The great grammar school debate

David Ossitt

It makes one proud David Davis and Stephen Pollard speaking for grammar schools; so the looney left had to put up three to speak against Charles Clarke, Fiona Millar and Simon Jenkins.

Of the five; I know which two, I would have round to my place for dinner.

luke

Shame you couldnt persuade Gove to come along and argue against as well...

HJ

The problem with the Grammar/Secondary Modern vs Comprehensive debate is that it is based on the idea that the state (or local authorities) should run tax-funded schools and that therefore should impose a structure on everyone.

It's ludicrous that people accept this and then argue that their preferred system should be imposed on everyone else.

Schools should be independent of government and they should work our for themselves how best to satisfy their target market if they want to attract pupils (and funding that goes with them). No 'system' of schooling should be centrally mandated

TGF UKIP

Interesting piece in the S. Times about referring to the unwinding of Gove's daft private schools plan which always seemed to me to be wildly impracticable and not a Swedish import which was translateable to the UK.

Going to cause a lot of red faces when it proves so, and notably that of F. Nelson, Gove's No. 1 fan.

More importantly than that though, it is going to provide Balls with a lot of very useful ammo.

And PS Remember UKIP's policy is a grammar school in every town.

country mouse

HJ, you are SO right!

Sir Graphus

Grammar schools are not popular, though.

They may well be popular among Speccie readers. Lord knows I'd like my children to go to one. They are wonderful; I went to a useless minor public school (Brentwood, since you ask), while my sister went to a grammar school. Which one of us got the better education? But we are a discerning bunch from the upper echelons of intelligence and refinement (we'd like to think).

However, among the voters, for every David Davis, Andrew Neil, Alexei Sayle et al whose lives were transformed by grammar schools, there are 10 people who didn't get into grammar school, and went to secondary moderns to be told they weren't terribly academic and there was no hope. These people were short changed and don't like grammar schools. They are entitled to be agrieved that they paid the same taxes as anyone else, but didn't get the same return. These people always vote for grammars to be abolished or not reinstated whenever there are local referenda on the issue. It's hard not to acknowledge they have a point.

The answer, surely then, is for local comprehensives to have a proper streaming system; if grammar schools are wrong, then the other end of the scale, mixed ability teaching, is socialist dogma gone mad.

Schools should not be too large, which is the biggest problem with current secondary schools, where 2000 pupils is not an uncommon number. No more than 1000, for proper pastoral care to be done. Lord knows how you get there from here, though.

THX1138

I Read Freakonomics over the weekend and according to the huge data set from the Chicago School Board which is brilliant for analysis as they run a lottery system for over subscribed schools. Therefore the in demand have an even mix socio economic groups in the intake rather than all the places at the best schools going to sharp elbowed middle class.

The data suggests that for academic success it makes not a jot of difference what school you went to , what makes the difference is the parents socioeconomic status, that the children had highly educated parents, the mother was over thirty, English was the first language at home, the child parents were in the PTA and the child has many books at home . Nothing else including which school the child went to made any diffrence to academic success.

I don't really have a view about schools apart from dropping the political BS on both sides work out what was for our kids and getting on with it but I thought this was really interesting.

TrevorsDen

Mrs thatcher created many comprehensives. The tories allowed existing grammar schools a chance to defend themselves but no new ones were created by either Major or Thatcher.

What we need is good education not another upheaval. I am sick of right wingers using grammar schools as a totem. The electorate are not going to vote to bring back secondary moderns.

wake up.

Stephen

Can we refer to this as 'The Great Grammar and Secondary Modern School Debate' please. It will remind us that for every winner there will be a loser. For every child lucky enough to get into the Grammar School there will be at least one who will not. The point is to improve things from the present not return education to the (imperfect) past.

Simon Denis

Stephen, "Sir Graphus" et al - total bilge. Secondary moderns do not blight lives; they do not assert that there is "no hope"; they actually do a better job for their pupils than comps do - the figures mentioned in this debate bear this out. Moreover, who says there is no hope just because your career is not an academic or quasi academic one? All the comps do is pretend to people - that with the skills of a plumber they can become a barrister - and in consequence the comps educate neither. Abolishing grammars has simply meant overloading secondary mods with a number of bright pupils with whom they cannot cope. Result? Everbody suffers. And recognising this the public will vote to restore secondary moderns. Every time the bloody left has tried to ballot the remaining grammars out of existence, the people have voted for them - and the corresponding secondary mods - to stay.

Cogito Ergosum

Sir Graphus (6.45pm) asks for streaming in moderate-sized schools. Unfortunately the numbers do not permit this.

My old grammar school admitted about a hundred pupils per year. But a comprehensive admitting 100 per year will find that 20 or fewer are of grammar school standard. Then at 14 or 15 they are divided between arts and sciences, leading to class sizes of 10 for that stream.

Not very likely, is it! So the 10 grammar standard children are going to be held back by 20 others who make up the class size. What chance does any academic child have with that?

What we really need are mid-stream schools for the Dim Rich Children - known, perhaps, as Didactic Resource Centres. They could be state schools allowed to charge top-up fees up to 10 percent of the state's cost: e.g. a top-up of 500GBP on a notional state expenditure of 5000GBP per pupil. The top-up fees would drive away the proles.

The existence of DRC schools would then allow the grammar schools to accept children of poor parents, as my old school did.

Streaming within one school is not the answer; streaming the whole population into separate schools is.

Kittler

At the new Grammars, will there be compulsory Latin and Greek for all? If not, they ain't Grammars.

Dirty Euro

Grammar schools are simply there to divide working and middle class people.
I was in top sets in some classes, and bottom sets in others. The whole concept of grammar schools is moronic. What if you are top class at maths but poor at English. So this logic says you have to go to grammar school for maths and secondary modern for English. As if people are all very good at all subjects or very poor at all subjects.
Einstein was superb at every subject except French does that mean he would not have gone to grammar school. It is an idiotic system.

David Ossitt

Dirty Euro.

Your post; moronic.

THX1138

So according to the data academic success is pretty much (obviously there are exceptions) pre determined by your parents not the school you went to and we know from free school meals data that the vast majority of Grammar schools pupils come from homes with high socioeconomic status and highly educated parent so the kids would have done well whatever school they were sent to

A good example of this is Haverstock School in Camden whose catchment includes uber trendy Primrose Hill home of the Leftie Intelligentsia before models & flim Stars moved in. Ex pupils at this bog standard inner London Comp include both Milliband brothers, Stephen Twigg, Oona King, Quincy Whitaker (high profile young barrister) and John Barnes Liverpool and England nothing to with the school everything to with their home background.

The other argument for Grammar schools is social mobility but considering that these schools are packed with middle class how much social mobility is there really? How do we know that clever working class kids wouldn't have done well and got to University from a Comp anyway my wife did. Mrs THX comes from solid working class Northern stock went to a a moderate inner city Comp and got to Oxford (turned them down if favour of UCL) . No doubt If Grammar's existed in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire she would have got in but it would have made no difference to her academic success & life choices.

Grammar schools is stale debate we should move forward I'm with Gove & Fraser on this the Swedish model makes lots of sense to me.

Fergus Pickering

My dear THwhateveritis, I can only tell you of my experience. I had two daughters at a Grammar School for Girls. Their friends were not (with one exception) rich? What do I mean by rich. Well this girl's dad is the Governor of a prison. That's rich. The other girls' dads were a taxi driver, a van driver, a heating engineer with a van, a teacher, a chap I'm not sure whathe did but he sure as hell didn't have much money, and there were two households with absent fathers and mothers who taught. Perhaps my daughters' friends were not a cross-section. But that's who they were. Rich mums and dads send their kids to the private schools. There are three within a couple of miles of here. In my opinion their education was OK, though not as good as the one I got at The Royal High School of Edinburgh in the 1950s and 60s, the school Robin Cook attended, and at which his father taught.

THX1138

Fergus P you make a good point And I'm sure we can all find examples like my wife who have done well coming from less well off backgrounds but the data suggests that in not the norm.

As for your daughters school friends whose parents are white van man & taxi drivers how do you know they wouldn't have done equally well at the local comp?

As for private schools my eldest daughter goes to super selective north London private school so who am I to talk but after reading Freakonomics over the Weekend I wonder If I'm wasting my money?

Dirty Euro

Ossit your point offensive and unhelpful like you.

Larry

What research really shows is that good teachers and good schools help poor students and at risk youth most. Students from middle class minded parents and homes get more help for success from his or her home setting (this includes higher income homes and the rich and even some poor homes). It's the attitude that the parents cultivate that counts to motivate students and the experiences they get. This includes the type of friends, relatives and others that parents have around in their lives. A great teacher can help students who lack what they need at home but not every teacher is a great teacher.

KB

THX1138, thanks for pointing out this. I've had a look at the three papers mentioned in Levitt and Dubner's book and there seems to be a rather glaring problem. While the Chicago Public Schools system does indeed allow choice, I could find no evidence that funds followed pupils as it does in the Swedish system and Gove's proposed system. Indeed, going from the fact that they need to hold lotteries and that average class size is 87, it suggests otherwise.

Aside: I believe it was in the CPS that Obama spent all the Annenberg Challenge money. He and erstwhile terrorist Bill Ayers conclusively showed that hosing $150 million at public schools made no difference.

beatriz

what society we are living? labour are labeling middle class, it sounds that been privileged is a sin. wasnt brown privileged? we need a society with people with a diferent ability to balance it rather than resent the academia. for sure there is not an egalitarian society yet in the world!!!

Karen Hayes

The simple fact is that comprehensive schools are generally poor because of the school system itself. If the system was structured so that students who performed poorly would not pass and have to repeat the year, you would have an entirely different success rate. As a former teacher in both the UK and the US, I can tell you that students need motivation in order to succeed. If there is no fear of failure or any reason to do well academically, you will have the lower ability children with behaviour problems bringing down the rest of the class. It seems generally acceptable for class behaviour to be atrocious in this country. After teaching in the US where I gave one detention the whole year, I was shocked at the appalling and out right hostile attitude of the students. I could not believe that students were not thrown out for cursing, disobeying, and assaulting teachers. After watching fellow teachers suffer nervous breakdowns, I decided to excuse myself from teaching in the UK. Grammar schools simply take the top of the class away from the lower achieving students. These students are bound to do well...they do not have anyone holding them back and they have parents that are supportive of their education. I guarantee that once students know that if they do not make an effort in school that they will have to repeat the grade without their peers, you will have an instant improvement in education. I have seen first hand english exams dumbed down to ridiculously low levels (my dog could pass these exams) just so that the majority of students don't fail. Why are we protecting them so much from failure?

Moses

I find it baffling that the Labour Party is against grammar schools. They appear to want to bring the clever down, rather than elevate the not-so-clever.

Holly

The 11+ takes into account, that a person is better at certain subjects than others. I went to a grammar school and i wasn't very good at english, however found maths and humanity subjects easier to understand. Grammar schools allow anyone that passes the 11+ the opportunity for a better education. Therefore lower class, middle class and upper class all have the opportunity to go, if they gain a specific score. Therefore is a measure on intelligence, not social background.