My opinions
about grammar schools will come as no surprise to anyone that knows me.
However, I am willing to engage in informed debate on this issue from many different
perspectives, except one.
The
philosophical and pedagogical assumption that it is a ‘good idea’ to select
children at the age of 11 may have been one that Piaget himself would agree
with. Much has been written about grammar schools being ‘good schools’; they ‘push’
the gifted and talented to achieve, or some such logic. Although, I’m not quite
sure what the gifted and talented student is supposed to do if they have not been
‘pushed’ at their primary school or by an eager parent and cannot pass a test.
Of course,
as an EP, I can understand that these are ‘intelligence tests’ searching for
the mythical ‘g’. However, as an EP, I cannot quite get my head around the
concept of intelligence being fully formed at the age of 11, especially given
what we know about the massive proliferation of brain development in later
teenage life. And, as an EP, I am of course fully aware of the limitations of
such tests. Never mind, testing is what we do in education and for many it
continues into our professional lives so let’s just get on with it.
As a
discursive and narrative psychologist, I find the messages that are received by
those that fail the test somewhat irksome, as they are expected to carry on in
education in the knowledge that they are ‘secondary’. I was under the
impression that we were all aware of self-fulfilling prophecies after the era
of 1960s psychology but maybe I should go back to my textbooks. There is of
course also the potential impact on these ‘secondary’ secondary schools of
being ‘secondary’, and the possibility of ‘sink schools’. The negative impact of
selection within a community does not sit well with me ontologically, however,
I do know that some comps and grammars work well together (in a similar manner
to a Downtown Abbey servant appreciating the scraps that they have been fed).
As a local
authority employee who has felt fairly aggrieved by the previous regime’s aggressive
pursuit of the academy system; this grammar ban lift is wearisome. The whole
academy thing has been a bit of a mess. In some places highly successful, in
others extremely dodgy. But a lot of people have worked very hard to support
the academy system, even when it has tried to avoid surveillance, so now to be
thrown a ball from the far right field will likely elevate everyone’s cortisol
levels.
There is
also the social mobility argument. Grammar schools are not bastions of social mobility.
We know they are not. They are bastions perpetuating inequality.
All of these
are lively debates which I am happy to be engaging with over the coming weeks.
However, one argument that I will not be engaging in from the other side is
that because grammar schools promote inequality the implication is that our
current system does not do so. We have a system with a gender skew in certain
diagnoses, representations from different ethnic minorities with different SEND
labels, appalling outcomes for kids in care, access to services by postcode, over
representations of certain ethnicities and certain social economic backgrounds
in youth offending institutions, secretive ‘managed move’ processes, reports going
home to parents with no budget to translate them into their home language, inappropriate
uses of cognitive assessments and parents and children not invited to consultations
about their own lives.
In
conclusion, no thank you to grammar schools, yes please to education and social
reform.
