and elitist

[ParentOfOne]

We are helping our child prepare for the 11+ test, to apply for some selective and partially selective state schools (we won't be going private).

She is doing quite well, so, from a purely selfish perspective, I should be happy.
However, I can't help but think that the test is elitist and unfair

• it favours children who are well-rounded, and who are so at 11ish. A child who develops well academically but later, and/or who is stronger in the verbal part than the non-verbal, or viceversa, won't do well
• state schools do not typically prepare children for these kinds of tests, so the family situation becomes a huge differentiator: if your parents are more educated, and/or take you to the library, and/or can pay for tutoring, you'll have a huge advantage. Libraries have books to prepare for the test, but a teenager can go to the library alone, not a 10-year old.
• some of the verbal part is honestly too hard for a child of this age. I am not sure it is appropriate to expect that 10-11 year olds know vocabulary such as cantankerous, recalcitrant, cogitations, etc
• children who speak a Latin language (maybe also Greek? Not sure) have a huge advantage guessing the meaning of the more complex words. French-speaking, Spanish-speaking kids etc are much more likely to guess the meaning of initiate, abound etc even if they are not avid readers

My sense is that the brilliant child of parents who are uneducated, don't speak another language, don't take their children to the library etc stands almost no chance vs a less academic, less brilliant middle to upper middle class child who enjoys all the other advantages mentioned above.

There is of course the separate topic of whether it is even appropriate to separate kids by academic success, but my point is not about that, it is that the 11+ test is a very poor assessment because it doesn't take into account all the other factors.

Thoughts?

Exactly this.

I have had 2 able children educated via an excellent local comprehensive (measured by its value added / progress). If such schools were universal, there would be no need for the distinctly imperfect 11+ (which adequately selects against the least able and least well supported - which is all grammars need it to do - but is woefully poor at actually distinguishing between individual pupils of middle / high ability).

People would still want to claim that excellence in schooling is measured by highest raw results, not progress, though, which is obviously daft.

A million years ago, when I was in primary school, we regularly had verbal and non verbal reasoning tests, as part of our regular assessments. Everybody sat the 11+ at our school, we didn't even know it was the 11+. There was no stress, for us or our parents, nobody had to pay a tutor to prepare us, as this had all been included in the curriculum.

If the bipartite system involving grammars was genuinely ‘a better schooling process’, then the overall results of selective areas should be boosted by having them.

Once corrected for socio-economic differences ( grammars ALWAYS have a significantly more privileged intake than their local non-grammars) then matched grammar and comprehensive areas show no overall advantage in the bipartite system.

However poor the 11+ is at dividing children, it is the fact that this division is to no overall benefit that is the best argument against it.

@ThisPageIsBlank Obviously what works for them is to get the most intelligent people with the highest ability because it gives them competitive advantage! It's not in their interests to pass up talent by accident because of confounding factors in the recruitment process.

Obviously??? May I ask what your experience of corporate recruitment is like? Because I can't think of many people who know how it works who'd describe it in such a naïve, idealistic and unrealistic way.

Let's say that, out of 100 applicants, there are 20 very good ones.
If big corporate has a recruitment process that identifies 15 good candidates out of the 20, and they only need to hire 3 anyway, they are not going to invest squillions because, hey, it's inefficient that they are missing out on 5 good candidates, if they can already find more good candidates than they need. They're not. That's now how the corporate world works.

The immense efforts to widen recruitment pools in recent years and the use of such tests to remove bias due to privilege aren't (even if they like to portray them as such!) due to some sense of egalitarianism or altruism: they do this because it is commercially beneficial to recruit the most intelligent candidates.

I'd argue they do it more to appease the political masters of the time than because it benefits their bottom line. Just look at how the very same companies are rolling back their DEI and ESG initiatives now that Trump is back.
I'd also argue there was a very sinister pact between Big Tech and certain political extremists, whereby Big Tech played allies and paid lip service to the "values" in vogue at the time, and the politicians made sure not to inconvenience Big Tech with too much talk about antritrust, regulation, etc.

These unicorn schools definitely do exist. My kids go to one. Loads of GCSE options, non selective comprehensive, thriving arts and sports communities, masses of extra curricular options, performs above national average on progress 8.

You've misunderstood my post. It wasn't a unicorn school". It was a totally failure of a school. Teachers being locked in cupboards, thrown through windows, children regularly physically assaulted, some of the buildings burned down by students, drugs rife. Very little learning went on at all. It was closed down entirely some years after I left, the building then left to become derelict.

I passed the exams by reading the textbooks when I wasn't at school, and me and a handful of other academic children who taught ourselves saved them from having the worst grades in the entire country that year so that they came instead in second to last place.

@ThisPageIsBlank You've misunderstood my post. It wasn't a unicorn school". It was a totally failure of a school.

I am truly sorry for your experience. It is terrible. But it is also, forgive me, completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The fact that there were terrible schools doesn't mean we need more grammars, and doesn't address, let alone negate, all the problems with the 11+ that I and others have raised.

My point was to the PP who claimed that because her daughter achieved 9s this proves some comprehensive schools are the best model. My own experience - achieving the top available grades at the time while having an horrific experience at school and learning next to nothing during those wasted years - demonstrates that this is not a valid measure of a school's excellence, even on an individual basis, let alone when you look at the entire cohort and all of the children who not only won't have a full set of top grades but have also had their talents and abilities ignored or crushed out of them because of the insistence on treating children like robots and trying to make them all the same.

I assume you will be withdrawing your child from the process then OP?

No I didn’t misunderstand - you mentioned that the system was at fault. What it shows (from your awful experience - I’m sorry) is that it’s not necessary a systemic issue as there are good and poor schools out there.

No, I will not.

It's not a system I like, but choices in the area are limited.

Not that I need to justify myself to you, but the other, non-selective schools in the area are at a distance whereby it's a bit of a lottery: in some of the past years she'd have got in, in some others no.

So, no, I will not risk sending my child to a school which is likely to be a bad choice for her, just because I disapprove of the 11+ system.

If this means some smug forum users will want to criticise me for it, I couldn't care less.

There are plenty of systemic issues. Some schools do well in spite of the systemic issues. Many do not. There are problems which are common to pretty much all state schools (in England at least).

Because even the most brilliant child will benefit from some practice, considering the test is fairly different from what they do at school.

The 11 plus is definitely an outdated form of testing. Also, I'm over 60 and grew up in a place where comprehensive schools started in 1974 and all grammar schools ceased at that time.

It's more than time they didn't exist especially if other local schools are seen as poor relations or suffer because of the grammar system

In my opinion it is an indicator that we need more grammars. And also an indicator that the other children at that school and many like it were also being failed as a result of the comprehensive system which has never and will never enable even a majority of students to reach their actual potential, for all of the reasons I've stated. We need schools for academic children that all such children can access regardless of the area they live or demographic background. We also need, in all areas, choices of schools available to develop the specific talents of other children in the arts, sports, technical and practical skills with proper routes into careers, so that all children have a chance to thrive no matter what their area of skill. And to provide appropriate schools for children with SEN, which is an absolute joke at the moment.

I'm astonished anybody is defending the current system and - ironically - anybody doing so must only have experienced it in a very nice area yet is bemoaning how "unfair" it would be to implement a system that didn't disadvantage children in poorer areas who have to endure such disruptive and dysfunctional environments and have people claim it constitutes "education", whose parents cannot move to a nice catchment area for a "good" comp or afford extracurricular activities to foster their talents in art or music or sport or electronics or carpentry or anything else, that their school will entirely neglect to develop in any meaningful way.

It's no more elitist than competitive sport.
To do well in sport you have to have parents who can pay for your lessons, buy you the kit you need and spend hours and days of their lives driving you around to competitions and training sessions.

And when you start work, if you, say, want to be a project manager, you have to get qualifications. Not everyone can afford that.

Life is like that, always has been, always will be.

I don’t think this is right. I think GCSE grades are on a relative basis, so only so many students can get an A star/A/B etc, therefore over the whole cohort, the tutored children get better results at the expense of the non-tutored ones. The whole education system is a ranking system.

And for those who don’t like the 11+, do you realise there is effectively a 16+?

ALL 6th forms (not just grammar schools) are allowed to select their pupils and can use various criteria, including GCSEs, their own internal exams (including NVR if they want) and interviews. Not surprisingly the most academically successful state schools (in terms of A level results and Russell group/Oxbridge) have the most stringent selection criteria into their 6th forms.

A further point to consider re 11+ is that it is designed to select pupils from the most engaged and academically focussed families, not the brightest children per se. They want children whose families will be supportive of the academic system of the school.

I completely understand, but this is why the system continues to operate. Thousands of parents make the same choice as you because they care about their child more than about educational reform. It makes sense on an individual level, but it also means things won’t change.

…And because tutoring is so prevalent that your bright children will be up against equally bright children who have had tutoring and so you’re not giving them a level playing field.

There are actually alternatives to catchment areas eg lottery allocations which I believe has been tried in Brighton. A lot of people have bought houses in the catchment areas of good schools though so would be very annoyed with any govt that did this, so it isn’t a vote winner!

What is impossible is stopping parents helping their own children….. So even if grammars and private schools were abolished and everyone was obliged to send their children to the local comp, some children would get better outcomes because they were better supported at home and/or were privately tutored.

@KnickerlessParsons
It's no more elitist than competitive sport.
[...]
Life is like that, always has been, always will be.

??? So what??? We should welcome a patently unfair and socially elitist system.... just because there is unfairness in other parts of life??? If anything, life is already so unfair that we should try to reduce the unfairness, not increase it!!!

@ThisPageIsBlank In my opinion it is an indicator that we need more grammars.

It indicates nothing of the sort!!! I can't help but notice that your answers to all the criticism raised about the 11+ has been a deafening silence!

• What about the advantage granted to better off families who can afford tutoring?
• What about the children who are not well-rounders and who excel in some subjects but not all?
• What about the children who develop and mature later?
• What makes you think that it is sensible to select children, up to the point of potentially determining a significant part of their future, at the age of 10-11? What makes you think that's fair, that it isn't too young an age?

I'm astonished anybody is defending the current system
I am astonished that is your interpretation. Criticising the 11+ does not mean defending the current system!!!

Agreed. You cannot eliminate disadvantage/ privilege from life. It is impossible. However, I'd suggest that the school system should be designed to mitigate this as much as possible by giving every child the opportunity to focus on and receive appropriate support/ environment/ facilities to develop their specific skills and talents. This is the best way to give every child the best life chances and also to treat them as individual human beings who have value. The current comprehensive system actually entrenches disadvantage and reduces social mobility, ironically, through the delusion that if we pretend everyone is the same they will somehow become so and then utopia will follow. But it hasn't, has it?

Formative years are critical to determining life outcomes for the majority. Children have no choices about these matters: they are the most vulnerable members of our society. And our future. Funding education properly so that appropriate schools with different specialisms are available to all children is absolutely essential if we wish to try to turn around this country's declining living standards, aside from it being a moral necessity.

The current system of one size fits all cannot and will not ever achieve this and it should be the top funding priority among all public services to overhaul the entire thing, scrap the current system entirely and start from scratch drawing on models from abroad which have been proven to have better outcomes (lower mental health issues in young people, lower youth unemployment, lower levels of NEETs, lower student debt, higher academic standards, better technical training, fewer skills shortages in the economy).

What I find so odd (not in a grammar area myself) is that it is a state system and yet the state primary schools don’t prepare their pupils. It’s like sitting GCSE Maths and English without ever doing mocks or exam practice. Why is that?

With respect, I've already addressed every single one of those points if you actually read my posts.

@Worried1305 I completely understand, but this is why the system continues to operate. Thousands of parents make the same choice as you because they care about their child more than about educational reform. It makes sense on an individual level, but it also means things won’t change.

I disagree.
I don't support the grammar system but I have had no role, neither direct nor indirect, in it.
What you say might apply to parents who may have lobbied for the creation of more grammars or the expansion of the existing ones, but that's not me.
I didn't move to a grammar area.
It just so happens that in our area:

• there is one good, partially selective school
• a few other good schools use a banding system based on an 11+ like test. The main criterion is distance, but it's calculated by band. The top band always has a greater maximum admission distance, so a higher score increases the chances of admission.