Failing 11-plus leaves no lasting impression, study suggests

CHILDREN can cope with being rejected by grammar schools, a study has found.

University College London’s Institute of Education found there was “no evidence” that failing the 11-plus exam had “any lasting effect” on pupils’ wellbeing, and that children who go to comprehensives are just as happy as those who get places at grammars.

The study, published in the American Education Research Journal, used the data of 4,784 children from the Millennium Cohort Study at ages 11 and 14: 1,094 children lived in an area with grammar schools and the other 3,690 in an area with only comprehensives.

Analysis of the data found that children reported similar levels of wellbeing and school satisfaction regardless of where they lived or where they went to school. Critics of selective schools argue that failing the 11-plus and going to a comprehensive school can have a negative effect on children’s happiness and self-confidence.

But Prof John Jerrim, lead author of the study, said there had been “surprisingly little” research on the links between selection at an early age and mental health. He said: “In order to empirically

‘There was no evidence that the selection process had any lasting effect on children’s well-being’

investigate the effect of exposure to the selection process, we compared pupils living in selective areas to pupils living in non-selective areas.

“If exposure to the academic selection process affected pupils’ mental states, then we could expect to see an association between living in a selective area and pupils’ social and emotional outcomes around the time they take entrance exams, but we observed no such relationship. Likewise, there was no evidence that going through the academic selection process or taking an entrance exam had any lasting effect upon children’s well-being.”

Children who passed the 11-plus had a temporary boost to their confidence but this largely wore off by the time they started at a grammar school and vanished completely by age 14.

Prof Jerrim added: “We did find however, that selective education areas have wider socio-economic differences in the extent to which parents and children expect to stay on at school and continue to university.”

Josh Hillman, director of education at the Nuffield Foundation, which funded the study, said: “These findings are important because they suggest that by the age of 14 attending grammar school has little effect on children’s well-being. Children attending selective schools did, however, have higher expectations for staying in school and attending university.”