Grammar schools don’t count in Bolton.
Category:
03 / 02 / 2009 | Author: dnorris
Grammar Schools don’t count in Bolton.
The class system is so embedded in English Education that you almost believe that it will never go away.
Every attempt to change it comes round in the end to an argument about the merits of grammar schools, (a case of the sins of the fathers and mothers being passed on to the sons and daughters.)
Teachers who have spent their careers in primary education can easily get confused about the merits of a system which creams off the most gifted of its children and puts them into a hot house environment, so that they are better equipped to go on to higher education, whilst at the same time having another set of schools which have the same aim.
Primary schools have always been comprehensive. Primary schools have always catered for all levels and abilities and where there was a selection test at 11 all children were entered with the hope of them going on to the school which would enable them to utilise their abilities and aptitude.
All of the research in the 1950’s pointed to a gross waste of ability. That was why comprehensive schools were devised. They did away with any selection. The whole neighbourhood went on to a bigger school and then carried on with their studies.
Oh, if it were that simple! But educational theory just couldn’t keep its fingers out of the pie.
Middle schools were promoted as advantageous for children aged 8 – 12 or aged 9 – 13 years. Faith schools kept themselves separate. Catholic schools and Jewish schools flourished and were joined by Moslem schools. Sub divide again and you come up with boys schools and girls schools. Lurking in the background has always been the grammar school.
Grammar schools persisted in some counties but lost favour in others. Leicestershire and Oxfordshire championed neighbourhood schools. Kent doggedly kept its grammar schools.
It is tempting to think that those who succeeded after going to grammar school always ended up making the policy decisions which maintained grammar schools.
Keeping grammar schools is a local government policy decision. It represents a council that believes in having an elite set of schools for its elite pupils, but the elite-ness tends to come about through limiting the number of schools. Cumberland famously once had enough grammar schools for all the pupils who left primary school, so everyone went to a grammar school.
So the endless merry-go-round continues. Different schools and different neighbourhoods scramble to put their children into the schools which achieve the best results, because they notionally have the right to choose where their children can go to school.
Parents opt for those schools which are highest up the league table and a melee occurs as places that are not the preferred ones are contested.
Some towns and counties offer places based on a school’s catchment area. Others are based on selection tests. Some even place children with older brothers and sisters.
Some parents move house to be in the right catchment area. Others lie about where they live. A few bully their local Councillor. It is all a chronicle of understandable exasperation to parents who want the best for their children, but at the root of it is the unerring belief in the nature of a grammar school education.
The very name segregates sheep from goats ....and yet it is 50 years since comprehensive schools were supposed to break the mould. They have not done so.
Will it ever end?
Yes, and the solution is coming from precisely the opposite direction to that which you would expect namely the poor immigrant population.
Universities spend a lot of time analysing which social class the parents of their students come from. They would do better to look in the corner shops of Bolton, Bradford, Oldham and Dewsbury. Chinese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi parents work hard to make sure that their children do not have such a hard life themselves. They are not only hard working but they see education as the ladder to a better life. And colleges such as Bolton, Dewsbury, Bradford and Oldham take almost all of their students from these poorer families.
They don’t fight over grammar school places. They don’t move to live in big houses but then interestingly they don’t understand the subtleties of the class system either. They simply expect their children to go to university and then expect them to succeed there.
Increasingly that is what they are doing.
I can’t help thinking that they are on the right track. They are showing that grammar schools are not always necessary.
