Selective schools have long been associated with higher achievement in exams at 16. This achievement plays a major part in marketing for ‘top’ private schools. And it’s behind the Prime Minister’s support to increase selection.
But research by King’s College London found ‘exam score differences between selective and non-selective schools are primarily due to the genetically influenced characteristics involved in student admission’. These traits were behaviour, personality, home environment and health.
When these ‘student and family factors’ were accounted for, the researchers found the type of school attended explained ‘less than one percent of the individual differences in educational achievement’ as measured by GCSE mean grade at age 16.
Academic achievement at GCSE level, the researchers reminded us, is linked with prior achievement, ability and socioeconomic status. These are all factors involved in selection at age 11. And if pupils are deliberately selected for the first two and obliquely chosen for the third, then what exactly do selective schools add?
Yet parents are willing to invest money, either by paying huge amounts of money to selective fee-paying schools or buying 11+ tuition in order for their children to attend state grammar schools.
The researchers cited a recent report which said pupils who attended fee-paying schools earned about £200k more than their state-educated peers between age 26 and 42 (£12.5k pa). But this report didn’t differentiate between selective and non-selective state schools. More research was required ‘to see whether differences in university attendance, career choice and earnings are still predicted by school type once individual student factors have been accounted for’. And it would also be interesting to find whether there are differences between school types regarding non-cognitive traits such as confidence.
The researchers recognised there was huge variation within the schools studied. Some were exceptional and some were under-performing. This variation was most apparent in the non-selective schools because they comprised most schools.
There were two further limitations to the study. Firstly, fee-paying schools and state-funded grammars aren’t evenly distributed throughout the country. Secondly, researchers considered only English, science and maths in their GCSE analysis. They acknowledged school type may have a greater influence on take up of such subjects as languages, art and social sciences.
If selective schools don’t have as much advantage as their supporters claimed, then it appears parents are wasting their money. And that’s without considering the negative affect that selection has on pupils who aren’t selected.
It also shows how daft is the idea that there should be a ‘private tutoring tax’ taken from parents who use tutors to boost their child’s chance of passing the 11+. The money raised would be used to pay for tutors for disadvantaged pupils. Leave aside issues such as privacy, data protection, the enormous cost of administering the scheme and the potential to avoid the tax by paying cash-in-hand, it would appear the money would bring no real advantage. Far better to scrap selection altogether and have a fully comprehensive system.
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Research from Durham
Research from Durham university featured in today's 'i' comes to the same conclusion. You can download the report here.
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/20400/
This is the Abstract.
"This paper forms part of a larger investigation of indicators of disadvantage and how they may be improved or supplemented in order to track school intakes and results better. Here our evolving dataset based on the National Pupil Database in England over 11 years is used to assess the impact of selective schools. At time of writing, the UK government is planning to increase the number of pupils attending state-funded selective grammar schools via a number of routes. They claim that this will assist overall standards, reduce the poverty attainment gap and so aid social mobility. Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this paper shows how stratified the pupils attending grammar schools actually are (worse than previous estimates) in terms of poverty, ethnicity, language, special educational needs, and even their age in year. It also shows that the results from grammar schools are no better than expected, once these differences are taken into account. There is no evidence base for a policy of increasing selection; rather the UK government should consider phasing the existing selective schools out."
Janet you are brave to mention 'genetically influenced' effects. The NUT influenced website 'Reclaiming Schools' refuses to post my comments, because I talk about 'general intelligence', even though I strongly support and promote the analyses they publish.
It is vital to recognise that 'genetically influenced' does not mean 'genetically determined'. These traits (in the research ) are behaviour, personality, home environment and health. These are among many heritable factors that combine to produce general intelligence 'g', which is therefore also genetically 'influenced' but not 'determined'.
These 'heritable factors' are also associated with relative poverty, which can and should be addressed through progressive social policies and taxation, but the mistake of the intelligence denying left is to mistake relative poverty as a causative factor in school attainment, when the causative factor is cognitive ability, which crucially is plastic and can be developed by good teachers and comprehensive schools freed from the corrupting pressures of our marketised education system.
Hi Roger - I've just written
Hi Roger - I've just written about the Durham report here.
You're right that 'genetically-influenced' doesn't mean genetically determined. It's important to make that distinction. However, I'm not sure 'environment' is genetically-influenced to any great extent. I would have though environment was more nurture than nature. And it's also affected by economics.
Maybe the sense is of a
Maybe the sense is of a supportive home environment inherited by the children from their intelligent, healthy parents. In my Mossbourne study I was impressed that the minority of FSM, Pembury Estate children, with the same high CATs scores as those from posher areas further away from the the school, did just as well. The whole point of a comprehensive school is that it should make comprehensive (ie full) provision to support the learning of all children equally well, regardless of parental affluence. When I first started my study Fiona Millar put me in touch with Henry Stewart, as someone with a lot of 'local knowledge'. Henry told me that when he visited Mossbourne he was impressed by the way that the students were supported in their learning. I was expecting something like other 'Spectacular School Improvement' Academy examples of the time that relied on the 'vocational scam' supported by cramming for maths and English. This turned out not to be the case. However, as the first head, Michael Wilshaw emphasised, the foundation strategy was to achieve a genuinely all-ability comprehensive intake that was not 'swamped' by huge numbers of lower cognitive ability students from the neighbourhood estate. This was achieved by the Hackney CATs driven Fair Banding admission policy. Which is a long way of saying that I agree with you that the 'advantage' of inheriting a very supportive home background is overplayed in a genuinely comprehensive, well funded system (that we so obviously no longer have).
All this is connected with
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