Grammar schools
 

Back on the island, our wolf in sheeps clothing new PM seems keen on re-introducing grammar schools. Really not sure what to think about that, as obviously they lead to social division, but on the other hand they are far more academic than most of the comps?

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Why is that?

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Er, the exact opposite is true - a grammar school allows children to achieve their academic potential irrespective of their parents' ability to pay, which is good for the children, and good for the country. Comprehensive education was a socialist experiment in social engineering on the patently false assumption that all children have equal potential. It is a great pity IMO, that despite disarming the unions, Mrs Thatcher never got around to rolling back that particular socialist programme. :(

The US's "no child left behind" program is equally absurd, and IMO all children should be given equal opportunities, but prescribing universal education in a foreign language and sciences, among other things, when some children struggle with basic reading and arithmetic, is daft for several reasons.

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I think grammar schools are a bit irrelevant these days when tuition is nearly 10,000 pounds a year. The purpose of grammar schools, because HE was effectively free at the point of delivery and therefore rationed, was to put middle class pupils on an early university track while limiting HE opportunities of working class children. Now if people want to give their children some competitive advantage they just buy a house in a good catchment area or send their children to "independent" schools.

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Where did that notion come from, when access to the local grammar school was based on perceived academic ability? :confused:

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At 11 years old? So you don't think social and economic conditions would have an impact on the academic achievement of small child?

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Not much. The 11-plus is essentially a test of logic and cognitive ability. Up to that age most academic learning is done at school, so the impact of homework, and the time and suitable space to do it, is relatively low.

My daughter was subject to TWO sessions of academic assessment of her cognitive ability and social skills, totaling about two hours, including an hour-long session with a certified child psychologist, and the rest by an admittance specialists at the school, before she was offered a place ...... in kindergarten! :blink:

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I don't know? A focus on learning rather than exploring. Higher expectations? Brighter cohorts? More engaged parents (although ironically, that's a table that has been turned).

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I count myself fortunate to have passed the 11+ and subsequently attended the local county grammar school. It raised the expectations of a boy from a poor family to become the first in his extended family to attend a university.

It proved to be divisive however. Early on my friends would call of an evening to play. But, with at least 90 minutes homework every weekday evening and at least 2 hours of a weekend, this meant that evening play was out of the question. Friends stopped calling and I became something of an outsider.

Discipline was strict, education was intensive and competition encouraged with, as I recall, monthly exams, intermediate tests and published results with class positioning. All a good thing in my view.

It forced pupils to work, to think and to achieve, and it opened a door for a poor boy.

I recall much shaking of my head when I latterly realised how things had changed since I went to school. Marking, for example, had turned upside down. At my school you started off with full marks and marks were deducted for getting anything wrong, so your answer had to be perfect to get full marks. Latterly I learned that pupils start off with no marks and accumulate marks if they get something correct.

I was quite pleased to get 2 C's and a D for my A levels, and anyone who received an A was exceptional indeed. I despair at today's results where multiple A's are the rule. The reasons behind holding examinations seem to have been subjugated to political expedience.

I welcome the return of grammar schools. Although a socialist, I never agreed with the social experiment that was comprehensive education. It was dogma dictating to common sense. Think of all those bright poor kids who were continually subjected to peer pressure to conform with no external pressure to do better, they were failed by politicians, many of whom attended grammar schools but disgracefully refused to pass on the benefits to younger generations.

So where would I be now if I had not passed the 11+? Probably a retired painter and decorator, as was my father, and living somewhere in London.

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Well I passed my 11+ and elected not to go to Grammar School. So here I am now in Canada making $70,000 annual salary and quite content. I don't dwell on what would have happened if I had attended Grammar school. Would i have gone to Uni or still joined the Army? Whats done is done. In the 70s grammar schools were touted as a higher education than the local secondary schools. I know people from both who are in jail or have been successful or just normal run of the mill folk. Its the Chipping Norton types I ****ing despise :lol:

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It's not though. No real academic learning is done before 11 yrs of age at all and the ability to "outshine" your year group is highly dependent on the parents level of education, which, alas, in turn depended on their parents income.

A self-fulfilling loop, which I benefitted from as a sprog but which I don't think needs reintroducing today.

Quite the opposite.

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We each have our own view, but consider a world where a choice of school is either a single category secondary school or fee paying private school.

Those with means will generally choose to send their children to the private sector, and this does matter. I remember one university interview I had where the interviewer described my school as 'only a county grammar'.

Rightly or wrongly 'grammar schools' carry a legacy of high achievement. No doubt there were good and bad examples, but it might tempt some with means to break the mould which they won't do otherwise.

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This is just going to appeal to the type of person who thinks things were better in the old days when they weren't really. Next step, bring back national service.

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Well that would reduce the unemployment rate :lol:
I highly doubt that some of the snowflake generation would be able to hack it and be complaining its against their youman rites and they are pacifists.

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For the fortunate few, well thats what 'they' say.... who are they?

Awe come on, you know its true;)

isn't that a good thing, if not, why not?

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It only makes sense for a country, never mind it's individual citizens, to provide resources for its "brightest and best" to succeed and excel. While some old duffers are obsessed about the "good old days" of socialist thinking in the 60's and 70's, the countries that we are losing out to economically are pushing their school children and students to excel. Though ironically some of those countries have a history of socialism and communism, but still see the nonsense of "one size fits all" education.

What we need is equality of opportunity, not equality of delivery. Everyone should have access to education which will most benefit them. For some that will be pure academic, for some academic-clerical, for some skilled manual, and for some it will be a triumph if they leave school with basic reading and arithmetic skills. Only a fool would suggest that the optimal delivery mechanism of education for all abilities is a single "one size fits all" school.

:getcoat:

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There's just no point in them. They were part of the tripartite system that came into being in 1944. Free secondary education was established and HE of course couldn't accommodate a mass of new attendees (a situation that was made worse by 1000s of demobilized servicemen in 1945-46) when just before 1944 only .09% of 18+ year-olds attended university. They had to devise a system that rationed places until more institutions were built and reconstruction had been accomplished. By the time you hit the 1960s more universities were being built and need for grammar schools was effectively over. But change is difficult in education because it is such emotional issue for people so it wasn’t until the early 1990s that things really started to move rapidly. Now we have the beginning of mass HE so the need to ration is no more. When they allow truly differentiated tuition fees, the transformation of the system will be complete. It seems to be a rather silly political ploy, probably aimed to appeal to the prejudices of their base support when in reality there is no practical reason for them anymore.

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But we've had stratified and streamed ability groups in the same school for decades. Why the need for a separate building?

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i agree there. I would have been far better off had schools taught me useful skill of some sort that could help get a job, instead they fixated on trying to force you to learn foreign language and algebra and other pure academics some of us just did not master and never have, and never will.

Academics is fine and dandy, but its not something everyone has the ability to excel at.

For high school, I cannot honestly say I learned much of anything, it was just a 4 year struggle to get out and not fail.

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I went to a secondary modern, and there were the div groups and the clever groups with a few in between. They weren't taught in the same classes or anything so I don't really understand the need to separate them geographically either.

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I passed and went to a direct grant school. My brother didn't pass but all his friends did. They are no brighter than he is, nor am I. This difference in whether or not you passed was in the answerS your parents gave on the application for,. School preference if you try child passes, father's occupation. First time round my mother put "joiner", when I sat it she put "government employee"

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Our grammar school was miles away - you needed to take the bus to get there. I'm glad I didn't have to do that and could just walk 15 minutes. Also a bunch of ex-grammar kids turned up at my school every year until it became a comprehensive - I don't recall any of them ever being put in the top groups for anything.

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If your goal is to increase the standard of academic achievement then I'd suggest the best way to do this would be to invest and thus improve teacher education.

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That's what we had at my comprehensive school.

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I hadn't realised that they were introduced as some sort of systemic rationing, but in any case, they have evolved into something else, namely schools with a heavy academic focus. Surely there is a place for such institutions in society, as Pulsaki says, for the brightest and the best. It does seem a shame to dismantle a highly performing educational tier.

The problem seems to be they way grammar schools broadly entrench class division, and perhaps way forward is to reduce the number further, spread them around the country, and make them accessible to the truly gifted. Like some of the performing arts schools. That way there would not be widespread grief and stress about the 11+ as most would choose to remain in the comprehensive system.

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The nature and structure of the economy in the UK is fundamentally different than it was in the post-war period. A curriculum based on the broad idea of a traditional and classical education is of little utility these days. I certainly agree with you that public education should always strive to offer the best educational experience it can but that will always be dependent on resources. All things being equal, there is a direct causation between money invested and results.

Secondly, I’ll restate, that the way social class manifests itself around the idea of selective grammar schools has lost much its potency with the formation of mass higher education.

And lastly, I think the best way to deal with this issue would be just to rename most of the secondary schools as grammar schools. This would either put the concept to bed or expose narrow class prejudice as the grammar school proponents scramble to create a new version of selective public education. Or they could stop moaning and put their children in private secondary education.

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I completely agree with this. Looking back, teachers in the post war era tended to be much more rounded and experienced, many having served overseas in the forces.

I remember one primary school teacher, who had probably been some kind of communications bod in the war, having us primary school kids make microphones, morse transmission devices and electro magnets from bits and pieces even then easily available, and they worked. I wonder how many primary school teachers would understand the principles today.

Even in the grammar school I went to, there was a degree of engineering training. I remember the metalwork room had an austin seven hanging from the ceiling that sixth formers were working on and it was useful to be able to use the lathe to machine motor cycle cylinder heads. No health and safety in those days, just enterprising fun. I do remember one geography master who was a returned civil servant from the empire who was a complete pratt.

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But without selection based on something like the 11+, how do you identify the "truly gifted" and why would you bother? The "truly gifted" will emerge from a proper common education system without being selected at age 11.

You mostly need to re-professionalise teachers in an attempt to get a few of the truly gifted to think that being a teacher is a privilege,

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I like the Conservative notion of a meritocracy in education when it'll most likely cost 30k+ pounds a year to attend a top 10% UK HE institution in the not too distant future. :rofl:

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A few years ago I worked for a company in the Tata Group. Its founder, Jamsetji Tata, had a typically Parsee (Zoroastrian) approach to charity, which though it was stated in relation to the poor of India, applies equally to the provision of education in the UK:

Exchange "charity" for "government funding" and there's an argument for academically selective education, as relevant today as it was 150 years or so ago.

Whether that education should be delivered in specialist Grammar Schools, or whether through academic streaming within a comprehensive education system, is not really the point. What makes the biggest difference is in encouraging academically able children to perform to their potential, to provide a learning environment where that is the expectation and where there is support for bright kids to push themselves. I can't help feeling that, too often, the teaching and administrative staff at public-sector schools have lost that aim in the political shenanigans and shifting fashions of education policy. However hard people like Oink work to point out the obvious (and not-so-obvious: I'd never considered that grammar schools were put in place to effectively ration HE places...) and demonstrate how the system ought to work, that work is too often undone by the lack of enthusiastic support from within the teaching profession.

The pre-Comprehensive system of grammar vs secondary-modern evidently needed changing in the 1960s. The disparity of funding, of teaching, of opportunity, was patently unfair to those who, for all sorts of reasons, had not been able to perform adequately on the 11+ exam.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with reintroducing selective schools today, so long as funding and support for the non-selective (the modern take on secondary-moderns) is guaranteed and properly managed. I've always been under the impression that it was the failure of secondary moderns, rather than anything the matter with grammar schools, that was the driving force behind the introduction of comprehensive education.

Of course, some areas never really lost grammar schools. A nephew of mine attends what is now officially a "direct grant maintained" school in Wiltshire that was a CofE-funded Grammar school for most of its first century of existence, until some time in the 1990s. It is still, fundamentally, a grammar school. It's always been academically selective, always free to attend, and has by all accounts a good relationship with surrounding comprehensive schools.

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I don't like categorizing children as “bright” versus I presume, “dull”. All children should be encouraged to perform to their potential and we have a moral obligation to provide a supportive learning environment for them all. :)

I do agree that children are extremely capable of performing far beyond the expectations of current curricula. But unless there is long term planning and implementation you're going to get this jerky and rather tepid approach to educational change. The problem of policy- making in the public service sector is that long term goals and objectives don't mesh with short-term political power.

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"bright" vs "less bright" then? Or are you suggesting that some children are not innately more academically able than some others, regardless of external influences? Semantics aside, I don't think we disagree - giving all children the encouragement and the environment "to perform to their potential" seems to be a worthy moral obligation.

As to the conflict between long-term goals and election-cycle timelines - that's pretty much a universal challenge. At least in education policy it's a five-year cycle between elections, rather than the 90-day cycle between reporting periods that stifles radical innovation in public companies! Education policy really shouldn't be a political football, but until everyone reads the same journals and comes to a consensus about how the world should work, it's an unavoidable reality :(

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I agree, children differ in their aptitude and interest for particular subjects and sometimes within subjects so a one size fits all approach is not beneficial. For example some children have an aptitude for mathematics but not with humanities, some have an aptitude for fine arts but not with sports etc etc. The point is, if your goal is higher academic achievement, it is much more effective to offer different levels of instruction within a main campus where we can fit them into a suitable course rather than have separate institutions that offer narrow curricula choices. Of course if the goal is something else, maybe of along the lines of “separate but equal” then it’s a different matter all together. ;)

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Hmmm.. Let me introduce an elepant that quite often appears in the room, that of human nature.

I think we all accept that bright children should be encouraged to perform to their potential. I think that it's always been the case that there are some kids who, for whatever reason, will act to discriminate and persecute any who they feel are different and can achieve academically where they can't. Even when I was at primary school, the poor 'swot' was not someone to be admired.

I think that an argument can be made that physical separation of the bright from those who would seek to pick on them both physically and psychologically is a requirement where the objective is to maximise attainment.

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This policy initiative has little to nothing to do with sound pedagogical practice and far more to do with property prices. My guess is that a proposal to create new separate “grammar” schools is an appeal to potential Conservative voters that can’t afford to purchase property within “desirable” and most probably ethnically homogenous catchment areas.

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:goodpost:

agree, as experienced myself as well as with our own children

My wife experienced the same issues with her siblings as an example measured against.

I passed the 11+ in the mid 50's, yet never went to 'Grammar School' for the reason Dad did not want it, because my siblings never went & they did OK, so why you. Likely the bloody blue collar working class council estate mentality;)

Not that it mattered any, what was I to know till many years later, I went to sceondary school (in fact dropped out/pulled out early), without 'O's or A's, simply ended up on the snakes & laddar academic path, the long & winding road, the hard way, night school for basics, day release, evening classes for HE, block study HE & DL - ended up with the necessary HE qualifications that mattered, it just took longer than the conventional route.

Stopped doing all of it going for further qualifications & CPD as I approached 60. A lifetime of academic study 'for what'. Who cares if you have HE qualifications, a degree or graduate studies, its the ability & money that makes the world go round - no one to prove anything to only yourself :blink:

Maybe the child or drive within me that wanted something, to achieve something, that I thought was held from me by my own Dad... who knows

Humans will always find or each their level of incompetence - not to be confused with ability :eek:

Just maybe you cannot make a dull child smart, yet possibly make a smart child dull... who knows


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I'm not sure why people think intelligence and book smarts can be "nurtured" any more than swimming speed or violin virtuosity.

I realize that many in the education industry owe their jobs to the misinformed belief that one can turn slow kids into Einstein.

When it comes down to it, it's mostly in the genes.

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Not so much political as belief in a two tier system. Theresa, after all, is a grammar school girl. In fact the even more worrying aspect of the proposal is an increase in selection power for faith schools. (Heaven help us, she's a vicar's daughter too.)

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There are exceptions but I do wonder if kids in the main just reach the levels they learn at.

My early years were spent in Somerset. Two older brothers went to the Secondary school. Part way into the last year at Primary my dad got a new job that meant moving to Bristol.

I continued travelling to the old school until xmas and then transferred to the new Primary.

Based on my school reports and the various tests so far, indications were that I'd have been off to Grammar after taking the 11+.

I'll never forget moving to the new school. It was like going back in time.

I went from a nice modern school with electric bells and where we wrote with biros (fountain or cartridge if you wanted) to one with a handheld bell a teacher rang on the doorstep and where we wrote with 'scratch' pens - like pencils but with a nib on the end that went into the inkwell. And, naturally, caused inkblots when you wrote.

Every question to a teacher had to be asked "please sir/miss (question) sir/miss."

At the old school we all knew 12d=shilling, 240d=£ and that a third of a £ was 6/- and 8d, 22yards in a chain etc but little of this was known at the new school.

On the other hand they did French.

When I went to Comprehensive school, there were the O level kids, the CSEs (big majority) and what was then perceived to be the dummies class. :o

The kids in the O level classes had been no brighter than me at the Primary school. Perhaps only having done French for a few months instead of 4 years made me look less capable when the decision was made, I don't know.

But those O level kids came out of school with their O levels and I came out with CSE passes, 5 of which were at a level generally considered on a par with O levels by those in the education system but not, unfortunately, by employers.

They may as well have handed out the certificates in the first year. :(

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Ah, The Peter Principle. Another great Canadian innovation! Laurence Peter was from Vancouver, although he'd moved to California by the time he published his famous book...