I agree that today’s grammar schools are elitist. They can afford to be fussy about selection when each available place is hideously oversubscribed. They are oversubscribed because parents of academically bright children know that state education is little more than a lottery. Why else do you think that the Blairs send their children to a so called “elite” schools rather than an ordinary comprehensive? Many Labour MPs send their children to fee paying independent schools. What a great endorsement for the state education system!
Why should sitting an eleven plus exam be any more traumatic than sitting level two SATs? Both exams test for the same thing; literacy, numeracy and basic science. It doesn’t take rocket science to work out that bright children have the potential to achieve more academically than their less able schoolmates. None of us are born equal whether financially or intellectually. I, and many like me, was propelled out of a working class background through grammar school education. My peers are government ministers, scientists, bankers, teachers etc. I do not consider my schooling to be either elitist or privileged; I consider it to be essential and an unassailable right.
I am the mother of a gifted child who almost left primary education barely able to write although he read prolifically. The school wanted to refer him to a “special” school because he was considered “disturbed” and educationally sub normal. An educational psychologist revealed my son to be in the top 5% of this country’s intelligentsia after he scored the 99th percentile on all his tests. This makes a nonsense of the government’s claim that intelligent children can easily cope with the current state system. No child can do that if the system is stacked against him because it is riddled with poor teaching techniques and oversized classes.
Three months of intensive private tuition in English enabled my son to pass his level two SATs. He now attends a technology college rather than a comprehensive because of his aptitude for maths, science, music, art, languages and IT. Within his school there are streams of varying ability for core subjects such as maths, English and science. Surely this is a kind of discriminatory elitism? If such elitism denigrates a child’s ability to learn why is it still practised?
Grammar schools are important to the future of this country. Rather than finishing them off more should be built to accommodate the lack of skilled professionals in our universities, hospitals, scientific establishments and schools brought about by poor funding and the failures of the education system. Selection used to enable children from ALL backgrounds to aspire to reach the top, no matter how poor they were. Grammar schools weren’t elitist they were egalitarian. The truth of the matter is that Labour don’t want the masses educated above the level of your average red top reader – so taken up with sex, football and tits that they don’t pay attention to what is really happening in Westminster. And the Tories are just as bad. Both Thatcher and Major could have reversed the trend but they didn’t which is why most of the top jobs are filled by the same class of people as at the turn of the century – the privileged public school types who know how to govern so much better than those who had to use their brains rather than their money to claw their way to the top.
Very New Labour!!!
