I'm neither a parent nor a teacher, nor am I any more a governor or councillor, and nor have I ever worked for the Department of Education, although I have worked in an Education Department.
So, these are just my thoughts, and the only googling involved has been of my brain.
At the ripe old age of coughcough I am in the minority of my contemporaries (other than siblings and old school friends, obviously... ) in having gone to a state-funded grammar school. Even amongst my grammar school friends and acquaintances, the system in which I grew up was relatively unusual in being a 'pure' system* where every child in top juniors took the 11-plus exam and on the basis of that was allocated either to a Grammar School or a Secondary Modern** There was no pretence at the non-grammars being 'comprehensives'*. In all honesty, in areas where there are grammars and 'comprehensives' does anybody choose a comprehensive if they meet the criteria to go to a grammar?
I will hold my hands up and say that attending a grammar school was perfect for me. Academically inclined and with an expectation of aspiration, it was nearly ideal (except for being single-sex throughout). But that aside, I have serious ideological issues with Grammar Schools.
One of the main ones is demonstrated by occasional campaigns in Trafford, and elsewhere, to "Save our Grammar Schools". There are never campaigns to "Save Our Secondary Moderns". Having Grammar Schools saves parents a fortune in school fees, because the 11-plus, like the school fee, keeps out the riff-raff. At the time that I was a pupil, Grammar Schools were better funded per head. I understand that this was to do with having Sixth Forms rather than being Grammars per se, but we all know that funding formulae can be tweaked to fit any social engineering objective.
My mother still supports the concept of Grammar Schools because, in her view, their existence opens up possibilities for social mobility for children like her, from a modest working-class council house background, to go to a Grammar some miles away and thus onto University. She argues that if mine and my brother's old schools were comprehensives, we would never have gone there, because they would have a geographical catchment taking in only the most prosperous areas, which equate to one of the most prosperous areas of the country. Instead, being the Catholic grammar schools for Trafford, they have to take suitably academic/Catholic children from less prosperous and even poor areas. Under a comprehensive system, and setting aside the religious element, we would have gone to our local school, which would have been academic and aspirational because we would have been with our neighbours, almost all of whom attended Sale Grammar. But if we were bright but living in a more deprived area, we would have had few aspirational classmates.
In May of Junior 4, you were supposed to ask your classmates "What school are you going to?" but of course, the question was "Did you pass or fail?" So, at age 11 you were doomed to failure, for ever. Well, not quite for ever. Two girls from Primary School who failed their 11-plus later passed their 12- or 13-plus and transferred from Secondary Modern to Grammar. A couple of my ex-Primary School classmates got 7 O-Levels at secondary modern and presumably went to Sixth Form College somewhere. And some of my University classmates had been 11-plus failures. But, in general, the 'pass or fail' at 11 marked out your future path in life.
In truth, for all the swots and dunces there are great many more children who, with the right leadership and attention, can achieve reasonably good academic results, or given the right leadership, can excel in non-academic areas. A good comprehensive school will give them this opportunity. Perhaps not 11 A*s (this is not about Partington or Italy) at GCSE, but 5 or more at Grade C or above and a good solid grounding in practical subjects. Grammar schools don't usually offer much in the way of non-academic subjects, and even then some are inappropriately academic. Secondary Moderns don't give a child with, say, a flair for languages the chance to study and develop that skill.
It seems to me that the best comprehensives are those in areas where there is not much of an alternative, so people naturally send their child to the local school rather than go through distortions to enter a selection-by-the-back-door process. I suspect that the best comprehensives also benefit from a relative absence of behavioural or socially dysfunctional children, in the way that Grammar Schools did and do. These are generally away from inner-cities or sprawling dumping-ground overspill estates. Pity the child that lives on the dumping-ground estate and wants to learn but has to go to the local comp with the ASBO brigade.
The system of education provision in Britain is overly complex. Whilst we have fee-paying schools, we will never have a comprehensive system. Religious schools are popular, not especially in the main because of their religious policy, but because of their ability to select children by their parents' ability to attend frequent worship, which, if done deliberately for school entrance reasons, is a good indicator of a positive parental attitude to education. Abolishing religious schools would remove many of the causes of social division, but would be politically unpopular and administratively difficult and expensive.
We would have this discussion in RE back in 1983 and someone came up with the opinion "Comprehensives are bad because there are kids at Comprehensives who can't read". Even in my idealistic/naive mode of 1983 I figured this to be illogical. That made Secondary Moderns also bad, because there were also kids there who couldn't read, and Secondary Moderns are anti-matter to Grammars. It is the role of Primary Schools to ensure that every child - save obviously, those with Severe Learning Disabilities - can read. Not by eleven, but a lot earlier. I caught something on the TV the other day that mentioned the difference between 'learning to read' and 'reading to learn' and suggesting age 9 as the target age for transition.
There seems to me, as a disinterested observer, to be far more angsting about secondary schools than primaries, and very little at all about Early Years. I still meet parents who think that their child is at a good school because they sit in rows and recite their time-tables at age 4, when all the evidence from Scandinavia and elsewhere is that before the age of 7 children learn best through play, exploration and discovery rather than by being lectured at in formal teaching sessions.
People take to the streets in righteous indignation at the thought of student loans and top-up fees, but there is very little mobilisation for Early Years or for Sure Start schemes. Presumably because the articulate and politically engaged feel confident about their ability to guide their own children through those stages with active involved parenting and hothousing. They don't really care what is happening to the children from dysfunctional backgrounds who are never going to go to University anyway, even though their lack of parenting and often under-educating below age 7 makes them doomed to disrupt the local Comprehensive and create havoc in their neighbourhoods.
I think the Grammar School system was a brilliant idea that failed too many children because of the stigma attached to and the under-resourcing of Secondary Moderns, and the lack of enthusiasm for Secondary Technicals which had brilliant results for the bright non-academic child. Comprehensive schools were a brilliant idea that have never fully succeeded in offering a broad education to the entire population because there are so many alternatives. And whilst the emphasis is on the later stages of education, the most important work is done before Keystage 1 "Give me the child until they are seven, and I will show you the adult..."
* for the sake of argument ignore Partington. This is the equivalent of AJP Taylor's footnote that all references to the Great Powers should be read to exclude Italy. Think of Partington as like Italy...
** some idiots argue that calling non-grammars "Secondaries" showed that they were inferior, without understanding that they were Secondary Moderns, rather than Secondary Grammars or Secondary Technicals. Idiots not understanding the sequence that goes Primary - Secondary - Tertiary
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