As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Hello Robert - at the risk of reopening the earlier debate, my responses to your question were basically why I'm entering my kids for grammar school, not should there be grammar schools. Should there be? I can see both sides. But in my authority, there are. And given this it makes sense for me a a parent to try to use them. Because primarily here's an opportunity for my kids to have an education with a very small risk of being smacked in the face for some perceived transgression.
I don't think anyone should be criticized for using the system in place even if you don't approve of it. You do the best for your kids.
Ah yes, the Diane Abbott defence...
And a good one. You're a slam dunk hypocrite if you go private yet slag off others for doing same. But just the act of using a system you disapprove of isn't necessarily hypocrisy.
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Hello Robert - at the risk of reopening the earlier debate, my responses to your question were basically why I'm entering my kids for grammar school, not should there be grammar schools. Should there be? I can see both sides. But in my authority, there are. And given this it makes sense for me a a parent to try to use them. Because primarily here's an opportunity for my kids to have an education with a very small risk of being smacked in the face for some perceived transgression.
I don't blame you at all. Heck, my kids go to extremely expensive private schools in Los Angeles.
My issue, really, is that I don't know (and this is from a societal not a parental level) if the good of grammar schools, outweighs the problems.
I certainly do believe in competition, and in everyone achieving the best they can. But it is not clear to me that is best achieved in a Grammar school system - or, at least, not one that selects as early as 10. (Which is how old most kids are when they take the test.)
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions? Who gains? No one. It just divides us further. SACK THEM ALL
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions? Who gains? No one. It just divides us further. SACK THEM ALL
On the second stop of my post-Covid driving holiday, 2 nights in the Breisgau wineland at the foot of the Black Forest before heading across the Alps. Last 2 days were in Ghent.
Leon pronounced to me weeks ago that the itinerary was far too whistlestop. I disagreed - you can get a good sense of a city in one or two days, and the drive is part of the fun. But after a day of Belgian, Luxembourgeois and Alsatian traffic jams and a beautiful stopover like this I’m wondering. Next time a week in the Black Forest with a view of the Belchen.
Which route are you using to cross the Alps?
We're planning to drive down to Lake Como next month from the Portsmouth - St Malo ferry, stopping first at Beaune in Burgundy for a couple of nights. Still undecided whether to go via Switzerland from there or use the Mont Blanc or Frejus tunnel.
We’re going Luzerne then Gotthard pass (not tunnel, going to take our time). Then Como 2 nights before ferry from Savona to Corsica.
If you are stopping in Burgundy then by far the nicest bit, where I have a second home, is the Maconnais - around Cluny. Beautiful landscape, beautiful architecture, affordable wine, and conveniently just before the motorway turning via Bourg en Bresse to the Alps.
I know Cluny. Quite a charming, slightly forgotten corner of France
I note that 40C is forecast there, for Thursday . Ouch. Global warming might fuck the French wine industry
Remarkably the hottest temperature on record in Macon is 39.8C, in (when else) August 2003. That will be broken this year.
The Maconnais is reasonably well protected from climate change because 1. They grow Chardonnay, in a fuller more new witkd style than further North, 2. They get decent rainfall in May and June even in hot years, 3. There are more inventive winemakers and less bureaucratic bureaucrats (Beaujolais likewise) so we’re starting to see a few plantings of Syrah and Viognier.
You make wine, don't you?
Do you think Bordeaux can adapt? I'm not sure how they can. Southwest France is slated to get some of the highest temps soonest, and they are completely dependant on tradition for their prestige - so they can't suddenly grow Spanish or Greek grape varietals to adapt. In my amateur opinion
California has adapted: they grow Merlot and Cabernet at much higher temperatures than Bordeaux, because they are massive users of technology. If you go to Robert Mondavi, each individual vine has a drip feed and a moisture sensor
It means quite homogeneous wines, because rainfall doesn't matter so much anymore, but still some absolutely stunning ones
I have never drunk a single Californian wine where I've thought: WOW
I have drunk some nice wines from the USA - from all over. But never anything special
I know I must be missing out but it is peculiar. And I drink and travel a lot
Do they hide them away or something? Are they just so expensive now they sell to Jeff Bezos?
I've had great wines from every continent, bar north America, and Antarctica
Really?
I think the great Californian reds are far superior to Penfold's Grange, and up there with the very best Bordeauxs.
Now, I grant you that European Pinot is much better. Likewise a really good Puligny Montrachet when compared to any US chardonnay.
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered
If grammar schools are so good why didn't you want to go to one?
Academically there was little difference between the local boys grammar and the public school I attended but the latter had more facilities and going to public school still has a bit extra social cachet like it or not.
My sister however preferred the atmosphere at her grammar and did very well regardless anyway. My cousins on my mother's side went to comprehensives but they were in Wiltshire where there was no grammar option and their parents could not afford to go private
I would like to live in a society where "social cachet" ie snobbery is dead, and people are judged on what they say and do not how they talk or who they know.
Yes but you are a leftwinger, so no surprise there
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions? Who gains? No one. It just divides us further. SACK THEM ALL
Clearly she lacks vision. Think how much she could save by sacking EVERYONE in the Public Sector...
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Hello Robert - at the risk of reopening the earlier debate, my responses to your question were basically why I'm entering my kids for grammar school, not should there be grammar schools. Should there be? I can see both sides. But in my authority, there are. And given this it makes sense for me a a parent to try to use them. Because primarily here's an opportunity for my kids to have an education with a very small risk of being smacked in the face for some perceived transgression.
I don't think anyone should be criticized for using the system in place even if you don't approve of it. You do the best for your kids.
Ah yes, the Diane Abbott defence...
What else are you supposed to do?
Put your politics before your child's welfare. Then watch the grief you'd get for that. Cold sanctimonious ideologue!
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
The article you cite includes a number of criticisms of the methodology of that study. Every child should go to a good school. Not just the brightest or best coached for an exam aged 11. And certainly not just those with wealthy parents. I don't really get why you would think it's OK for most kids to go to bad schools. Well, I do get it, it's because you are an elitist who divides the world into the deserving and the undeserving. I wonder about the values you picked up at your own school - and it makes me more certain that I have done the right thing sending my kids to the local school where they mix with everyone just like I did and won't view society as divided into them and us. I really don't think your divisive mindset is a healthy way of looking at the world.
'Every child should go to a good school.'
Well everybody agrees with that. Just you as an ideological leftwinger believe that is achieved by universal comprehensive education, while I as an ideological rightwinger believe that is achieved by maximum choice and as many private schools, free schools, grammar schools and academies as possible
I thought we'd all (apart from stragglers) signed off on my Optimal Education System from PT.
Not me it sounds pretty sub optimal and in contravention of how real people react. Always the problem with the left. However not going to be a left for much longer due to climate change
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
The article you cite includes a number of criticisms of the methodology of that study. Every child should go to a good school. Not just the brightest or best coached for an exam aged 11. And certainly not just those with wealthy parents. I don't really get why you would think it's OK for most kids to go to bad schools. Well, I do get it, it's because you are an elitist who divides the world into the deserving and the undeserving. I wonder about the values you picked up at your own school - and it makes me more certain that I have done the right thing sending my kids to the local school where they mix with everyone just like I did and won't view society as divided into them and us. I really don't think your divisive mindset is a healthy way of looking at the world.
'Every child should go to a good school.'
Well everybody agrees with that. Just you as an ideological leftwinger believe that is achieved by universal comprehensive education, while I as an ideological rightwinger believe that is achieved by maximum choice and as many private schools, free schools, grammar schools and academies as possible
I thought we'd all (apart from stragglers) signed off on my Optimal Education System from PT.
Nope, see last thread. I called it educational communism but you are entitled to your view
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
The article you cite includes a number of criticisms of the methodology of that study. Every child should go to a good school. Not just the brightest or best coached for an exam aged 11. And certainly not just those with wealthy parents. I don't really get why you would think it's OK for most kids to go to bad schools. Well, I do get it, it's because you are an elitist who divides the world into the deserving and the undeserving. I wonder about the values you picked up at your own school - and it makes me more certain that I have done the right thing sending my kids to the local school where they mix with everyone just like I did and won't view society as divided into them and us. I really don't think your divisive mindset is a healthy way of looking at the world.
'Every child should go to a good school.'
Well everybody agrees with that. Just you as an ideological leftwinger believe that is achieved by universal comprehensive education, while I as an ideological rightwinger believe that is achieved by maximum choice and as many private schools, free schools, grammar schools and academies as possible
I thought we'd all (apart from stragglers) signed off on my Optimal Education System from PT.
Not me it sounds pretty sub optimal and in contravention of how real people react. Always the problem with the left. However not going to be a left for much longer due to climate change
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
Utterly pathetic comments from Truss on Sturgeon .
Yes, it’s a poor answer. Nicola Sturgeon presents a difficult challenge for the UK pm, especially a Tory one, as she is intelligent, and tactically astute. She also is adept at blaming the U.K. government for all Scotland’s ills, in a rather similar manner a previous version of the same blame game re the Tories/UKIP and Brexit. But she cannot be ignored, any more than the significant number of Scots who currently believe their country should govern itself.
She can on the union as it is a reserved matter to the UK government
It’s not about legality it’s about how you preserve and make a case for the continuing union.
No it isn't, legally and constituonally all a Tory government has to do is say 'NO' to Sturgeon, forever if needed if re elected.
If Labour grants indyref2 it would be their problem to win it
If only we had just said no to all those empire holdings in the 20th century, we’d still rule a quarter of the globe... I think you are wrong if you think a U.K. government can in reality keep saying no.
Well it wasn't the Tories who gave up India, it was Labour and that was the key moment which began the end of Empire, Churchill wanted to keep India. (Though of course Scotland has MPs and Holyrood so is not a colony).
Spain has successfully said no to Catalan nationalists for years without even 1 independence vote.
So basically you think we should have tried to keep the empire?
The Tories at the time certainly thought that under Churchill's leadership.
Now obviously once the Empire went we are not getting it back but in the Scottish context there will not be any indyref2 allowed while we Tories remain in charge
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Interesting to read Peter Zeihan (referred to in an earlier post on this site, about the Ukraine war) on this very topic; he thinks that this fear relating to advanced chips is overblown, as Japan and, particularly, the USA have the capabilities and technology for high-end chip fabrication, he says.
Zeihan further suggests that (presumably short of an actual nuclear confrontation, which shafts everybody), a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could theoretically be cut off not even requiring the USA but by an alliance of local states that are not keen on the idea - the Japanese navy alone, he asserts, is a more capable force than the Chinese one. The Japanese and/or Indians could likewise cut off China's access to the Indian Ocean, which is the route most of its fuel imports. An international boycott, on the scale of the one currently in place for Russia, would cripple China far more than it has Russia due to the structure of the Chinese economy.
This is not to say that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is impossible, just that it would be so self-destructive on the part of the Chinese government as to be suicidal.
Unfortunately, dictatorships have a habit of taking suicidal actions because their leaders are unhinged, receive dishonest information and are harder to contradict. This leads to more frequent miscalculations, as seen by Germany in WWI and WWII, Japan in WWII, Russia in 1905 and 2022, etc.
Also, there may be a situation where China recognises an attempted invasion would be highly risky, but manages to convince itself that not attempting the invasion would be worse, such that they feel forced to attempt it.
I think it's important to understand why Putin took the catastrophic decision to launch the February 24th invasion, and what we might do to make a Chinese repeat over Taiwan less likely.
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Indeed, but the start of the solution / backstop is in progress and Fabs take years to clean before production can ramp up.
Interestingly, there was an interview of someone from TSMC stating that, whilst they are brilliant at turning out the actual chips, they have next to no chip design capability and the US was the other way about, great at design but costly in terms of chip production.
On the second stop of my post-Covid driving holiday, 2 nights in the Breisgau wineland at the foot of the Black Forest before heading across the Alps. Last 2 days were in Ghent.
Leon pronounced to me weeks ago that the itinerary was far too whistlestop. I disagreed - you can get a good sense of a city in one or two days, and the drive is part of the fun. But after a day of Belgian, Luxembourgeois and Alsatian traffic jams and a beautiful stopover like this I’m wondering. Next time a week in the Black Forest with a view of the Belchen.
Which route are you using to cross the Alps?
We're planning to drive down to Lake Como next month from the Portsmouth - St Malo ferry, stopping first at Beaune in Burgundy for a couple of nights. Still undecided whether to go via Switzerland from there or use the Mont Blanc or Frejus tunnel.
We’re going Luzerne then Gotthard pass (not tunnel, going to take our time). Then Como 2 nights before ferry from Savona to Corsica.
If you are stopping in Burgundy then by far the nicest bit, where I have a second home, is the Maconnais - around Cluny. Beautiful landscape, beautiful architecture, affordable wine, and conveniently just before the motorway turning via Bourg en Bresse to the Alps.
I know Cluny. Quite a charming, slightly forgotten corner of France
I note that 40C is forecast there, for Thursday . Ouch. Global warming might fuck the French wine industry
Remarkably the hottest temperature on record in Macon is 39.8C, in (when else) August 2003. That will be broken this year.
The Maconnais is reasonably well protected from climate change because 1. They grow Chardonnay, in a fuller more new witkd style than further North, 2. They get decent rainfall in May and June even in hot years, 3. There are more inventive winemakers and less bureaucratic bureaucrats (Beaujolais likewise) so we’re starting to see a few plantings of Syrah and Viognier.
You make wine, don't you?
Do you think Bordeaux can adapt? I'm not sure how they can. Southwest France is slated to get some of the highest temps soonest, and they are completely dependant on tradition for their prestige - so they can't suddenly grow Spanish or Greek grape varietals to adapt. In my amateur opinion
California has adapted: they grow Merlot and Cabernet at much higher temperatures than Bordeaux, because they are massive users of technology. If you go to Robert Mondavi, each individual vine has a drip feed and a moisture sensor
It means quite homogeneous wines, because rainfall doesn't matter so much anymore, but still some absolutely stunning ones
I have never drunk a single Californian wine where I've thought: WOW
I have drunk some nice wines from the USA - from all over. But never anything special
I know I must be missing out but it is peculiar. And I drink and travel a lot
Do they hide them away or something? Are they just so expensive now they sell to Jeff Bezos?
I've had great wines from every continent, bar north America, and Antarctica
Really?
I think the great Californian reds are far superior to Penfold's Grange, and up there with the very best Bordeauxs.
Now, I grant you that European Pinot is much better. Likewise a really good Puligny Montrachet when compared to any US chardonnay.
I'm not disputing that California makes world class wines. Too many people I respect say that it REALLY does. But there is something peculiar in the way it is sold to the world - either they can't be arsed to market it, or it is so prized the best is all bought up (perhaps a bit of both, they are related)
eg in my career with the Knappers Gazette I have been sent out to Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chile, South Africa, Italy, Germany, England, the east and west coast of Australia, Spain.... and others.... and been given the finest wines they have. I've guzzled £10k bottles in Bordeaux from decanters shaped like antlers
The one missing is California. I'm not quite sure why
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector... Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers. Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
The article you cite includes a number of criticisms of the methodology of that study. Every child should go to a good school. Not just the brightest or best coached for an exam aged 11. And certainly not just those with wealthy parents. I don't really get why you would think it's OK for most kids to go to bad schools. Well, I do get it, it's because you are an elitist who divides the world into the deserving and the undeserving. I wonder about the values you picked up at your own school - and it makes me more certain that I have done the right thing sending my kids to the local school where they mix with everyone just like I did and won't view society as divided into them and us. I really don't think your divisive mindset is a healthy way of looking at the world.
'Every child should go to a good school.'
Well everybody agrees with that. Just you as an ideological leftwinger believe that is achieved by universal comprehensive education, while I as an ideological rightwinger believe that is achieved by maximum choice and as many private schools, free schools, grammar schools and academies as possible
I thought we'd all (apart from stragglers) signed off on my Optimal Education System from PT.
Not me it sounds pretty sub optimal and in contravention of how real people react. Always the problem with the left. However not going to be a left for much longer due to climate change
The Right will survive will they?
Yes because the right wing people will put the citizens of the country first. Climate change is going to make a lot of the middle east, south east asia and africa no longer viable for living. It will displace about 2 billion to 4 billion people to become refugees.
Now do you believe most countries populations are going to
a) welcome their countries population having a four fold increase of people that dont really share the same values
or
b) let a few in then look in horror at the eventual number they will need to take going to demand their governments shut the refugees out by any means necessary
My money is on b and border forces are armed and told to shoot
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered
If grammar schools are so good why didn't you want to go to one?
Academically there was little difference between the local boys grammar and the public school I attended but the latter had more facilities and going to public school still has a bit extra social cachet like it or not.
My sister however preferred the atmosphere at her grammar and did very well regardless anyway. My cousins on my mother's side went to comprehensives but they were in Wiltshire where there was no grammar option and their parents could not afford to go private
I would like to live in a society where "social cachet" ie snobbery is dead, and people are judged on what they say and do not how they talk or who they know.
Yes but you are a leftwinger, so no surprise there
So do we take it from that reply that you believe people should be judged on how they talk and who they know and that snobbery is a good thing?
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered
If grammar schools are so good why didn't you want to go to one?
Academically there was little difference between the local boys grammar and the public school I attended but the latter had more facilities and going to public school still has a bit extra social cachet like it or not.
My sister however preferred the atmosphere at her grammar and did very well regardless anyway. My cousins on my mother's side went to comprehensives but they were in Wiltshire where there was no grammar option and their parents could not afford to go private
I would like to live in a society where "social cachet" ie snobbery is dead, and people are judged on what they say and do not how they talk or who they know.
Yes but you are a leftwinger, so no surprise there
And YOU don't want to weaken the link between parental bank balance and children's quality of education and life prospects.
A rebuttal to the oft heard platitude that we all want the same things but just differ on the best way of getting there.
Politics - at its root - is about clashing values and different brain chemistries not about "what works".
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
Tax payers arent being milked to pay private sector salaries on the whole
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
Aren't grammar school areas generally better-off, because they are the areas that fought to keep it? Surely that area phenomenon is just proximity to opportunity.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
That's the tax the millionaires argument in reverse. Sure. You could. But the amounts are minuscule.
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered
If grammar schools are so good why didn't you want to go to one?
Academically there was little difference between the local boys grammar and the public school I attended but the latter had more facilities and going to public school still has a bit extra social cachet like it or not.
My sister however preferred the atmosphere at her grammar and did very well regardless anyway. My cousins on my mother's side went to comprehensives but they were in Wiltshire where there was no grammar option and their parents could not afford to go private
I would like to live in a society where "social cachet" ie snobbery is dead, and people are judged on what they say and do not how they talk or who they know.
Yes but you are a leftwinger, so no surprise there
Unfortunately your view of the world is widespread, accounting for the over-promotion of well-spoken non-entities and our poor economic performance. At times it has almost made me want to emigrate in order to escape the barriers to progression that exist for the non-posh, but I've found that as long as I work mainly with non-English people, which is easy enough in finance, then I can do okay. It's a sad reflection on this country, though, and if I feel it as a middle class white man the God knows how others put up with it.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Presumably she will be getting rid of all the equality legislation that diversity officers monitor for statutory reports?
The reality is that the HR department will just do the same work under a different name. Perhaps "levelling up officers" would be more in keeping with the times.
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Hello Robert - at the risk of reopening the earlier debate, my responses to your question were basically why I'm entering my kids for grammar school, not should there be grammar schools. Should there be? I can see both sides. But in my authority, there are. And given this it makes sense for me a a parent to try to use them. Because primarily here's an opportunity for my kids to have an education with a very small risk of being smacked in the face for some perceived transgression.
I don't blame you at all. Heck, my kids go to extremely expensive private schools in Los Angeles.
My issue, really, is that I don't know (and this is from a societal not a parental level) if the good of grammar schools, outweighs the problems.
I certainly do believe in competition, and in everyone achieving the best they can. But it is not clear to me that is best achieved in a Grammar school system - or, at least, not one that selects as early as 10. (Which is how old most kids are when they take the test.)
One way (as I’ve noted before) of squaring that circle.
A large enough 6th form college can offer a superior teaching offer to most grammar schools. It needs a significant number of (comprehensive) partner schools to give up their 6th forms in return for priority admission. A semi-selective admissions policy applies to non partner schools.
This one has a roll of around 2700 students: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhead_College … Students from partnership feeder schools are given priority for places at the college, and are required to obtain a minimum of GCSE grades 4 in Maths and English language in addition to three GCSE grade 6s to gain a place at the college. Students usually need to get a B grade in the subjects they are wanting to take…
…Students from other schools are considered based on their mock GCSE results, a one-to-one interview and the availability of subject places, this after partner school students have been taken into consideration….
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
The problem is. To make those savings means no CS at all. Zilch. Nada. She won't get any of her other plans typed up.
Nancy Pelosi and "The Last Hurrah": For some years I have flattered myself that I could predict 80-90 percent of what Pelosi would do, from what I learned from Edwin O'Connor's novel (and from Mike Royko's biography of the original Richard Daley, "Boss") about political machines.
Here, for example, is an example from "The Last Hurrah": The political boss is explaining to his nephew that it is necessary to have stands on foreign policy, even running for mayor in a city that resembles Boston. (Massachusetts, not the British one.): "When you come right down to it, there are only two points that really count." "Such as . . . ?" Skeffington held up two fingers. "One," he said, ticking the first, "All Ireland must be free. Two, he said, ticking the second, "Trieste belongs to Italy. They count. At the moment the first counts more than the second, but that's only because the Italians were a little slow in getting to the boats. . . ."
You may -- or may not -- admire the practical politics in those two stands. They won him support, without him ever being expected to deliver anything tangible.
And now the connection to Pelosi. She is the daughter of a Baltimore boss and learned from her father. San Francisco has more of a tradition of machine-style politics than most West coast cities. San Francisco's Chinatown claims to be the largest outside of Asia. http://www.sanfranciscochinatown.com/
So Pelosi has practical political reasons for supporting Taiwan. But I will concede that she may be making this visit in part for principled reasons, too. Whatever her reasons, I'm glad she is going.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions?
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
It is about £160k, and the answer is that the PM's job delivers ego-stroking benefits that attract people like Sunak who don't need to work.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions?
You tell us. You don’t have any idea, do you ?
Funny the people who think "diversity jobs" aren't needed sometimes spend their evenings screaming online about wanting to lock up people who they hate.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
YES.
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions?
You tell us. You don’t have any idea, do you ?
Seventy eighteen billion. Get rid
Even if it was 2 quid, get rid of them all. They are poison
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
Especially since they and their relatives vote. As do folk who's kids get sent home. And who can't see a doctor. But. She's rowing back on the top.of her head bollocks even as we speak. So that's OK then.
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
Such a shame as BT is doing an amazing job of FTTP rollout, after many false starts. They are really pacing ahead, I genuinely believe they'll have much of the country done by 2024.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
Another colleague today handed in her retirement notice. CPI on a pension vs 7% real terms paycut was a no brainer.
I think I can last another year, unless we get screwed again on pay. If so retire and do locums when I fancy and the price is right.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Not sure I agree. For example, I’m happy for world class surgeons and consultants to be paid more than the PM by the NHS. That way everyone gets access to them, rather than just the immensely wealthy. PM’s make fortunes once they leave office, if they choose to do so. It’s not a job for life.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Leon is in full dumb reactionary rant mode with this old chestnut.
People complain that the Government is full of morons and idiots and then say we should cut their pay to attract better people, ok
You are denying the government are full of morons and idiots? It is the same with the civil service...speak to anyone who has experience of the civil service such as yoedethur, me that had to deal with the idiots in the dft etc......the public sector attracts people who like job security because they know their idiocy would get them sacked if they had to actually work where they were expected to turn a profit or serve customers in a way the customers would be pleased.
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
Aren't grammar school areas generally better-off, because they are the areas that fought to keep it? Surely that area phenomenon is just proximity to opportunity.
Yes.
And it is worth noting that poorer children do better in richer areas, irrespective of whether there are grammars.
Adjusting for the variables (in a transparent way) is what is particularly difficult.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
It's utterly insane and I'm sure it won't happen.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
By my calculation unless Truss has got her sums badly wrong, she'll have to cut the pay of nearly every doctor, nurse and police officer outside London to make this work
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks - along with the Balkans)
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
Such a shame as BT is doing an amazing job of FTTP rollout, after many false starts. They are really pacing ahead, I genuinely believe they'll have much of the country done by 2024.
We're getting our FTTP next week!
And when BT was nationalised they went for isdn rather than adsl and sold lines for about 5 times more than adsl that were 5 times slower. You don't remember how crap nationalised industries were else you would never want to go back to them
As Tory members reach for their pens, Liz Truss may get some exposure that's more about "show us how good your performance is" than "make some nice promises" - relating to Taiwan.
"The island dominates production of the chips that power almost all advanced civilian and military technologies. That leaves the U.S. and Chinese economies extremely reliant on plants that would be in the line of fire in an attack on Taiwan. It's a vulnerability stoking alarm in Washington."
A few years ago, some US companies started moving chip fab back to the US simply because of the perceived vulnerability of Taiwan. Even TSMC is opening a US operation
Taiwan still dominates high end contract chip fabrication
Indeed, but the start of the solution / backstop is in progress and Fabs take years to clean before production can ramp up.
Interestingly, there was an interview of someone from TSMC stating that, whilst they are brilliant at turning out the actual chips, they have next to no chip design capability and the US was the other way about, great at design but costly in terms of chip production.
Also note that the most sophisticated machinery for chip fabrication is made by a US/European concern - ASML.
The threat to Taiwan, though, is a serious threat to the world economy. It would likely take the best part of a decade to replace their manufacturing capacity if it were destroyed in a conflict.
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
Such a shame as BT is doing an amazing job of FTTP rollout, after many false starts. They are really pacing ahead, I genuinely believe they'll have much of the country done by 2024.
We're getting our FTTP next week!
And when BT was nationalised they went for isdn rather than adsl and sold lines for about 5 times more than adsl that were 5 times slower. You don't remember how crap nationalised industries were else you would never want to go back to them
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
imo there are fundamental flaws in both the public and private sector in terms of optimum societal gain. I have worked in both and recognise fully the flaws already stated about both. i have also worked in mutual/membership /cooperatives and find these (whilst not perfect ) have less flaws than pure private or public in getting the babalnce right between incentive, customer service ,staff welfare and the wider society consideration.
There should be more cooperatives - consumer ones in natural monopolies and worker ones in more competitive sectors
By my calculation unless Truss has got her sums badly wrong, she'll have to cut the pay of nearly every doctor, nurse and police officer outside London to make this work
And teachers. Good luck with TA's. They're minimum wage already, and no holiday pay.
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
Such a shame as BT is doing an amazing job of FTTP rollout, after many false starts. They are really pacing ahead, I genuinely believe they'll have much of the country done by 2024.
We're getting our FTTP next week!
And when BT was nationalised they went for isdn rather than adsl and sold lines for about 5 times more than adsl that were 5 times slower. You don't remember how crap nationalised industries were else you would never want to go back to them
ADSL doesn't exist when BT was privatized.
Yes true but there was a better alternative isdn was a pain in the butt to get working but they stuck with it for a long time. SIP trunks maybe what I was thinking of it was a few decades ago so....
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered
If grammar schools are so good why didn't you want to go to one?
Academically there was little difference between the local boys grammar and the public school I attended but the latter had more facilities and going to public school still has a bit extra social cachet like it or not.
My sister however preferred the atmosphere at her grammar and did very well regardless anyway. My cousins on my mother's side went to comprehensives but they were in Wiltshire where there was no grammar option and their parents could not afford to go private
I would like to live in a society where "social cachet" ie snobbery is dead, and people are judged on what they say and do not how they talk or who they know.
Yes but you are a leftwinger, so no surprise there
Unfortunately your view of the world is widespread, accounting for the over-promotion of well-spoken non-entities and our poor economic performance. At times it has almost made me want to emigrate in order to escape the barriers to progression that exist for the non-posh, but I've found that as long as I work mainly with non-English people, which is easy enough in finance, then I can do okay. It's a sad reflection on this country, though, and if I feel it as a middle class white man the God knows how others put up with it.
We are hardly that poor economically, we are still comfortably a top 10 economy.
Plus nowadays our great public schools are filled with Chinese and Nigerian and Jordanian and Indian offspring as much as middle class whites
People complain that the Government is full of morons and idiots and then say we should cut their pay to attract better people, ok
You are denying the government are full of morons and idiots? It is the same with the civil service...speak to anyone who has experience of the civil service such as yoedethur, me that had to deal with the idiots in the dft etc......the public sector attracts people who like job security because they know their idiocy would get them sacked if they had to actually work where they were expected to turn a profit or serve customers in a way the customers would be pleased.
I've worked in the civil service and the private sector and I don't recognise this difference.
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
You're not trying very hard
Have you been to Argentina? It is brilliant if you love wine. You can get really superb bottles for about $20 US
Ditto Chile. I was a personal guest at this winery about three years ago. Stayed three days and went horse riding on the estate with the cute lady owner - quite drunk. Glorious wine
If Liz really wants to wrongfoot Starmer and get ahead of the CoL stuff she'll ask the right questions about BT raising prices by 14% but only having a 4-7% cost base increase. Sometimes Tory politicians need to name and shame specific companies and force them to u-turn.
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
Such a shame as BT is doing an amazing job of FTTP rollout, after many false starts. They are really pacing ahead, I genuinely believe they'll have much of the country done by 2024.
We're getting our FTTP next week!
And when BT was nationalised they went for isdn rather than adsl and sold lines for about 5 times more than adsl that were 5 times slower. You don't remember how crap nationalised industries were else you would never want to go back to them
BT wanted to roll out FTTP in the 80s. Thatcher stopped them and forced them to stay with copper because it was seen as anti-competitive.
We were then a world-leader in fibre, we sold our expertise off to Japan and South Korea.
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
Liz Truss is properly bonkers. Dominic Cummings was right.
What can we do about it?
Laugh.
To be fair, the observation that Dom C elevated BoJo to power knowing he was useless, then spent a year or so on Operation Regieme Change only to see him replaced by someone worse, is quite funny.
I just wish it wasn't happening in the country I call home.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
imo there are fundamental flaws in both the public and private sector in terms of optimum societal gain. I have worked in both and recognise fully the flaws already stated about both. i have also worked in mutual/membership /cooperatives and find these (whilst not perfect ) have less flaws than pure private or public in getting the babalnce right between incentive, customer service ,staff welfare and the wider society consideration.
There should be more cooperatives - consumer ones in natural monopolies and worker ones in more competitive sectors
Never worked with a cooperative so cant make an assessment. Have worked with the public sector and private sector and won't work where the public sector is pulling the strings again as they really don't have a clue largely.....which is unfair there are people who have a clue its merely they generally aren't listened to as a higher up has an empire building objective and there sub optimal desires override the advice of those that actually know what they are talking about in the public sector.
Give you an example in a public sector I worked for....we at the back end devised routes using the ordinance survey data we had foisted on us. The front end team from another company were using data from a completely different source which they had had foisted on them. Result often the routes we sent back were using roads that didnt actually exist on the map data so it appeared we were sending people through fields with no roads.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
It's utterly insane and I'm sure it won't happen.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
I assume that Diversity Officers exist because legislation requiring the production of certain documents exist, and it's more efficient to have Diversity Officers do it than having it done in a sort of cross-curricular way. So the legislation wants fixing at the supply end.
Of course, it's possible that diversity officers in, say, the NHS save us money, by getting people from marginalised communities in for early diagnosis. So behind all the tiresome woke, there might be sound money at work.
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
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
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
Wow. The last time I was on here (about three hours ago) it was being proclaimed that Liz was tacking to the centre. Now she's going to abolish the British Civil Service!
Liz Truss is properly bonkers. Dominic Cummings was right.
What can we do about it?
Laugh.
The circle can't be squared. SKS can't either. We need an FDR to truth tell.about the situation. And fireside chat us through the solutions. I.don't see a likely candidate anywhere.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
It's utterly insane and I'm sure it won't happen.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
I assume that Diversity Officers exist because legislation requiring the production of certain documents exist, and it's more efficient to have Diversity Officers do it than having it done in a sort of cross-curricular way. So the legislation wants fixing at the supply end.
Of course, it's possible that diversity officers in, say, the NHS save us money, by getting people from marginalised communities in for early diagnosis. So behind all the tiresome woke, there might be sound money at work.
No. We can't afford any of this shit any more. Get rid of it all. PURGE
Comments
My issue, really, is that I don't know (and this is from a societal not a parental level) if the good of grammar schools, outweighs the problems.
I certainly do believe in competition, and in everyone achieving the best they can. But it is not clear to me that is best achieved in a Grammar school system - or, at least, not one that selects as early as 10. (Which is how old most kids are when they take the test.)
GET THE FUCK RID OF DIVERSITY OFFICERS
I'd vote for her and that, on its own. How much is this insane Woke industry costing us? Billions? Who gains? No one. It just divides us further. SACK THEM ALL
I think the great Californian reds are far superior to Penfold's Grange, and up there with the very best Bordeauxs.
Now, I grant you that European Pinot is much better. Likewise a really good Puligny Montrachet when compared to any US chardonnay.
Now obviously once the Empire went we are not getting it back but in the Scottish context there will not be any indyref2 allowed while we Tories remain in charge
Also, there may be a situation where China recognises an attempted invasion would be highly risky, but manages to convince itself that not attempting the invasion would be worse, such that they feel forced to attempt it.
I think it's important to understand why Putin took the catastrophic decision to launch the February 24th invasion, and what we might do to make a Chinese repeat over Taiwan less likely.
Interestingly, there was an interview of someone from TSMC stating that, whilst they are brilliant at turning out the actual chips, they have next to no chip design capability and the US was the other way about, great at design but costly in terms of chip production.
eg in my career with the Knappers Gazette I have been sent out to Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chile, South Africa, Italy, Germany, England, the east and west coast of Australia, Spain.... and others.... and been given the finest wines they have. I've guzzled £10k bottles in Bordeaux from decanters shaped like antlers
The one missing is California. I'm not quite sure why
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
But the CS total pay bill is £9bn.
Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers.
Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Now do you believe most countries populations are going to
a) welcome their countries population having a four fold increase of people that dont really share the same values
or
b) let a few in then look in horror at the eventual number they will need to take going to demand their governments shut the refugees out by any means necessary
My money is on b and border forces are armed and told to shoot
We can see she has a very bad symptom of promising a lot
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
A rebuttal to the oft heard platitude that we all want the same things but just differ on the best way of getting there.
Politics - at its root - is about clashing values and different brain chemistries not about "what works".
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-just-five-points-behind-liz-truss-in-latest-tory-leadership-poll-0p2b8nppv (£££)
Why has Sunak’s price come in?
The reality is that the HR department will just do the same work under a different name. Perhaps "levelling up officers" would be more in keeping with the times.
A large enough 6th form college can offer a superior teaching offer to most grammar schools. It needs a significant number of (comprehensive) partner schools to give up their 6th forms in return for priority admission.
A semi-selective admissions policy applies to non partner schools.
This one has a roll of around 2700 students:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhead_College
… Students from partnership feeder schools are given priority for places at the college, and are required to obtain a minimum of GCSE grades 4 in Maths and English language in addition to three GCSE grade 6s to gain a place at the college. Students usually need to get a B grade in the subjects they are wanting to take…
…Students from other schools are considered based on their mock GCSE results, a one-to-one interview and the availability of subject places, this after partner school students have been taken into consideration….
She won't get any of her other plans typed up.
Here, for example, is an example from "The Last Hurrah": The political boss is explaining to his nephew that it is necessary to have stands on foreign policy, even running for mayor in a city that resembles Boston. (Massachusetts, not the British one.):
"When you come right down to it, there are only two points that really count."
"Such as . . . ?"
Skeffington held up two fingers. "One," he said, ticking the first, "All Ireland must be free. Two, he said, ticking the second, "Trieste belongs to Italy. They count. At the moment the first counts more than the second, but that's only because the Italians were a little slow in getting to the boats. . . ."
You may -- or may not -- admire the practical politics in those two stands. They won him support, without him ever being expected to deliver anything tangible.
And now the connection to Pelosi. She is the daughter of a Baltimore boss and learned from her father. San Francisco has more of a tradition of machine-style politics than most West coast cities. San Francisco's Chinatown claims to be the largest outside of Asia. http://www.sanfranciscochinatown.com/
So Pelosi has practical political reasons for supporting Taiwan. But I will concede that she may be making this visit in part for principled reasons, too. Whatever her reasons, I'm glad she is going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Hurrah
You don’t have any idea, do you ?
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Even if it was 2 quid, get rid of them all. They are poison
It would put Rishi and Starmer in very tough spots, Rishi because instinctively he will not disagree with BT putting up prices and probably doesn't realise for a lot of lower income people finding £50 extra per year for basic bitch broadband will be pretty difficult. Starmer because he's already pitched himself against the workers and on the side of the bosses putting everyone's prices up.
As do folk who's kids get sent home. And who can't see a doctor.
But. She's rowing back on the top.of her head bollocks even as we speak.
So that's OK then.
We're getting our FTTP next week!
Like say most banks and energy companies.
Sorry but the chance of "Cons supporters" and the membership having identical polling are absolubtely miniscule (43 Sunak, 48 Truss, 9 dk)
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
I think I can last another year, unless we get screwed again on pay. If so retire and do locums when I fancy and the price is right.
And it is worth noting that poorer children do better in richer areas, irrespective of whether there are grammars.
Adjusting for the variables (in a transparent way) is what is particularly difficult.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks - along with the Balkans)
Their Montebello, to my mind, is the best Bordeaux in the world. And it has lower alcohol content than most Bordeauxs.
Hubris perhaps?
The threat to Taiwan, though, is a serious threat to the world economy. It would likely take the best part of a decade to replace their manufacturing capacity if it were destroyed in a conflict.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
There should be more cooperatives - consumer ones in natural monopolies and worker ones in more competitive sectors
The vast majority of parents don't even know.what one is.
Plus nowadays our great public schools are filled with Chinese and Nigerian and Jordanian and Indian offspring as much as middle class whites
Have you been to Argentina? It is brilliant if you love wine. You can get really superb bottles for about $20 US
Ditto Chile. I was a personal guest at this winery about three years ago. Stayed three days and went horse riding on the estate with the cute lady owner - quite drunk. Glorious wine
http://www.wineanorak.com/chile/chileanwine_part4_Matetic.htm
You need to try harder
We were then a world-leader in fibre, we sold our expertise off to Japan and South Korea.
I just wish it wasn't happening in the country I call home.
Give you an example in a public sector I worked for....we at the back end devised routes using the ordinance survey data we had foisted on us. The front end team from another company were using data from a completely different source which they had had foisted on them. Result often the routes we sent back were using roads that didnt actually exist on the map data so it appeared we were sending people through fields with no roads.
Of course, it's possible that diversity officers in, say, the NHS save us money, by getting people from marginalised communities in for early diagnosis. So behind all the tiresome woke, there might be sound money at work.
https://www.vivino.com/GB/en/spice-route-chakalaka/w/1112383
Gorgeous. Goes with anything
And of course they make some spiffing sweeties
https://8wines.com/wines/klein-constantia-vin-de-constance-2018?cur=gbp&cr=uk&gclid=Cj0KCQjw852XBhC6ARIsAJsFPN0W0vAb-WlhUM1KJQ13POtOzvyTs2pwjPnfuj9g1kq2LR3CCHIlYDAaAuGuEALw_wcB
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
We need an FDR to truth tell.about the situation.
And fireside chat us through the solutions.
I.don't see a likely candidate anywhere.
The Great Liz T is Right