Comp

Yes this series looks really promising. One thing I wish I was keeping better track of is the education reforms in Northern Ireland. As I (very weakly) understand it, NI has stayed with the grammar system longer than England and Wales, but is now phasing it out to align with England — and yet the NI system has delivered quite high levels of educational attainment. And I’m sure education researchers would like to have two separate systems running within the UK for as long as possible to study their impact. Of course analysis of the NI system is probably impossible to detach from sectarian issues. So it would probably need its own R4 series, of many, many installments.

Roughly…

Grammar = children selected at age 11 or 12 on basis of IQ test (about 20-30 percent of cohort — all others go to non-academic track “Secondary Modern” school)

Comprehensive = all children in cohort attend school except those with serious education related disabilities and those whose parents pay for them to go private

Comprehensive schools frequently not “truly” comprehensive because they are (or were in the old days, pre-1981/1988) neighbourhood schools, with all the attendant problems.

phenomenon in the UK

To be honest this is almost entirely a phenomenon of London, a fact that’s not often emphasised in the UK media.

phenomenon in the UK

To be honest this is almost entirely a phenomenon of London, a fact that’s not often emphasised in the UK media.

However, it’s a phenomenon of the entire United States.

But the specific phenonmenon of feedback loops between house prices and school “quality”, while it may exist in the States, is something I haven’t seen documented.

Oh, there’s NO doubt that it exists in the U.S.–especially because in most states, the schools in well-off areas not only get students from wealthier families but also get more (sometimes a LOT more) money to spend on those students (because most public education is financed by local property taxes).

That said, the inequalities tend not to be quite as bad for high schools as they are for elementary schools because high schools are much larger and draw from a broader area which tends to mean a somewhat more heterogeneous population than elementary schools.

Having lived and worked in several (very) different regions in Britain – including Leicestershire and London – I think I can say with some confidence that it would be a mistake to believe that the problems connected with neighbourhood comprehensive schools are mostly confined to London. Moreover, it is somewhat easier to overcome those problems in London – unlike elsewhere – because of long-established practices in London of travelling to school on the unusually well-developed public transport system.

It happens that in London, I now live in one of the few local education authorities (LEA) in Britain where grammar schools have survived. One outcome is that for the last decade and more, this particular LEA has consistently been at, or close to, the top of the LEA league table in England based on the average points scored in the GCSE school examinations normally taken at 16. On the evidence, grammar schools are hugely and indisputably successful in maintaining high average attainment in school examinations.

In Leicestershire, the general practice in the roll-out of the plan for comprehensive education of 1957 was to turn previous secondary modern (or non-grammar) schools into the (supposedly controversial) “middle schools” for 11 – 14 year-olds while the previous grammar schools became the high schools for 14 – 18 year-olds. The outcome was that in the course of normal school careers, all pupils would naturally progress through schools that had previously been secondary modern (or non-grammar) schools and then go on to grammar schools to take their A-levels (for university entry) or vocational qualifications. One of the (intended) consequences of this structure was to substantially diminish, if not entirely remove, neighbourhood effects because whole age groups would mostly attend both kinds of school.

Arguably, the problem of neighbourhood effects in schooling is a consequence of (notoriously) persisting differences in social class cultures in Britain and the differential values therein attributed to education. These differences were perhaps most aptly characterised by George Orwell in: The Road to Wigan Pier, a book written prior to WW2, although his account of class attitudes to educations is recognisable today:

“And again, take the working-class attitude towards ‘education’.
How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people
often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where ‘education’
touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy
instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures
of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work
at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should
descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one
working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will
leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on
ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the
notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely
contemptible and unmanly.”
http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html

Matt’s right about this. Conjecturing wildly, one of the factors might be the exam system, which is quite different in Scotland (and which, until the emergence of GCSE, and even after, was designed to rule out a large percentage of kids from entering higher education at age 14). In addition, as Halsey points out in the show, selection at age 11 is notoriously inaccurate — if you rule out 75% at age 11 from HE, and then, among the 25% selected about half should have been in the 75% you ruled out, you are severely restricting the pool of potential HE users.

Of course, some Secondary Moderns, especially in the latter years (and on a much increased basis in place like Bucks that still have Grammar Schools), established an academic track fro the kids who they believed should have gone to Grammars, and, again in recent years, I presume Universities do not discriminate against these kids.

Bob B:

I’m afraid I don’t know re: the percentage with 3 year ordinary and 4 year honours degrees. The figures I was referring to are the ones cited here: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/lifelong/herp2-04.asp
and as far as I can tell they don’t distinguish between them.

Looking at Glasgow University’s web-site it seems about 80% of students take the four year honours degree, with the remaining 20% doing the three year ordinary. That certainly accords with my own memories of actually studying there myself. I#’d imagine that’s fairly typical for the universities that offer the 3 year ordinary versus 4 year honours split.

Harry:

Yeah, re: the exam system. The Scottish system seems to me to be quite a bit better at turning out people with proper educations and is a great deal more inclusive, I think.

That is, in the sense that you don’t get the option of ‘hiding’ from the (anecdotally) harder subjects like Maths or the sciences and in the sense that a much broader subject base is assumed.

Every undergraduate coming from the Scottish school system will probably have done at least one science and one humanities subject plus maths and english to Higher level.

The more ‘generalist’ nature of the Scottish system probably puts them at a disadvantage in subjects like Physics or Maths where the greater depth of the two year A-level (over the 1 year Higher) definitely shows. However, for just about everything else the Higher system seems, from my own personal experience, to work well.