What About the 11-plus failures, then, eh? eh?

Mr
Charles says that I seldom address the fate of those who did not pass the
Grammar School exam, the eleven-plus. I believe that anybody who searches the
index under ‘grammar schools’ and ‘comprehensives’ will find that this
accusation is flat out untrue. I address it frequently, and Mr Charles has been
writing here for quite a while. Has he been reading, though? There is a
frustrating group of contributors who write but do not read, and these – for
obvious reasons - are usually the ones who accuse me of silence on subjects
which I have addressed.

 

Anyway,
let me repeat here what I have often said. 1. Those who went to Secondary
Modern schools often did better than is generally thought. Some secondary
moderns got pupils into university even in the 1960s when there were many fewer
university places than now.

 

2.
There is no reason to believe (that I have ever seen) that those who are
nowadays excluded from the better schools, by their parents’ lack of money or
influence, do any worse than those who were sent to secondary moderns before
the 1965 change, on the grounds of ability.

 

I
believe the collapse of the old GCE ‘O’level exam (first diluted, then abolished
because too few people could pass it ) suggests that the general level of
secondary education is higher in a system that selects on merit (such as the
one we used to have, and the one which still just about exists in Northern
Ireland) , than it is in a system which selects on wealth, such as those in
England, Scotland and Wales.

 

 

3.
As I have often said (via the old Evelyn Waugh –Randolph Churchill
‘non-malignant’ joke, which you will have to look up), there is no doubt that
the pre-1965 system had many serious faults. The Secondary Moderns lacked a
clear purpose. The technical schools intended by the 1944 Act were, for the
most part, never built. They were not cured by destroying the one part of it
which worked well. A more intelligent reform, based on reason rather than on
egalitarian dogma, would have been to open many more grammar schools (they were
very unevenly spread), and particularly to expand the number of girls’ grammar
schools. A serious attempt could also have been made to set up the Technical
Schools which are still so badly needed. The sums involved would have been tiny
compared with the vast construction and bureaucratic costs of going
comprehensive, let alone the price of the absurd University expansion which was
launched by John Major and made even more bloated by New Labour.

 

As
for the eleven-plus itself, I have many times said that I prefer the German
system of selection by assessment and mutual consent, combined with at least
one second chance (at 13) and perhaps more such chances for pupils whose
talents develop later. 

 

I
have said all this before. I suppose I should be grateful for the chance of
saying it again, but honestly I find it exasperating that people such as Mr
Charles can come here and brazenly complain that I haven’t addressed it when I
have. I would appreciate his personal acknowledgement that he has read this
posting, so that, if he once again claims I have not addressed the issue, I can
simply reproduce it.