The most diverse school system we have ever had?

September 10, 2016 2:36 PM

The UK's new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wants an increase in the number of selective state schools.

After the 1944 education act (almost) all state schools in the UK fell into one of two types. Some were "grammar schools". These focused on academic education and it was assumed that most grammar school students would go on to university. Some were "secondary modern schools", which were intended for students who were to go into trades. Students were separated by an exam at age eleven - the "eleven plus".

In most of the country, this system was abandoned in the 1960s, largely because it was felt that it entrenched class divisions. Grammar schools remain only in a handful of areas. Since 1998, it has been illegal to open new selective state schools in the UK.

This article from the BBC explains some of the history.

In a recent speech Theresa May (who was once herself a grammar school girl) announced that she wants new selective schools. She wants "Britain to be the world’s great meritocracy":

The debate over selective schools has raged for years. But the only place it has got us to is a place where selection exists if you’re wealthy – if you can afford to go private – but doesn’t exist if you’re not. We are effectively saying to poorer and some of the most disadvantaged children in our country that they can’t have the kind of education their richer counterparts can enjoy. … What is "just" about that? Where is the meritocracy in a system that advantages the privileged few over the many? How can a meritocratic Britain let this situation stand?

May's position polls well. However, critics allege that research on the existing grammar schools is not encouraging. The writer of this piece from the BBC's "Reality Check" blog summarizes the data as follows:

Pupils at grammar schools perform well. Children overall in areas with grammar schools perform less well than in non-selective areas, except for the richest children. Poorer children are less likely than wealthier children to get into grammar schools.

This topic was recently discussed on Radio 4's More or Less.

In her speech, May anticipated the complaint that an increase in selection will be bad for students from less affluent backgrounds. She replied:

We are going to ask new grammars to demonstrate that they will attract pupils from different backgrounds, for example by taking a proportion of children from lower income households. And existing grammars will be expected to do more too - by working with local primary schools to help children from more disadvantaged backgrounds to apply. … [Moreover, while] there is no such thing as a tutor proof test, many selective schools are already employing much smarter tests that assess the true potential of every child. So new grammars will be able to select in a fair and meritocratic way, not on the ability of parents to pay.

posted by HoraceH (30 comments total)

Other links

Why not bring back grammar schools?

Current grammar schools and social mobility: what's the evidence?

The Guardian view on grammar schools: the wrong answer but the right question

Theresa May's grammar school plan is post-truth politics in action

Grammar schools aren’t fit for the world of the future

5 reasons why a return to grammar schools is a bad idea

More grammar schools would be a disaster, says social mobility tsar

Grammar schooling to reintroduce concept of ‘riff-raff’
posted by Speculatist at 2:52 PM on September 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well, looks like Brexit and the subsequent collapse of the Labour Party have given the Tories carte blanche to drag the UK back to the fifties.
My guess is that May wants the whole of the UK to look like the Channel Islands - think a corporatized home owners association with zero tolerance for dissent and which you can never, ever leave.
My plan to return has turned to dust.
Anyone got any ideas for where I should go if Trump wins here?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:59 PM on September 10, 2016 [9 favorites]

This guy had a modest proposal.
posted by bukvich at 3:18 PM on September 10, 2016

My timelines are a mess with this right now - I went to a grammar school (academically selective state school, not private school that has grammar in the name) in the UK in a place that still had them as kind of a throwback, and then to a very academically selective university, so I know a disproportionate amount of people who've experienced this fairly niche (for people my age - late 20s) kind of education.

My theory on grammar schools and social mobility is thus: they allow for social mobility insofar as the underlying society allows for social mobility. So in a changing post-war Britain they were a tool that could funnel smart poor kids towards brighter prospects, into professions that would have been closed to them previously. But now I don't believe they can be anything but a reflection of the fact that potential for social mobility is much, much lower now in the UK than it's been for decades. Most of the kids who end up in schools like mine are comfortably middle class anyway - in my city the grammar schools were better than the private schools, so if you could afford to pay but your kid was smart you sent them to my school and if they didn't/couldn't pass the test you sent them to a fee-paying school.

Even within the grammar school itself, social class was still a big predictor of outcomes - the girls who got pregnant at school or dropped out before A Level were disproportionately the ones from poorer backgrounds. The ones who did really well were the ones who would have done really well in nearly any environment because they had resources at home, parents who were engaged with their education, etc.

So now my Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of people who can't understand why so many people object to the idea of reintroducing selective schooling, and their argument basically boils down to "well it was an amazing opportunity for me and I can't see what's wrong with bringing them back" when they're also the people who would have had a good education and amazing opportunities either way.

I really think it was different in my parents' day (both went to grammar schools from working class/social housing backgrounds and it did give them different opportunities to their peers and cousins who went to regular schools), but by the time I went the majority of the people there were people whose parents were pretty invested in getting them into the really good school AND had the resources to pull it off (e.g. private tutoring), and that's usually a fairly strong socioeconomic indicator.

I guess you could argue that with more schools like this it'll get normalised again and lots of kids will routinely be tested (rather than just the ones who self-select for testing), but I think a lot of families have lost the culture of grammar schools in the last twenty years or so (loss of prestige, loss of the idea that routinely testing the intellect of most 11-year-olds is normal, more attachment to ideas like fairness and every individual being successful/accomplished in their own way), so it's no real guarantee that more kids from deprived or lower-income backgrounds will get access to a better education (if it is a better education in the way it's implemented, which isn't guaranteed, especially under this government) even if the admissions process is amazing and impartial and class-blind as Theresa May promises. Which it won't be.
posted by terretu at 3:22 PM on September 10, 2016 [16 favorites]

Do any of the articles discuss how the existing schools will be reconfigured if selective grammar schools are reintroduced? I am interested in what will happen to those students. Is it just segregating out the lower socio-economic and academically disinclined members of society? Will they be left with an underfunded and poorly directed educational purpose?
posted by Thella at 3:28 PM on September 10, 2016

I do wonder if support for grammar schools stems from people feeling no one has any real social mobility. The grammar school system was my mother's only hope of social mobility and I think she sees the abolishment of grammar schools as the thing that separated her and her brother's educational fates. But my mother grew up in an area where there just weren't enough (or any) rich people to take all the grammar school places.
posted by hoyland at 3:29 PM on September 10, 2016

No-one who uses the word "meritocracy" knows where it came from.

(anecdata: when I was growing up in Nottinghamshire, I took the 11+ and had the opportunity to go to a grammar school; all my friends were going to the local comp, so I told my parents that's where I wanted to go too. I occasionally wonder what it'd have been like had I gone, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that I'd be even more of an insufferable arse than I already am, so I don't regret the decision. 11-year old parm wasn't entirely stupid.)
posted by parm at 3:36 PM on September 10, 2016 [10 favorites]

> Do any of the articles discuss how the existing schools will be reconfigured if selective grammar schools are reintroduced?

"Observe," said the Director triumphantly, "observe."

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks–already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

"They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives." The Director turned to his nurses. "Take them away again."

Still yelling, the khaki babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled out, leaving behind them the smell of sour milk and a most welcome silence.

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, chapter 2.
posted by scruss at 3:45 PM on September 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's such a peculiar policy. Seems to be aimed at collecting votes from a minority of voters, to the detriment of the majority of the population. Various opinions inc:

"Grammar schools policy is not about social mobility, it's for the middle classes who can't afford private schools"

"All of the evidence suggests that selecting by ability, or faith, simply increases social inequality. The prime minister is either completely ignorant of this evidence, or is aware of the evidence but remains determined to push ahead anyway.

"This suggests either that our prime minister is a fool, or that she is determined to worsen educational inequality while pretending to do the exact opposite. The first explanation would be very worrying. The second explanation is far more worrying still."

Theresa May: "We need to do more for the hidden disadvantaged children". By placing most of them in secondary moderns."

"Terrifying! 24% of electorate voted Con in 2015 & this wasn't in their manifesto => no mandate for these policies"

Even: Former Education Secretary: Theresa May’s school plans are ‘weird’
posted by Speculatist at 3:59 PM on September 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Being able to go to a school where being a nerd was the norm, and it wasn't uncool to care about learning, was pretty magical for me.
posted by Joe Chip at 4:07 PM on September 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Lets make every school selective! Then everyone will have gone to a selective school. And we all know that people who have gotten into selective schools did it on merit. So we can have a meritocracy where everyone has merit. It will be completely excellent!
posted by srboisvert at 4:22 PM on September 10, 2016 [4 favorites]

The USSR was a meritocracy. North Korea is a meritocracy. Someone needs to decide who has the merit and who doesn't. That someone is in that position either because they are a ruthless accumulator of power, or because they have a patron who is a ruthless accumulator of power.
posted by Anoplura at 4:26 PM on September 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's likely to turn out a bit like the re-branding of second-class rail travel as 'standard class'. What they want us to believe is that there will be 'grammar schools' for those who are in the top X percent, but somehow the remaining schools (which used to be called 'secondary moderns') will be just as good. Which of course invites the question 'why would we need grammar schools, if the other schools are just as good?'

I'll allow that, for a lot of people, particularly those growing up in the post-war period, grammar schools did afford them some degree of social mobility (although of course it didn't get them the privileges of the privately educated). But that was then, and class divisions don't present the same set of problems that they do now. Social mobility and educational attainment are now widely understood to be mostly about the wealth and the social status of your parents (and hence geography also).

The people I see arguing for grammar schools are (usually) the people who went to them. They found the experience pleasant, no doubt, and some feel that they wouldn't be where they are now without it. I'd argue that, in fact, many of those people would have done just as well in a properly-resourced comprehensive school. I went to one - quite a large one in a very poor part of the country - and even as a very academic kid, it worked out brilliantly for me. See, both sides can produce anecdotal evidence...

Even in a comprehensive school, pupils are divided into groups by ability, and those ability groups often reflect the wealth and status of the parents, with the more middle-class kids tending to rise to the top. It's pretty inevitable, although good heads and good teachers do what they can to counter the effect. There's a mobility that emerges off the back of that - a child can move up or down between those ability groups as they develop, or when a particular subject starts to resonate with them. It's a complete myth that the less able kids are holding the bright ones back. Children (at least in secondary education, which is what we're talking about) are taught in classes where they have a similar level of attainment in the subject. So where's the need to have two types of schools, exactly?

If you're going to adopt a system that's by nature a fixed two-tier system, largely decided on the basis of an exam at a specific age (or two different ages, or three - it doesn't really matter), you're not really doing anything to break down social barriers. Quite the opposite - you're segregating kids by class and wealth (although you can claim it's by ability - both are often true at once) and at the same time creating a system where the best teachers will gravitate to the grammar schools - because what teacher wants to teach the kids who struggle?

The UK's education system is broken in all sorts of ways - recruitment and morale is in an awful state, and the Tories have always been suspicious/afraid of any well-educated group in the public sector (see also doctors). Sweeping the mess into two piles and calling one pile 'Grammar Schools' and the other something mealy-mouthed to try to placate those whose kids are unfortunate enough to end up there, isn't any kind of a fix. About the best thing any UK government can do for education is to leave it alone.
posted by pipeski at 4:44 PM on September 10, 2016 [7 favorites]

Being able to go to a school where being a nerd was the norm, and it wasn't uncool to care about learning, was pretty magical for me.

As a counterpoint, I'll politely state that the above very much did not match my experience in a well-regarded state grammar school through the 1990s.
posted by ominous_paws at 4:54 PM on September 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ugh, on the on hand I totally empathise with the idea of "nerd schools" - as someone who was a young nerd myself, the idea of hanging around other nerds at school sounds delightful. Maybe I would have had a girlfriend! My wife went to a selective school, and loved t.

But, as a motherfucking citizen who recognises responsibilities as well as rights, the case for selective schools is fucking appalling. There is reams of evidence that they grossly over-represent the middle and upper class, entrench inequality and more. Further, there is a well-documented effect that above average children have in a class, essentially they "uplift" that class with their presence. I.e. if you take a "smart" kid out of a given class, that class's marks/skill levels will fall more than what the 'smart' kid has taken with them. You are left with these educational ghettos that teachers try to avoid, require more classroom management and require more resource, and guess what? They don't get it, cause no one wants to fund a slightly-below-average school.

And indeed, the whole idea ignores what has - again - proven to be by far the biggest determinant of academic success in children. Is it classroom? No. Funding? No. Homework amounts? No Teacher qualifications? No. Education and income level of the parents is the most reliable predictor of academic success.

As parents, we like to pretend we have the illusion of choice to ensure educational outcomes. A private school will make a difference, a school in a good neighbourhood will make a difference. Not really. Certainly not in aggregate. The reality is that if you take a kid with bright, rich parents you can put them in the shittiest school imaginable and they will still do pretty good, and conversely, you can take a kid with poor, low-educated parents and that kid will struggle at the best school in the city. Because rich people have the tools, culture and resources to correct any shortcomings in the school, and poor people have the opposite.

Whenever I voice these facts in my circle of bourgeois, largely selectively-taught friends, there is a tsunami of disagreement. It's like, yes, your case is totally different, and a complete statistical outlier for no apparent reason - and so is yours and so is yours and so is yours. People are so blind to their privilege.

(this is why my daughter is going to the local school just down the road. I don't care if it's like Dangerous Minds up in there. In fact, in some ways I think it would be good for her!)
posted by smoke at 6:28 PM on September 10, 2016 [11 favorites]

The 11 plus and grammar schools never went away in N Ireland, it allowed me to go to a good school,university and relatively successful career when all things considered, breaking a pretty much unbroken chain of farm labourers as far back as family tree could be traced. That said, as rightly mentioned above, just because I found it good doesn't mean its the optimum solution. Look at Finland etc
posted by Damienmce at 6:36 PM on September 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

To add to what I said earlier.
I went to one of the few grammar schools left in England and it was great - for US readers, imagine a school where jocks are regarded as weird and being into the subjects you were being taught was the norm. A place where people told jokes in Latin in the lunch line without anyone freaking out.
It was, of course, a massively privileged environment without any but a token of the non white populace represented. It was also a place where, if you looked idle for a couple of days, you would be given another examinable subject to study.
It was, and I can't stress this enough, absolutely awesome for a nerdy kid.
And the kids who went to secondary moderns?
The attitude was that they were destined for failure.
Think about that - 11 year olds written off, pushed into poor, badly structured lives because of shitty IQ tests.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:42 PM on September 10, 2016 [9 favorites]

Anyone got any ideas for where I should go if Trump wins here?

I've always considered it ironic that Canadian citizenship is harder to obtain than American, at least in that you can't simply marry a citizen to receive a green card.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:56 PM on September 10, 2016

Isn't the German educational system, which is widely considered to be a model system, based heavily on streaming kids into academic and trade schools?
posted by PenDevil at 12:02 AM on September 11, 2016

Eleven is just so young… let’s say it was selection at 14, after three years of secondary education but before taking GCSEs; I still think it would be a bad idea but at least it would be less horrible. Eleven, though?
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:22 AM on September 11, 2016

We already have German-style parallel streams here: after GCSEs, some kids go on to sixth form colleges and do A-levels. Others go to vocational colleges and do GNVQs or a trade education (one of my friends is currently doing woodwork and furniture making at a local college, and most all of her classmates are fresh out of fifth form). Splitting kids up at 11 is a different ballgame altogether.
posted by Dysk at 1:28 AM on September 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Isn't the German educational system, which is widely considered to be a model system, based heavily on streaming kids into academic and trade schools?

Parts of the German system, such as the availability to non-university-bound students of vocational education incorporating an apprenticeship, seem like very good ideas. The rigor of its tracking certainly isn't/hasn't been uncontroversial though and there have been some reforms.
posted by atoxyl at 2:41 AM on September 11, 2016

Even in a comprehensive school, pupils are divided into groups by ability

This wasn't true when I went to one. All classes were mixed ability, with absolutely no exceptions. There were no sports teams, no clubs, no trips, no playground facilities, no music. I can safely say it was an atrocious education, just a holding pen for the workforce. The Tories are welcome to try something different as far as I'm concerned.
posted by Coda Tronca at 3:07 AM on September 11, 2016

I went to a grammar school. It was not, in any way, a nerd's paradise.
posted by Albondiga at 5:11 AM on September 11, 2016

more attachment to ideas like fairness and every individual being successful/accomplished in their own way

This is orthogonal (maybe) to any particular school system, but if we really believed this we'd organize the rest of life differently, wouldn't we? More honor to any useful or beautiful labor, less to the rare but inborn talents and less to the talents that happen, right now, to have increasing returns to scale. What Walton's Thessaly books are showing an attempt at, with its difficulties.
posted by clew at 11:33 AM on September 11, 2016

Think about that - 11 year olds written off, pushed into poor, badly structured lives because of shitty IQ tests.

someone has already posted my go-to comment for any discussion of selective schooling, especially in the UK - but I'll add to it:

No one should ever be allowed to even utter the M-word until they read Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, and can articulate why it is so clearly a dystopia (and not a how-to guide). It was written in response to the original mid-20th century debate on selective schools versus conprehensives.

and my second point: in the spirit of anecdata, I have met people who failed the 11-plus and later went on to get a PhD. It was a damned flawed test.

But no test, no matter how perfect, will ever make meritocracy (ie rule by the talented, as opposed to equality) a good idea - for that, see my first point (and read Young's book).
posted by jb at 11:43 AM on September 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I can't help feeling this is an irrelevance. The end of grammar schools didn't increase social mobility. The end of the comprehensive won't decrease it. The class that cares about schools - like my family - will use money to (1) pay for school fees (2) pay for tutors or (3) pay for a house in the catchment area of the most academic state school. We've already done this for our age 5-11 school, moving two miles up the road and tripling our house cost, but (we hope!) getting us into the terribly nice non-selective age 5-11 school. Various friends have moved a few miles to where they still have grammar schools.

I see comparisons with the changes in Swedish schooling, in the last few years, moving control from local authorities to become independent. Ideologically-driven, not actually very important, since it doesn't make children smarter (or more stupid) and it doesn't make parents care more about education, and those are the things that matter.
posted by alasdair at 12:38 PM on September 11, 2016

The simplest counter-argument to all of this of course is that this policy is always mooted as "let's bring back grammar schools" and never "let's bring back secondary moderns". Yet the whole point of a selective system is that this is precisely what you will be doing for the majority of children. There's a very good reason we abandoned this the first time round.

There's certainly an argument to be made that we need to get better at catering to different levels and types of intelligence so that every child can achieve their potential, but that's not what this is about.
posted by the long dark teatime of the soul at 5:43 AM on September 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Testing kids at the age of 11 to determine which track they are going to go on is a horrible idea. They're still larval human beings, pre-formed, their intelligence mainly informed by their background, not their potential.

I have a very small suggestion for the makeup of grammar and comprehensive schools: give the tests as normal and then assign students by lottery, as it will be just as fair.
posted by Hactar at 7:11 AM on September 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I work in a selective government funded grammar school. This year we admitted around 180 new students, 23 of which were from the catchment area. Children who live in the catchment area that pass the entrance test are guaranteed a place. I doubt that the local families whose children didn't make the grade are assuaged by the knowledge that the house prices in the area are effected by a school that doesn't serve the local community.

The education system in the UK has grown up alongside the industrialisation of the country. It is designed to provide workers well trained enough to work in the traditional industries or to go into academia. It is not designed to train the future leaders of the country and it is not designed to foster creativity. In fact, much of the current education system works to stifle creativity. A case in point is the examination system; creativity is shown to be reduced in stressful situations.

As winterhill points out, this system is designed to produce pliant citizens for jobs that won't exist in a society that has changed. Of all the things that could be done to improve the education system in this country, creating a more divisive system is the dumbest. The effects of this stupidity will be felt for decades unless it is reversed or abandoned.

As regards class streaming, grouping children by ability, this has been an area for contention for some years. There is plenty of evidence to show that well taught mixed ability groups benefit all students, boosting grades for all. The method is to let the more intelligent students, who pick up the subject matter earlier, teach the other students. The early adopters benefit from the challenge of explaining the material and the other students benefit from individual tuition. This requires a different approach and pedagogical method to be adopted and high quality teaching.

Good teachers can get good results, where as good school environments have a much less marked effect. The teaching profession has been under siege for decades by successive governments and discontent is rife. Good teachers leave the profession not because they don't like teaching, but because the pressures they are subject to are overwhelming. There is a huge amount of administration that they must undertake that has little to do with education and lots to do with keeping the management free from blame if an Ofsted inspection takes place. Make teaching an attractive job prospect, afford them respect and value them. That will get you almost all the way to creating a better education system.

As with everything the Tory party does, expect the worst. This move is part of a plan to privatise the education system and has nothing to do with creating a better education system for all, better outcomes for students or a better society for us all to share.
posted by asok at 6:18 AM on September 13, 2016 [5 favorites]