I went to a Quaker kindergarten, an English Prep school an English Grammar school and a Welsh Comprehensive, Swansea's own Dynevor school.I was deemed talented and encouraged at the first and the last school and labelled and devalued at the middle two....there is nothing magical about private education or the Grammar schools...we have selection already its based on house prices........
AS shadow education secretary Angela Rayner recently said: “Selective education does indeed belong in the dustbin of history.”
The so-called “golden age of grammar schools” is a myth perpetuated by the Tory propaganda machine.
However, the Tories have decided to once again flog this long-expired dead horse.
This myth is one in need of urgent debunking, alongside the one which is currently being fed to us about Theresa May’s caring and compassionate conservatism which is aimed, apparently, at decreasing inequality.
No-one who cares about equality or giving children a fair chance in society can possibly support grammar schools, let alone consider increasing their number.
Of course, many working-class students achieved success in grammar schools.
But that does not mean social mobility increases under a selective system.
These working-class pupils would have succeeded just as well in a comprehensive school and none of their peers would have been written off or deemed as no-hopers.
No-one who experienced the 11-plus examination will forget the divisiveness of the procedure and the disillusionment and unhappiness of friends who “failed.” To even talk of 11-year-olds “failing” is disgusting — not that all of those who passed the selection process were automatically on the path to success.
In most grammar schools yet more selection took place — again based on the results of the 11-plus examination — and ensured that only about 30 of the brightest A-plus students received anything like a reasonable education.
The ones destined for B and C grades were given a different curriculum, including woodwork and cookery — presumably more suited to their abilities.
Results in grammar schools were never as good as they should have been simply because over half the students were never expected, or encouraged, to pass examinations.
I read recently of some young people turning to Ukip because of that party’s preference for grammar schools.
They cannot possibly know how appalling most grammar schools were, especially when compared to today’s comprehensive schools, the real “centres of excellence” in our society.
There, all pupils get the opportunity to demonstrate their talents because state schools were created in the knowledge that students’ abilities and potential continue to develop long after the age of 11.
Wasn’t it the success of comprehensive schools in enabling all pupils to prove their worth which caused the former education secretary Michael Gove to end coursework and re-sits — not to mention the maintenance grant for potential sixth formers — and to place more reliance on punctuation, memory tests and end-of-course examinations?
Will May turn the clock back? Yes, but not to 2009 — she wants it turned way back to the 1950s and ’60s!
Discipline in boys’ schools was based on corporal punishment, by means of striking a cane across the unfortunate boy’s backside; I remember having ridges and bruises days after a caning.
Teaching lacked invention, encouragement, variety and even decent preparation, and this was in the grammar schools.
Imagine how much worse it would have been for the 80 per cent of pupils in the secondary moderns.
Don’t believe the Tory nonsense about grammar schools and social mobility.
Don’t be persuaded that there is even a reason to debate May’s proposals.
It has to be totally rejected.
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