http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson‘s_School
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallington_County_Grammar_School

Please read down the thread for links to appropriate citations – the London Borough of Sutton perennially comes at or near the top of the league table of local education authorities (LEAs) in England based on average achievement of candidates from local maintained schools in the GCSE exams for 16 year-olds.

Sutton has a cluster of outstanding maintained selective schools, the effect of which is to raise average performance of schools across the borough. It happens that Sutton is a low spender on education compared with most other LEAs and the distribution of income of residents is close to the average for all London boroughs so the borough can hardly be regarded as unusually affluent. For all that, two of Sutton’s outstanding maintained boys schools and one of its outstanding maintained girls schools achieved better results than Eton in the A-Level exams for 18 year-olds.

The outstanding, selective maintained schools in Sutton are funded by the local council – which, like all councils, receives a block grant from central government to cover c. 80 per cent of council spending – but the schools are “independent” in the sense that they have their own boards of governors and, subject to law, are otherwise free of detailed control by the local council.

The pupils of the schools are hardly elitist to outward appearances – boys from the one down the road, which my son attended a good few years ago, regularly travel on the same buses as I do when I go shopping for groceries and look broadly representative of the united nations.

I’m none too sure that the academic excellence of the schools is widely recognised by residents across the borough – the percentage of graduates (and others with level 4 qualifications) among borough residents is below the average for London although the local press usually carries a perennial news item reporting that Sutton was top again, or nearly so, in the league table of local education authorities for England.

Entry to the schools is by entrance exam – it happens that my son didn’t know that he was going to sit the exam until he was a couple of hundred metres from the school he was accepted for and he was appropriately unphased at the prospect. It also happens that my GP (NHS doctor) attended the same school before going on to university to read medicine but I doubt many of his patients know that. More recently, the school has opened its sixth form to girls from neighbouring schools who, presumably, can’t access the subjects that interest them at their own schools. However, the borough does have an outstanding, selective girls school – admittedly a longish bus ride away from where I sit – which achieves better results than Eton and there are several other girls schools which don’t do quite as well.

Parents who wish their siblings to be considered for admission, apply for them to sit the relevant entrance exams, otherwise they apply for them to go to one of the local comprehensive schools for which there are no entrance exams. The choice is theirs.

The evidence from the borough’s experience is that the presence of these outstanding schools in the borough helps to raise and not diminish average education standards across the borough. As a faithful adherent of evidence-based policy, I am therefore unable to support Mr Seldon’s clarion call to abolish the maintained grammar schools. A cluster of them has served this borough well and there is virtually no detectable local groundswell of opposition to them.

As a summary of the issues at stake here, this would be hard to improve on.

To the extent that there is a genuine benefit from private schools, it can and should be realized as greatzamfir says: private schools funded by the state at the same per-pupil rate as public schools, with no additional payments by parents. That achieves the ostensible goals of competition with the public sector, choice for parents and greater range of experimentation without the class sorting that is obviously the main function of private schools today.

As I understand it, this school is not government-run, but is government funded, and ‘selective’ means it reserves the right to reject certain children, based on school performance?

If that’s the case I have to stress that Dutch schools have very strict rules on who they can reject. In particular, if your test scores give you VWO advise, a VWO school is not allowed to reject you. Religious schools are allowed to reject people on religious grounds, but only within strict rules. In practice this is rare.

Also, most secondary schools are ‘scholengemeenschappen’, ‘school communities’, meaning they combine all three tracks in one organization, and often in one building. This makes it easier for children to switch track, and it also diminishes the ‘elite’ aspect that the higher forms of education might have otherwise have.

The gymnasia you mentioned are a bit of a peculiarity, since they only offer VWO education and are indeed a bit elitist and also a bit ‘white’, meaning they have little immigrant children. However, they do not offer appreciably better education than the VWO sections of school communities, except for a self-selection effect because children who doubt they can finish VWO will prefer scholengemeenschappen, where they can switch to HAVO if necessary.

I have understood that in Britain you cannot send your children to schools outside your own district, or at least my colleagues there used to worry about this a lot. Is this also true for secondary schools? If so, I imagine the ‘elitist’ feeling of good schools in highly-educated neighbourhoods is much stronger than here in Holland.

Perhaps I should have made it clearer that the outstanding selective schools in the London borough where I live – including the two boys schools within a mile of where I sit now and which achieve better results than Eton in the A-Level exams (and university entrance) for 18 year-olds – are all state funded or “maintained” schools, in the jargon. There are no fees.

Of course, that fact is hugely embarrassing, not only for those pressing for an end to all academic selection by schools but also for those who pay c. £10,000 a year or more for their siblings to attend one of the outstanding, non-maintained schools. And we might note that there are many non-maintained schools which are not “outstanding” compared with, say, Eton.

Besides, we also have this hugely embarrassing research from Warwick University a few years back:

“The UK’s most expensive private schools are producing pupils who achieve the worst grades at university, according to research. An eight-year study of graduates’ results by researchers at the University of Warwick suggests that the more parents pay in school fees, the less chance their children have of getting a good degree.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2552523.stm

Everyone in the country attends ‘basisschool’, primary education until 12. At the end of this everyone makes a standardized test, and its result plus your teacher’s advice determines what level of ‘middelbare school’, secondary education, you go to.

Middelbare school has roughly three levels. VWO is ‘preparation for scientific education’, it takes 6 years and prepares for university. This is similar to the German Gymnasium, in the Netherlands gymnasium means VWO with Greek and Latin.
HAVO takes 5 years and prepares for HBO, ‘higher vocational traning’, perhaps comparable with the former polytechnics etc. in the UK.
The majority of secondary school students go to VMBO for 4 years, which has its own sublevels, preparing either for work after it, or for MBO, ‘middle vocational training.
At the end of secondary school everyone does a standardized test again, and passing it automatically qualifies you for the fitting tertiary eductation.

So in principle you are put on a single track at age 12, which is quite young I think. There are however a nuber of ways to change track on the road, usually at the expense of redoing some years if you move to a higher level.

I think roughly half of the schools are state schools, the rest are mainly religious schools funded at exactly the same terms as state schools. (This is a leftover from the strong religious sepration in the country until recently). At primary school level there are also ‘alternative’ schools, with special educational philosophies, but at the secondary level the government prescribed curriculum is too strict to leave much of a difference between the schools. Truly private schools that charge their own fees are extremly rare, and aimed at rich people whose children are failing in the normal system, so attending them is not good for your CV.

Personally, I would like to keep the funding system that treats state and non-state the same, but with a prescribed curriculum that is a lot smaller, leaving schools with more freedom to do differentiate.

The separate track system in secondary school is quite different from England, isn’t it? From an egalitarian point of view, it has good and bad points. If someone scores well on the 12-year old tests, they are automatically put on track to tertiary education no matter their social bakground. On the other hand, people with higher education themselves tend to push their children to higher levels, and the system tends to exaggerate this effect.

“That came a few weeks after this news:

“British teenagers have plummeted down an international education league table, sparking fresh fears that schoolchildren are failing to master the basics.

“They fell in a set of new rankings comparing reading, mathematics and science standards in 57 nations – accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s economy.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/nedu404.xml“

This particular little misleading piece of league table nonsense was nicely skewered by the BBC’s More or Less:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/7136351.stm

An advantage of a voucher system is that it makes it easier to set up schools appealing to poorer people. I know there is a long internal debate amongst proponents of vouchers as to whether schools should be able to charge “top-up” fees. According to The Economist, top-up fees are forbidden in Sweden and most American systems but not in Chile, but I have not checked the figures myself. According to Caroline Hoxby, charter schools in the US are banned from charging a top-up fee on top of what they receive from the government (which I suppose makes them state, or to use non-British terminology public, schools by definition). http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9119786&fsrc=RSS

http://www.ekonomiskaradet.se/Panda_ekonomiska/Data/Documents/sepr2003/Hoxsby.pdf

The Wikipedia entry for Gymnasium schools in Germany and the Netherlands compares them with the (? 166) grammar schools in England:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)

Why it is wrong for England to have more schools of the kind that are regarded as mainstream in Germany and the Netherlands. Among the City Academies famously promoted by the Blair government, some are specialising in modern languages, others in media studies or science and technology and so on. There appears to be no objections to some academies specialising in sports studies:

“There are currently 345 Sports Colleges in England operating as part of the Specialist Schools Programme. In addition, a further 12 schools have been designated in combined specialisms which include sport and 14 schools have Sport as a second specialism.”
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/specialistschools/what_are/sports/

What then is wrong about some academies specialising in academic subjects with a general expectation that their pupils will mostly be going on to universities after leaving at 18 and selecting their intake according to aptitude?

But if these other options are not funded by the government, they will never be open to all students. The system I have my doubts about is ‘voucher system’ some people seem to be promoting in the US, where the government subsidies part of the cost of private education, and leaves the private schools free to ask more on top of that amount.

I can too easily see this evolve in a system where private schools become just as unreachable for poor people, but now with extra subsidy.

Because of course education ministers are completely unaffected by comparisons between what state schools and private schools are doing.

A rule requiring elected politicians to place their children in state schools strikes me as placing ample incentives on the education minister to do things his/her colleagues care for. MPs are extremely good at lobbying in their own interests.

This way all people, not just the rich, get the option to choose the type of school they want, but at the same time it guarantees that most people with children in private schools still support adequate funding for state schools.

Public school teachers and other education staff are an ample lobby for more government spending on education.

What is far more important than spending on schools is the quality of educational outcomes.
There is a lot of evidence that there is no automatic relationship between spending money and good educational outcomes. What matters is the details. Is the curriculum well-structured so that a new skill is only taught once students have mastered all the necessary pre-requisites for learning the new skill? Does the curriculum include practice of already-learnt skills, or does it teach something then ignore it for 3 months, by which time most kids have forgotten about it? Are teachers trained to present new information in a way that is unambiguous for all the children in their class, regardless of cultural background? Are teachers trained to continually seek feedback on mastery and to adjust the lesson in response to that feedback? Do the national standards call for too many things to be taught per year? Are there national standards at all? Does the school administration support teachers in maintaining discipline? Does the school administration support teachers in running the classroom or do they interrupt classes all the time?

All these things are relatively independent of the level of spending. And we don’t seem to have a decent lobby group for them. The well-educated and/or wealthy either can teach their kids themselves or hire tutors if their kids have problems – I know as I’ve been hired often enough as a tutor.

On the other hand, an independent sector allows parents an escape from the state system, thus reducing the state’s ability to go down lunatic tracks.

I think there is a lot to say for a system where private schools can choose to get financed by the government at the same rate as state schools, but only if they take no other funding.

This way all people, not just the rich, get the option to choose the type of school they want, but at the same time it guarantees that most people with children in private schools still support adequate funding for state schools.

This way you separate two streams of people who want private (or for example religious) education, namely people who object to aspects of the state schooling system and people who want to spend more money on their child’s education than provided by the government.

The first group can go to privately-run but government-funded schools, the second group can still go private, but then their children receive no governemnt subsidy.