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Thursday 11th June 2009
We Need Selective State SchoolsFor several weeks now I have been agonising about whether to run as an independent at the next election and I cannot make up my mind. On the one hand, the current political crisis means that an independent has a higher-than-normal chance of being elected. But on the other, it is not clear what an MP who isn’t affiliated with any of the major political parties could achieve. What would be the point? As the father of four young children, the issue I care most about is education. In the constituency of Ealing Central and Acton where I live there are only two outstanding state secondary schools, one C of E, the other Catholic. The nearest secular school to me is Acton High where, according to the latest Ofsted report, only 31 per cent of pupils managed to get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above. That compares to a national average of 49.1 per cent. (To read more, click here.)
Comments page 1 of 1 - 24 post(s) Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Mousquetaire on 11-06-2009 11:38: I agree; a friend from one of Melbourne's two state selective schools, which are full to bursting, said he'd rather go somewhere where you were seen as a dunce for getting 67% than ostracised as a nerd for getting 97%. And that opposition to such schools invariably came from staff at normal state schools who would be "robbed" of their best talent -students who simply felt they would be better served somewhere else. Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Toby Young on 11-06-2009 16:03: There's certainly a huge amount of opposition to selective education within the educational establishment. State education is the last redoubt of egalitarianism in Britain. But I think the dam will break in the next five years or so. Britain's middle class simply won't put up with such poor state education, particularly as they can no longer afford to educate their children privately. Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Mousquetaire on 12-06-2009 00:10: Ooops, got my first sentence the wrong way round Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Ed Prior on 12-06-2009 23:46: Being from Stratford-Upon-Avon, we're fortunate enough to have three local grammar schools, one of which I attended from 1996-2003. It was smaller than the local comprehensives, we had a disproportionate number of great teachers and took 11 GCSEs instead of the 9 or 10 many of my friends sat. That said, my brother and sister both went to Stratford High School and I'm not convinced their level of education was any worse than mine, in fact, given that many of their subjects were taught in sets determined by ability in some respects their teaching may have been better. Having spent the last five years living in Coventry, however, I think the standard of many of their comprehensives is significantly lower than in my affluent hometown. I think the big problem with Grammar Schools at the moment is the places they still exist are the places they're least needed and in many of those places their higher standards are being eroded by typical British embarrassment about 'showing off'. The other problem is a VERY high proportion of kids passing the eleven-plus have been coached through it with private lessons, which needless to say (though I am anyway) are not free. To my mind what this means is well-off parents can effectively pay a one-off fee and cheaply buy their kids into a theoretically-better education, saving them money on private school and pushing out children from poorer families who would make better use of the places. This is especially sad seeing as many of those coached children struggle in grammar school damaging their confidence and probably not much improving their grades. If selective schooling were to be made more universal again (something I think is probably a good idea on balance) there would have to be a better means of selection than a single test whose effectiveness can be easily circumvented with money. I think the main problem with this whole issue would be getting people to sign up for it, it seems to me that knee-jerk hatred of elitism by the people with power to do anything about it makes this a non-starter. As you say, unfortunately one independent would struggle to do anything about the situation, or even to get their voice heard. Maybe if the government stopped pushing eighteen-year-olds into ill-considered and laregely pointless degrees (in what I can only assume is a way to fiddle the unemployment figures) there might be some money to pay for selective schools, which would surely need to be balanced by some sort of, oh, I don't know, technical colleges or something, for those who aren't so academically-inclined? Maybe a nice middle-ground might be if schools worked more closely with the Open University (which someone pretty clever set up over forty years ago, I gather) to give more intelligent children (there, I said it) the chance to push themselves and remain engaged in the education system, which many of them (myself included) give up on because it fails to challenge them. Of course, why concentrate any attention on clever kids who are coasting with average grades? They don't make the statistics look bad, do they? Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Ed Prior on 12-06-2009 23:48: Do I get a prize for writing a comment far longer and infinitely less interesting than your original post? Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Toby Young on 13-06-2009 00:59: Ed -- You make a very good point. Increasing the number of grammar schools wouldn't do for social mobility if middle class parents monopolised the places by gaming the system. One way round this would be to cap the number of places offered to middle class children. For instance, if only 12 per cent of the adult population in the area served by the school earned more than £40,000/annum, you could stipulate that only 12 per cent of the children you admitted each year could be the offspring of parents earning more than £40,000/annum. Or develop more sophisticated testing techniques that only measured raw intelligence and couldn't be prepared for. Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by Mousquetaire on 13-06-2009 12:50: Hmmm. Then, even among families earning the same amount, under <40k, there might be a considerable discrepancy in cultural terms, between 'intelligensia' parents and those less likely to imbue their children with intellectual curiosity. Maybe have extension classes in the last year of primary school? And for your children, Toby, aren't their many scholarships at private schools? Re: We Need Selective State Schools Posted by David Bouvier on 22-06-2009 12:56: Do we need selection on ability or selection on behaviour? Some kind of selection and/or streaming does seem necessary to effective teaching, though those at the top of the bottom will always be unhappy about it wherever the line is drawn. But frankly I would leave that to independently managed schools dependent on parent choice for their continued survival. But for the state sector, if they would (a) maintain high expectations of behaviour and performance, and (b) be allowed to discipline and exclude those who fail to behave, then we would make a big step forward. Me? I am paying for a private but minimally selective school for my daughter? But one thing the school is clear on is a very high standard of personal and group responsibility for behaviour and learning. 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