As Christians we should not be afraid to say that we believe in education as a common good for all children. I hope my story will appeal to compassionate politics in that the powers that be will reconsider the 11+ is not an accurate proxy for determining children's potential before they have had a chance to shine.
I recently enjoyed a festival concert that celebrated 500 years of our church’s spire. Children came together, as they always do within our choir from selective and non selective schools, but this time it was different. They sang so beautifully. I closed my eyes while they were singing Children’s Voices, by Claribel Alington Barnard (1830-69) and all I could hear was one voice united in the love of God.
The significance of this concert I cannot put into words. Its music reached into my soul. It accomplished for a couple of hours, across our divided education system, what no policy-maker or influencer in education has achieved, it paused that awful scenario, whereby, every year children in our county are divided into sheep and goats at 11+.
Claribel's music told the real story that children do not want to be divided.
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Her most famous song was 'Come Back to Erin', often described as an Irish folk song. I managed to find a scratchy recording.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recordings of 'Children's Voices'.
I have 2 daughters and a son, and believe I'd be facing a similar situation if they'd had to take the 11+ exam, since the elder girl who is just 18 months senior to her sister is more academic. Fortunately they attended the local comp and were both able to maximise their potential, along with their brother, albeit with differing exam outcomes.
I know that my youngest lass would have felt very insecure if she'd have been stigmatised by attending a sec mod and would have always felt in the shadow of her sister had she gone to a grammar school.
It begs interesting questions. Music stands high in the hierarchy of the arts and you have a chance of making an argument in favour of its merits. Dance is pretty low. But all those arts disciplines, which call on ability beyond numeracy and literacy, show how talent is spread through the school population and is no respecter of academic attainment. Sadly, these talents aren't respected nearly enough and probably can't compensate in a child's mind for not passing some random exam at age 11, especially when the world around them is attaching such mammoth importance to it. And equally sad is the fact that even those kids who do jump through the academic hoops aren't necessarily guaranteed a life in the promised land. As we have to compete in the UK with developing nations and more and more highly trained people entering the global job market with a wonderful mastery of the English language to boot, we're going to need to equip our kids with something extra. What a pity we don't value all their talents.
One thing I could suggest as a small act would be to try to get the school you are involved with to display the kids' work and achievements more. It's a bee in my bonnet (as an ex-classroom assistant) that secondary schools forget to trumpet pupils' work sufficiently outside of the specialist classroom. The first netball team and rugby (normal, nay obligatory in Wales) team photos are on the walls of the corridor. Why not a fabulous piece of woodwork displayed in the foyer or a brilliant piece of photography. We forget to do this in education after primary school. We say these abilities don't matter any more. But I believe they really do and we need to tell those who have these abilities that they do. Clever people inventing algorithms in Silicon Valley are making even formerly high-skilled jobs redundant. But there are human skills which won't be replaced. I hope there is a decent recording of your choir.
No parents should be forced to make such choices, because we know for certain that high quality uniform comprehensive systems maximise opportunities for all children regardless of their individual talents and limitations. We were lucky to live in Leicestershire where all our children went to comprehensive schools (some of the first in England) and our nearest grandchildren live near us in South Cumbria where the two nearest secondary schools are both very good and are both LA controlled (for now) comprehensives.
If only all the people of Kent, Thameside and LIncolnshire could see through the weasel words and underlying nastiness and dishonesty of the grammar school lobby.
He has a friend who lives in the poorer area of Medway where the sec mod falls below gov't targets. He has socialist leanings but admitted that had his son failed the 11+ he would have felt compelled to go private.
Back in 1994 when my son was 10, I was interviewed for a job in Folkestone which would have meant uprooting there. The disparity between the William Harvey grammar and the 2 sec mods was vast. In fact although the local comp my son was destined was below average, these sec mods in Folkestone had even worse results. The woman at KCC was very suspicious about the motive for entering my son for the 11 plus exam, but the job never materialised, so it all came to nothing.
False education information is everywhere and very deeply rooted.
This is from Section 4.6 of 'Learning Matters'.
"...schools are always likely to vary with regard to mean CAT scores and because cognitive ability is the main driver of school attainment, not relative affluence or social class, as correctly argued by Peter Saunders (1.3), it makes school league tables that take no account of such differences statistically worthless and explains why hundreds of schools serving poor communities with low average ability intakes, like Hackney Downs school, have been written off as failing when their comparatively low raw GCSE scores were just what should have been expected from their intake ability profiles. It is important to note that there is no necessary disadvantage to any pupils attending a lower average intake CAT score school provided their GCSE results do justice to their cognitive abilities. A school with a poorer intake ability profile could have been achieving just the same success for their more able pupils as Mossbourne, but there would be proportionately fewer of them, resulting in the league table position of the school being lower. However, the more balanced the intake ability profile, the easier it is for any comprehensive school to be able to adequately meet the developmental entitlements of all of its pupils.
So securing reasonably balanced intakes is important for any comprehensive education system, but for complete fairness they only need to be exactly balanced in a competitive league table based system like that which uniquely prevails in England. As we have seen even in Hackney, which probably has the fairest system currently possible, further improvements require the dismantling of school league tables together with the artificially created market that they drive."
Things would not be so bad if OfSTED could be relied on to give the true picture. However, bad OfSTED judgements are automatic if schools fail the latest 'floor targets', which successive governments have always sought to raise as part of a macho chest thumping, zero tolerance of failure narrative that has no statistical or educational validity.
The fact is that there are a diminishing number of schools where, in the absence of gaming or outright cheating, the average intake cognitive ability of pupils SHOULD result in failure to meet floor targets. This is part of the problem, not the solution.
These schools COULD be good/outstanding schools if they were allowed to ignore the floor targets and the league tables and concentrate on maximising the development of each child's plastic cognitive ability and all the other aspects of a full, healthy and inspiring education.
I was once head of a school that did just that and there are plenty of high flying success stories amongst its ex-pupils and many testimonials from those that are well aware of their personal development achieved with the help of the school.
Grammar school selection is just the tip of an iceberg of a failing education system in the grip of an ideological mentality that recognises its continuing failures, but diagnoses 'not enough of the medicine' as the cure. In Section 5.9 of 'Learning Matters', I describe this as 'Educational Lysenkoism', as follows.
" School league tables based on crude performance indicators are an invitation to ‘gaming’ and a disincentive for schools to adopt the developmental approaches to learning that lead to cognitive growth...schools that can achieve balanced intakes have a degree of immunity from the worst perverse incentives.
School league tables are false indicators of school quality because their very nature precludes taking due account of the fact of continuously variable pupil cognitive ability.
The 1988 Education Act will eventually have to be repealed or drastically reformed.
This current period of what I call ‘Educational Lysenkoism’ (after the ideological Soviet theory of agriculture that became the compulsory orthodoxy under Stalin) will eventually be consigned to history as an essential lesson in how not to run a national education system."
Robert Winston's book,'Bad Ideas', 2011, Bantam Books, contains in Chapter 2 'Appetite for Destruction', a graphic history of the Lysenko tragedy in Stalin's USSR that has striking parallels with the current 'Great Education Reform Movement (GERM)' ideology that is causing so much destruction in the education systems of England and the US.
That said, a my local grammar no longer has a textiles room. And the cookery room's disappeared too. I have to admit the art work (under which textiles has been buried) is excellent. But so is the art work from the non-selective school down the road and the local primaries.
This thread isn't really about whether one type of school values creative subjects more than other types. It's about the stupidity and unfairness of segregating children at age 11. This, as you'll be aware as you teach in a grammar, is that some pupils (the minority) go to what are perceived locally as the best schools and the rest (the majority) go to ones that are seen as second best. People might say the latter are doing a 'good job' with their ('not-so-bright) intake but deep down they believe the former are doing a 'better' one.
There is no reason why grammar schools should be seen as the 'best' and other schools as 'second best'. No one turns a hair when you say XX is the best school in the area for drama, or YY has by far the best football team. We could surely imagine a world where grammar schools are seen as the 'best for very academically able children' and moderns/high schools etc. are 'the best for less academically able children'? Much of this status anxiety is unnecessary.
It also assumes no change in the development of talents/potential of children after the age of 11.
As for football teams and drama, such reputations are transient. Good for drama/football now does not necessarily mean good for drama/football in five year's time after key teachers have left/been made redundant/retired or a new head has changed the school's curriculum priorities. Most parents understand that
Nice try, but that's a rubbish argument.
I do not therefore recognise the comment that displays are limited to "art, technology, textiles etc [because] they are the most visually attractive".
I also wonder whether if all Grammar Schools were abolished whether commentators would describe the act of sending children to different Comprehensive Schools within the locality was segregation? That is to say, they could all go to the same school and/or siblings had to attend different schools because of capacity issues.
It's because, as you've implied, attending such schools labels children as 'very academically able' (aka 'bright') and 'less academically able children' (aka 'not-so-bright' or more pejorative labels such as 'dim', 'thick' etc). And all based on two short tests taken at age 11. Labelling children in this way at such a young age disadvantages both types of children. The former can become over-confident and complacent while the latter have their confidence knocked by being labelled 'not-so-bright'.
That said, here's a story that might amuse you. A grandparent went to a bus depot to collect PE kit which his grandchild had left on the bus. When he explained what he'd come for, the receptionist said, 'Don't tell me, it's ...... grammar'. Apparently most of the items left on school buses were on buses taking pupils to the grammar.
I work in a fully comprehensive system and I can report that in my small corner of South Wales exam results are still the dominant measure of success. Because I am on the PTA of my kids' school, I do have some voice in school. We raise a significant chunk of money and can propose real support for this kind of initiative. Schools tend to keep parents at arm's length, but it is possible to engage with schools via PTA's and work with school to make these sorts of things happen.
Schools can use their websites to display photos, clips, footage (especially useful for performing arts and sports), pieces of writing can go up on the walls of the corridors where the whole school population can read it, art work similarly. Our school has a radio and TV suite currently lying idle. Kids are perfectly able to learn to use this technology and start to broadcast within the school. We as the PTA are funding training for staff and kids.
Psychologists often comment that children draw their self-esteem from what they are able to do rather than the labels they wear. In all my time in secondary education, though I was academically successful, my fellow pupils probably knew me best for my art work which was up on the walls and the posters I used to design advertising the school's 6th form discos. I probably got more recognition and kudos for that than anything else. When a kid you don't know (big comp) comes up to you and tells you they really like your art work or that your poster is "lush" it's a huge boost to your sense of self.
Btw my original comments were to counterpoint Janet's position and not in any way suggest that what I describe was universal, which is what you infer.
Given what you know about average differences in prior attainment and cognitive ability between socio-economic groups, are you really sure the intakes of any of your local schools will deserve the label 'comprehensive'?
" ensured that all such schools provide a comparably good standard of education. "
Then differences in socio economic status of intake not relevant.
Where I live two million pound houses are less than five minutes walk away from an inner city, (Islington) Council housing estate.
In urban areas this issue is best addressed by admission systems based on CATs driven fair banding. Less densely populated areas are more likely to be adequately provided for by a single comprehensive school that takes all the children from its more diverse wider catchment.
This issue is discussed in great detail in Part 4 of 'Learning Matters' with reference to the real example of Mossbourne Academy and the universal system of CATs driven banded admission systems in Hackney. This is directly relevant to Mossbourne Academy, which is very close to the Pembury Council Estate.
This is an extract from Section 4.6.
" ...it is clear that, as is normally the case in areas of high social deprivation, the average neighbourhood CAT scores are very low. However some of these pupils are more able and the Mossbourne banding system makes it possible for these to be admitted to their neighbourhood school where similarly able pupils (from further away) are also well represented. This would not be possible either in a selective grammar school system, or in a comprehensive system not using banded admissions regardless of whether the schools were Academies or maintained by the Local Authority.
Although its banding process is selective it is designed to produce a genuinely all-ability intake despite being geographically located in an area where less able children are hugely over-represented.
Should Mossbourne be criticised for this? Absolutely not. Mossbourne has provided an all-ability, fully comprehensive school to which its local community has access on a basis that is likely to be as fair as possible in the current circumstances of school regulation. Like all good comprehensives Mossbourne is raising the opportunities and life chances of its pupils across the full ability range.
It should be noted that Sir Michael Wilshaw, the first head of Mossbourne Academy and now the Chief Inspector of Schools is a fierce critic of the 11+ selection system. Whatever you think about Mossbourne Academy, it is a school that proves that, within a uniform comprehensive system administered by the LA, standards of academic excellence can be achieved for bright children from poor families far more effectively than in any 11+ selective system.
(If you read this section of my book you will find some some qualifying comments about the genuine success of this well known school.)
The 1988 Education Act made it impossible for Hackney Downs school (which Mossbourne Academy replaced) to achieve this without either banded admissions (not open to LA schools at the time) or an enlightened LA like the Inner London Education Authority ILEA (abolished by the Thatcher government) willing to use its powers to balance admissions through control of catchment areas.
The prospects for the pupils rejected by Mossbourne are also improved by banding because the LA wide system introduced by the (Hackney) Learning Trust has resulted in all the alternative (local) Community Schools offering genuinely all-ability comprehensive education (even if not as balanced as Mossbourne) so there are no sink schools. In Hackney, it appeared to be (at the time of writing) the religious schools that struggled hardest for applications from higher ability pupils."
When I talk about the right to attend a local school, this does not necessarily mean the nearest school. In urban areas there are always likely to be a number of schools sufficiently close to any particular address (walking or cycling distance) to be regarded as 'local' schools.
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