Malcolm McLean's Blog: Faith schools and Catholic culture. - Posts Tagged "grammar-schools"

St Tom's is a highly selective school. That doesn't mean that the children are all swots, in fact only Albert and Adam have any real academic interests. But they are bright enough to take advantage of great teaching. The exception is Ibrahim, whose primary schoolmaster cheated on the entrance examination. It doesn't really do Ibrahim any favours, out of his depth, he struggles.

Selective schools, or in British terms, "grammar schools" are a big issue at the moment. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, herself a grammar school girl, has promised to reverse the policy of abandoning selection at 11+. What happens, of course, is that the parents of those who narrowly fail the 11+ kick up a huge fuss. But their children can seldom point to an academic subject that they really like, or a non-school academic interest they pursue. The reason is simple, ability is a bell curve. If you cut off the top 10% or so on the bell, you get a few children like Adam and James clearly in the upper tail of the distribution. Then the rest are bunched up together, near your cut-off point. For every Cecilia - a nice bright girl but no intellectual heavyweight - there's a similar girl who was into horses and dogs and who didn't quite make the cut.

The children who narrowly fail the 11+ are by and large the marginal ones, ones who could reasonably be assigned to either a grammar or a secondary modern school, But there will be some child somewhere who is of lower ability, and nevertheless got into the grammar. For parents, that is galling, it seems unfair. But it isn't really unfair, if the child has no academic interests, he doesn't have a right to an environment where academic interests are common and nurtured. And if we accepted all marginal cases, we'd just create another, larger class of marginals below them.