What I think!

The grammar school debate rages nicely here. I've been talking about it today with my daughter. 

There is a sort of nostalgia for something that existed throughout my childhood and still exists in little pockets of privilege around the country. Strangely there isn't a parallel nostalgia for secondary modern schools. Nobody is leaping up and saying how good that side of the old selective system was. 

Various people, however, keep popping up in the media explaining how awful the 11-Plus experience was in their family. In some cases they were very traumatised because the teachers at the private schools they were then sent to after failing the exam singled them out as stupid for doing so. I wonder if they will get around to talking to the "ordinary people" that our prime minister keeps talking about. 

In my case, through the last two years of my primary schooling I watched the new girls' grammar school being built about twenty minutes away from my house, replacing a decrepit building at the other end of town. I wanted to go there. I referred to it as "my school". And then I failed the exam and went to the local secondary modern: classes of forty children, teachers who assumed you were badly behaved from the word go and shouted at you constantly. 

Fortunately for me, my parents did not make me feel that I had let them down. I was not punished, as some of my small contemporaries were. But I was disappointed and not a little jealous of those I knew who had passed and received a new bike as a reward for being so clever! 

Equally fortunately for me, in my town they offered you a second chance: the 12-Plus, with exams in English, Maths, Science and French. My parents had been told that I failed the 11-Plus by one mark and were encouraged to let me sit this other exam. No pressure from my parents, I was simply to do my best. 

I passed and found myself in the second year (year 8 in modern parlance) at the girls' grammar, not in the bottom form where many of the 12-Plus girls ended up but in the middle stream, perhaps thanks to the idealistic young French teacher who had made me love learning a foreign language, and with the chance to begin learning Spanish as well. And that's how I ended up with a career in Modern Foreign Language teaching. 

Small classes (about 24 girls) and teachers who spoke to you reasonably and expected that you would do your best as a matter of course. And so mostly we did. I thought I had found a kind of paradise. And I carried on feeling that way despite the evident faults in the system, especially the elitism that I became aware of. 

I had experienced both sides of the selective system and as I went on through education and became a teacher, I decided that what I had had at my girls' grammar was the experience all schoolchildren should have. Not the elitism but the small groups and the thoughtful teachers and the expectation that you were able to do your best and would do well. And later I worked in a comprehensive school that, like my girls' grammar, had its faults but did allow even pupils who would undoubtedly have failed the 11-Plus to progress through the school and improve sufficiently to go to university, not just any old university but in some cases to Oxford. 

It seemed to work for a while, at least in some places. But we still had to fight, mostly unsuccessfully, for smaller classes.

And since then, successive governments have messed up the system. 

So I don't look back on a golden age of grammar schools. And I particularly do not look back nostalgically to a time when a significant number of children were made to feel like failures at eleven years old. 

No, I don't know what the solution is but I don't think a return to an old system, even in a new coat, is going to work.