A study out today suggests that sending your kids to private schools puts them two years’ ahead of their state school counterparts by the time they reach the age of 16. The research, revealed in The Times, showed the ‘private school effect’ apparently boosted grades in almost every subject. But here, in an article first published in the Spectator in 2013, leading genetics Professor Robert Plomin shows that this is nonsense and that GCSEs are much more about nature than nurture:
We have previously shown that individual differences in educational achievement are highly heritable in the early and middle school years in the UK. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether similarly high heritability is found at the end of compulsory education (age 16) for the UK-wide examination, called the General Certificate of Secondary Education(GCSE).
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