Social sorting ‘likely to remain’

Autumn comes, and with it, peak worry time for families with school age children around Kent and Medway. Children of a certain age, and their parents, become focussed upon the process of 11+ ‘Grammar selection’.

Meanwhile in High Schools teachers begin the repair work for those in year 7 ‘not selected’ or who have ‘failed’ – as we called it back in the early 1970’s when I started teaching. If the 40 years I spent in classrooms have taught me anything, it is that the system didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.

‘Sharp-elbowed’ middle class families who buy places through tutoring or independent preparatory hot housing now dominate selection.

In my work with Special needs children I have many times come across boys and girls who have come to grief in the Grammar system.

Don’t get me wrong our Grammars in Kent and Medway are excellent schools, which do everything they can to support their troubled pupils, but ask any teacher from these schools and you will hear their own examples of children like these.

It is the system, which is not working. Back in the 40’s and 50’s when 20% of the pupils were ‘creamed-off’ (as it was termed then) and prepared for the civil service or the professions, while the rest went to work in factories or shops - maybe it did.

The landscape is very different now, adaptability, teamwork (with all abilities and expertises contributing) and excellent communication is what now required.

Overall Kent’s bipartite system doesn’t perform any better than an equivalent comprehensive area, some research indicates it performs less well. I guess the social sorting will remain.

David Finch Maidstone