Truss adds: “The best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is to ignore her. She is an attention seeker. That is what she is.”
JFC. You don't have to be @StuartDickson to think that the Prime Minister of the UK deciding to "ignore" the elected leader of the Scottish Parliament is probably not the way that devolution was meant to work.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
The fertile crescent has seen better and more fertile days.
Egypt was the Ukraine of its day, biggest bread basket in the known world.
No wonder the Roman emperors never delegated its government to a senator, but only to an equestrian - in other wirds a middle class type with no hope of ever making himself Emperor.
The Nile Delta is still incredibly fertile. It supports ten times as many people as in Roman times.
A big mistake about the Equestrians, who certainly fancied themselves as Emperors, or at least kingmakers.
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
Well, I can't eat much more as it is. (I don't know if the pheasants are from the sort of pheasant shoot where they basically let them go dumb and happy, as opposed to being feral/wild from birth, but the deer and partridge at least must surely be feral?).
Truss adds: “The best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is to ignore her. She is an attention seeker. That is what she is.”
JFC. You don't have to be @StuartDickson to think that the Prime Minister of the UK deciding to "ignore" the elected leader of the Scottish Parliament is probably not the way that devolution was meant to work.
In terms of powers reserved to the UK government and Westminster like the Union it absolutely was
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
Well, I can't eat much more as it is. (I don't know if the pheasants are from the sort of pheasant shoot where they basically let them go dumb and happy, as opposed to being feral/wild from birth, but the deer and partridge at least must surely be feral?).
Deer there's too much of, partridge is artificially bred just as pheasants is
Truss adds: “The best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is to ignore her. She is an attention seeker. That is what she is.”
JFC. You don't have to be @StuartDickson to think that the Prime Minister of the UK deciding to "ignore" the elected leader of the Scottish Parliament is probably not the way that devolution was meant to work.
*weeps softly*
Well, it's basically how the last, sorry still current, PM and his cabinet operated all the time. ON at least one occasion, taking so long to respond that they could change the laws meantime and make the point at issue moot.
This Tory election is so funny. Currently our resident Tories are ramping Truss, someone they were saying was going to deliver certain defeat just a few days ago.
Just remember who is voting and it all makes more sense...
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
Any evidence Truss is winning back voters yet or just speaking to the converted
She leads Starmer as preferred PM with 19% 2019 labour preferring her compared to 16% 2019 Con preferring Starmer. So, some evidence.
Thanks wool.
That's the one to watch, let's see how she does.
Yeah, how far she gets and how quickly she gets pegged back are what will determine if theres any chance of a cut and run vote. I think she will probably get towards a ten point lead on preferred pm before it reverses, with the Tories maybe getting to 39/40 to lab on mid thirties in a few polls......
This Tory election is so funny. Currently our resident Tories are ramping Truss, someone they were saying was going to deliver certain defeat just a few days ago.
Just remember who is voting and it all makes more sense...
The majority of my privately educated friends are Labour and Lib Dem supporters, actually.
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
Well, I can't eat much more as it is. (I don't know if the pheasants are from the sort of pheasant shoot where they basically let them go dumb and happy, as opposed to being feral/wild from birth, but the deer and partridge at least must surely be feral?).
Deer there's too much of, partridge is artificially bred just as pheasants is
Does that explain these Alan Partridge soundalikes?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
The average working or middle class Englishman, the Indian ryot, the West Indian slave, the American pioneer, the Chinese peasant, all had much worse lives in 1780, than their modern counterparts do. That's not open to question. And, that improvement is, in large part, due to the Industrial Revolution.
With the exception of better medical care, the living standards of the very rich may not that be that different then and now.
I'll take a warmer climate over the average standard of living in 1780 any day.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
I seem to remember that back in the day the biggest trade in pheasant was between Britain and France. I wonder what happened to that. This isn't a Brexit snipe by the way. Has pheasant just fallen out of gastronomic favour?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
I just don't get the idea that we have more shit to deal with than before. There is certainly different shit to deal with, but we're also a lot better at dealing with it. It really feels like people are being rather dismissive of what a hand to mouth existence for much of humanity was like for thousands of years, as its handwaved away as if it was nothing.
I think that is value after today's "difficulties" with Sir K.
She's the Rishi Sunak of Labour, a complete non-entity
No, Rishi has talent, Wes Streeting would likely be the choice if Starmer went
Streetings tweetings will derail him.
I doubt it, he certainly has a less controversial past than Truss
He tweeted 'over my dead body' yesterday, he is not a serious politician
So what, that is a very common phrase.
Nandy on the other hand hasn't got the gravitas to lead Epping Town Council, let alone the UK, even Rayner is more heavyweight and she at least has some charisma
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
Also, more people live utterly shit lives than ever before, and they outnumber the better lifers by 1m to 1.
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
I seem to remember that back in the day the biggest trade in pheasant was between Britain and France. I wonder what happened to that. This isn't a Brexit snipe by the way. Has pheasant just fallen out of gastronomic favour?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
For the record, it's fairly easy to have a better time than one's ancestors. Especially if they are dead.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Have you met any members of the Green Party?
I think that subconciously, a lot of people imagine themselves as being among the elite in the past, rather than among the masses, for whom life was a daily grind.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
Well, considering they take the top 20% of 11 year olds, you would expect them - on average to get 5x as many (proportionately) into Oxbridge as Comprehensives. That should be the absolute minimum achievement.
'The country’s most disadvantaged pupils are twice as likely to attend Oxbridge if they live in a region with grammar schools compared to a non-selective area, a new study has claimed.
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
Also, more people live utterly shit lives than ever before, and they outnumber the better lifers by 1m to 1.
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
Have you ever travelled by private jet?
Do you know what proportion of the world has a smart phone? Or access to Wikipedia? Or the ability to contact distant friends? Or access to clean water? Or a chance of living to see the age of 30? Or of being healed after a bacterial infection or the breaking of a limb?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
I just don't get the idea that we have more shit to deal with than before. There is certainly different shit to deal with, but we're also a lot better at dealing with it. It really feels like people are being rather dismissive of what a hand to mouth existence for much of humanity was like for thousands of years, as its handwaved away as if it was nothing.
Who would really choose to live their life in a previous time to now? Even as a member of the elite, say as a king, or empower etc. No medicine, so no painkillers, much more likely early death an probably any number of ailments. Shit food. No entertainment beyond minstrels and tumblers and endless epic poetry.(I’m mixing a lot of previous eras). Now for a lot of people in the world life has not yet achieved a comfortable western existence, but it’s getting there. But by any realistic measure 2022 is the best time to be a human.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
The average working or middle class Englishman, the Indian ryot, the West Indian slave, the American pioneer, the Chinese peasant, all had much worse lives in 1780, than their modern counterparts do. That's not open to question. And, that improvement is, in large part, due to the Industrial Revolution.
With the exception of better medical care, the living standards of the very rich may not that be that different then and now.
I'll take a warmer climate over the average standard of living in 1780 any day.
Even climate change at the highest end of predictions of c.4C warming - which won't happen, because we'll take action to mitigate it - would still mean the mass of humanity still leads far better lives than they would have done in the 18th C.
One of the stupidest decisions we've taken in the last 40 years is to cancel the rakes of new nuclear power stations that were planned, but never built, in the wake of Chernobyl and so we went for more coal instead.
Had they all contained to be built worldwide (as planned) it would have knocked 0.3-0.4C off the averag global temperature rises we've experienced to date.
This Tory election is so funny. Currently our resident Tories are ramping Truss, someone they were saying was going to deliver certain defeat just a few days ago.
Just remember who is voting and it all makes more sense...
The majority of my privately educated friends are Labour and Lib Dem supporters, actually.
That was a remarkably good answer to the hunting question.
Managed to get a rural audience to clap her when saying she wouldn't repeal the Hunting Act 2005
Mind you:
I was talking to a mate who runs a small commercial pheasant shoot the other day who said she was putting down 5,000 birds this year. To be shot. And after they are thwacked, they are landfill or cat food. And every single person thwacking them is a rich fuck, vs about 20% of the average mounted hunting field.
And what really pisses me off, is the likes of Nick Palmer are well informed and intelligent and realise all this is true. And are prepared to leverage sheer dishonesty to advance their case. I do utterly loathe an intelligent liar.
Seriously, do they not eat the pheasants? That's a criminal waste. I often eat pheasant and other game from Lothian and the Borders.
There just isn't the demand. They backed off from the just burying them when people started noticing, but mostly they become catfood.
Whereas fox hunting only ever polished off 2 or 3 a day, and those were the unhealthy ones.
Well, I can't eat much more as it is. (I don't know if the pheasants are from the sort of pheasant shoot where they basically let them go dumb and happy, as opposed to being feral/wild from birth, but the deer and partridge at least must surely be feral?).
Deer there's too much of, partridge is artificially bred just as pheasants is
Depends which partridge. Red-legged - not native. Grey - native, on the red list.
Pheasants are a pain as they are almost always kept at unsustainable levels. They are the main predator of snakes on our local nature reserve.
I think that is value after today's "difficulties" with Sir K.
She's the Rishi Sunak of Labour, a complete non-entity
No, Rishi has talent, Wes Streeting would likely be the choice if Starmer went
Streetings tweetings will derail him.
I doubt it, he certainly has a less controversial past than Truss
He tweeted 'over my dead body' yesterday, he is not a serious politician
So what, that is a very common phrase.
Nandy on the other hand hasn't got the gravitas to lead Epping Town Council, let alone the UK
Do you think that threatening to invade Spain, etc., provides sufficient gravitas?
That is a matter of policy not personality but of course from my perspective being willing to do the necessary to defend Gibraltar if required would be vital in the unlikely event Spain threatened it
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
Also, more people live utterly shit lives than ever before, and they outnumber the better lifers by 1m to 1.
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
Have you ever travelled by private jet?
Do you know what proportion of the world has a smart phone? Or access to Wikipedia? Or the ability to contact distant friends? Or access to clean water? Or a chance of living to see the age of 30? Or of being healed after a bacterial infection or the breaking of a limb?
Yes, but apart from that, what did the Industrial Revolution ever do for us?
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
Also, more people live utterly shit lives than ever before, and they outnumber the better lifers by 1m to 1.
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
Have you ever travelled by private jet?
I am sure the average peasant in the Middle Ages would have happily swapped places
I think that is value after today's "difficulties" with Sir K.
She's the Rishi Sunak of Labour, a complete non-entity
No, Rishi has talent, Wes Streeting would likely be the choice if Starmer went
Streetings tweetings will derail him.
I doubt it, he certainly has a less controversial past than Truss
He tweeted 'over my dead body' yesterday, he is not a serious politician
So what, that is a very common phrase.
Nandy on the other hand hasn't got the gravitas to lead Epping Town Council, let alone the UK
Do you think that threatening to invade Spain, etc., provides sufficient gravitas?
That is a matter of policy not personality but of course from my perspective being willing to do the necessary to defend Gibraltar if required would be vital in the unlikely event Spain threatened it
So you are a supporter of independence for Epping, as a state of its own, separate from the UK. There is no other way in which your statement makes sense.
Grammar schools is one of those bizarre obsessions which is meaningless outside the UK or indeed beyond a particular post-war moment.
Anyone promising to bring them back is in the business of selling snake oil.
But look at the audience at this tory hustings. There is hardly a single person who does not have masses of grey hair.
This is a party whose backbone was born in the 1940s and 1950s.
That has been the case ever since I have been a member, unless they are weird Harry Enfield Tory boys or gay without a family to raise or a local councillor most normal people even if Tory voters don't consider joining the party until they retire and their children have left home and they have more time to go to events, campaign etc.
I am unusual in being a member under 50 and always have been
Truss is going to have a very narrow window in which to deliver. The public will not be taken for fools twice
She will also likely have a very tight window in which to go early, like Brown.
Unlike Brown, who had dominated the domestic agenda for a decade and had nothing left to do, you get the sense that Truss wants to use the majority to do stuff, so I doubt she’ll want to go for an early election.
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
But if it backfires to something dreadful the overall score could be negative. Not that I'm expecting this necessarily. But it's possible.
JohnO is going to disown me but Truss is impressing me.
I still think the cost of living crisis is going to dominate and destroy her premiership.
The only way it wont is if the narrative can be spun that they threw the kitchen sink at it whilst Labour carped, and went on strikes and offered no answers. Which is probably an impossible narrative. So she probably needs to make use of the honeymoon window and hope to get 5 years and ride it out
Grammar schools is one of those bizarre obsessions which is meaningless outside the UK or indeed beyond a particular post-war moment.
Anyone promising to bring them back is in the business of selling snake oil.
But look at the audience at this tory hustings. There is hardly a single person who does not have masses of grey hair.
This is a party whose backbone was born in the 1940s and 1950s.
That has been the case ever since I have been a member, unless they are weird Harry Enfield Tory boys or gay without a family to raise or a local councillor most normal people even if Tory voters don't consider joining the party until they retire and their children have left home and they have more time to go to events, campaign etc.
I am unusual in being a member under 50 and always have been
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
Sunset walk up Yes Tor, Dartmoor. In the interests of balance, and to show that holidays sometime refuse to be picturesque:
Slightly hairy at the top and I was glad of the backup of a map and compass. But the variability is part of the attraction, and it'll stick in the memory.
Truss is going to have a very narrow window in which to deliver. The public will not be taken for fools twice
She will also likely have a very tight window in which to go early, like Brown.
Unlike Brown, who had dominated the domestic agenda for a decade and had nothing left to do, you get the sense that Truss wants to use the majority to do stuff, so I doubt she’ll want to go for an early election.
Yep. She has two years of proving what she can do before the next GE. Why risk throwing it all away by running for the electorate in October?
This Tory election is so funny. Currently our resident Tories are ramping Truss, someone they were saying was going to deliver certain defeat just a few days ago.
Just remember who is voting and it all makes more sense...
The majority of my privately educated friends are Labour and Lib Dem supporters, actually.
Same.
Were the Upper Class Twits privately educated? Only two of them were identified as Old Etonians...
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
What you are rightly saying, is that the human race has been irretrievably fucked by the industrial revolution.
The doubters said that the transatlantic slave trade was the pinnacle of our national achievement. but I said, Be patient!
Outside of the top 2% or so, very few people would welcome a return to the standard of living we had pre-1780.
Who is "we"? I mean, yay that you and I are having a ball compared to our ancestors, but the amount of shit time that people are having now vs then, is x 10 million. Easily. What is good about that?
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
More people live better lives than ever before.
Also, more people live utterly shit lives than ever before, and they outnumber the better lifers by 1m to 1.
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
Have you ever travelled by private jet?
Do you know what proportion of the world has a smart phone? Or access to Wikipedia? Or the ability to contact distant friends? Or access to clean water? Or a chance of living to see the age of 30? Or of being healed after a bacterial infection or the breaking of a limb?
Are you drunk?
You have clearly been to Pooristan, but you have never been to me. Nor, on reflection, to Pooristan.
Poor people don't have distant friends, because how would they have them because how can they afford to travel more than walking distance from where they were born? do you not realise that poor = not having any money? not, not very much money compared to the average Cambridge graduate, but actually not any money?
Fuck smartphones, fuck wikipedia, and the people:drinking water ratio has plummeted because the industrial revolution has multiplied people a fuck of a lot quicker than it has multiplied fresh water.
Grammar schools is one of those bizarre obsessions which is meaningless outside the UK or indeed beyond a particular post-war moment.
Anyone promising to bring them back is in the business of selling snake oil.
But look at the audience at this tory hustings. There is hardly a single person who does not have masses of grey hair.
This is a party whose backbone was born in the 1940s and 1950s.
That has been the case ever since I have been a member, unless they are weird Harry Enfield Tory boys or gay without a family to raise or a local councillor most normal people even if Tory voters don't consider joining the party until they retire and their children have left home and they have more time to go to events, campaign etc.
I am unusual in being a member under 50 and always have been
That won't last.
It will, the Tories almost always win over 65s, even if they lose every other age bracket, the only time they ever lost pensioners was 1997.
However even when we win majorities like 2015 and 2019 and win most voters over 35, most of our members are still over 65
Comments
So, some evidence.
Sunak just has something about him, that extra bit of slickness and debate skills that just doesn't quite work when trying to connect.
A big mistake about the Equestrians, who certainly fancied themselves as Emperors, or at least kingmakers.
And do you think that we are not irretrievably fucked by climate change? You might be right, but it's a bold claim.
That's the one to watch, let's see how she does.
It's my party and I'll cry if I want to!
The report, published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), also found 39 cent of pupils in selective school areas progress to highly-selective universities, compared with just 23 per cent in comprehensive areas.'
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/poor-pupils-at-grammar-schools-twice-as-likely-to-attend-oxbridge-study-claims/
I think she will probably get towards a ten point lead on preferred pm before it reverses, with the Tories maybe getting to 39/40 to lab on mid thirties in a few polls......
Maybe I am wrong, but I find it inconceivable that Labour will not elect a woman next. It is becoming incredibly glaring now that they haven't so far.
And there are 3 or 4 top class Labour women ready to be leader.
With the exception of better medical care, the living standards of the very rich may not that be that different then and now.
I'll take a warmer climate over the average standard of living in 1780 any day.
Damn right.
Anyone promising to bring them back is in the business of selling snake oil.
Nandy on the other hand hasn't got the gravitas to lead Epping Town Council, let alone the UK, even Rayner is more heavyweight and she at least has some charisma
Britain saved humanity once with the Industrial Revolution. All this means is that: now we must do it again
Onwards, Britons, to the stars!
So whenever someone advances the "better lifers" argument I eagerly ask, whether they are members of the better life minority.
Do you realise how small a percentage of existing humanity has ever travelled by plane?
And how small a percentage of them, has ever travelled by private jet?
Have you ever travelled by private jet?
https://poultry.network/9738-british-game-sector-faces-ai-headache-over-france-imports/
Tory leaders should have the courage of their convictions. What’s the point of being in power, else?
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1554136296242692097
Nandy, you are correct, is a total lightweight
Now for a lot of people in the world life has not yet achieved a comfortable western existence, but it’s getting there. But by any realistic measure 2022 is the best time to be a human.
One of the stupidest decisions we've taken in the last 40 years is to cancel the rakes of new nuclear power stations that were planned, but never built, in the wake of Chernobyl and so we went for more coal instead.
Had they all contained to be built worldwide (as planned) it would have knocked 0.3-0.4C off the averag global temperature rises we've experienced to date.
Pheasants are a pain as they are almost always kept at unsustainable levels. They are the main predator of snakes on our local nature reserve.
I still think the cost of living crisis is going to dominate and destroy her premiership.
This is a party whose backbone was born in the 1940s and 1950s.
And the expectations game is in her favour.
People have underestimated her forever.
They hadn't noticed that Sunak can sound like a East Anglian radio host when he gets all high energy in campaign mode.....
I am unusual in being a member under 50 and always have been
It will sweep away whoever wins frankly.
@RichardVaughan1
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37m
To say Liz Truss is looking relaxed on stage during this hustings is an understatement.
She just winked at an audience member.
https://twitter.com/RichardVaughan1/status/1554183807942680578
Plus Labour hate the private schools.
Everyone else has flip flopped from disaster Truss to how good she is.
Slightly hairy at the top and I was glad of the backup of a map and compass. But the variability is part of the attraction, and it'll stick in the memory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVYA3oTG8fg
You have clearly been to Pooristan, but you have never been to me. Nor, on reflection, to Pooristan.
Poor people don't have distant friends, because how would they have them because how can they afford to travel more than walking distance from where they were born? do you not realise that poor = not having any money? not, not very much money compared to the average Cambridge graduate, but actually not any money?
Fuck smartphones, fuck wikipedia, and the people:drinking water ratio has plummeted because the industrial revolution has multiplied people a fuck of a lot quicker than it has multiplied fresh water.
However even when we win majorities like 2015 and 2019 and win most voters over 35, most of our members are still over 65
Betfair next prime minister
1.12 Liz Truss 89%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
Next Conservative leader
1.12 Liz Truss 89%
9 Rishi Sunak 11%
LAB: 38% (-3)
CON: 34% (+1)
LDEM: 12% (-)
GRN: 7% (+2)
via @RedfieldWilton, 31 Jul
Another Redfield? I am lost