Before they even arrive, and fathom out the school motto Ascensiones in corde suo disposuit (She has set heights in her heart), every girl at Rugby High School for Girls has sat and passed the 11-plus exam. Apart, that is, from the headteacher.
Charlotte Marten, head of the Warwickshire grammar school, failed her attempt at passing the entrance exam that for decades has dictated entry to England’s most prestigious state schools.
“My personal story is a bit at odds with the claim that if you don’t get in it’s all doom and gloom,” she says cheerily.
Marten, until recently chair of the Grammar Schools Heads Association, grew up in leafy Kingston upon Thames in Surrey. Had she passed her 11-plus she would have gone to the desirable Tiffin Girls school, with its stellar record of attainment. As it was she ended up at Tolworth, a non-selective secondary modern for girls, now an academy, in Surbiton, which she loved and where she thrived.
Nevertheless, she is delighted that the Weald of Kent grammar school in Tonbridge has been given the go-ahead to build its extension in Sevenoaks, nine miles away – “I’m really pleased for the people of Sevenoaks – this is something they’ve wanted for quite some time.”
The Kent decision – should it withstand legal challenges – this week set off another round in the long-running national debate about selective schools, which were driven to near extinction in the 1970s by – among others – Margaret Thatcher. But they now appear to have gained a new lease of life.
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For their many supporters – including the Eton-educated Boris Johnson – grammar schools are a vehicle of social mobility, a way for the gifted to transcend their social and economic boundaries, and use education to gain access to the universities and careers enjoyed by the middle classes.
But others who have looked closely at the subject say the social mobility argument for grammar schools has always been a myth.
“I think they could be a fantastic vehicle for social mobility if any poor kids actually went to them,” said Rebecca Allen, an economist and director of the Education Datalab research group.
“That’s the basic problem. Of course they could be good for social mobility, because what we know about grammar schools is that the children who get to go do better as a result.”
Recently a group of grammar school heads have recognised that they need to do more. At Rugby, Marten says she is doing her bit to try to increase the diversity of children attending grammar schools, and open up the opportunity of a grammar school education to more children from less privileged backgrounds.
She has been working with the CEM research centre at Durham University on the contested issue of social mobility. “Part of the issue is trying to get students who are in receipt of free school meals (FSM), or have been in the past, and therefore qualify for pupil premium,” Marten says.
Analysis of local data suggests that there were 367 children from deprived backgrounds in Warwickshire, whose primary school results showed they were able to cope with a grammar school education. Yet of those, just 11 chose to sit the 11-plus entrance exam.
“That’s a really shocking figure,” says Marten. “We can see these students as dots on a map; now what we would really like to know is which schools those students are located in and actively go out and talk to parents.
“The thing I’m really keen on is the message should be going out, these schools exist for the whole community. Not for a section of the community.”
Marten’s intentions may be sound, but currently Rugby high school has a tiny proportion of FSM students – somewhere between 2% and 6% every year, compared with a national average of 28%. “It’s a really low figure,” says Marten.
In an effort to attract children from less privileged backgrounds, Rugby now reserves 10 places out of its annual intake of 120 for children eligible for free school meals, who can secure a place even if they score 10 marks below the 11-plus qualifying standard that year.
“It’s about getting the message out there; it’s about persuading people that a grammar school education might be for their child.” Sadly last year, only three of the 10 reserved places were filled.
Professor Chris Husbands, director of the Institute of Education, says that among the 163 grammar schools in England, Rugby already does a better job of admitting a wider range of abilities than many of its peers.
“If you try to go to Birmingham’s King Edward grammars, they are hyper-selective and only take the top 6% of attainment at age 11. If you then go to Rugby girls high school in Warwickshire, that’s taking about 35% of the attainment range,” Husbands says.
Like Marten, Husbands also sat the 11-plus, although unlike her he passed.
“I went to grammar school and absolutely hated it. I really hated it and did very badly. It was only when I went to a sixth form college that I began to do rather well,” he said.
Asked if grammar schools improve social mobility, Husbands makes a flat denial: “No. The empirical evidence is very clear.”
Husbands is backed by research published last year by the IoE’s Alice Sullivan, which used longitudinal data to track the lifetime education and achievement of children born in Britain in one week during 1970.
“If grammar schools improved social mobility, then controlling for all other factors you would expect more children from grammar schools to be getting to elite universities than from comprehensive schools. But Alice found absolutely no evidence that was the case,” said Husbands. “So they don’t improve social mobility.”
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At Rugby, almost 100% of pupils get five GCSEs A*-C including English and maths, nine out of 10 go to university and last year seven girls made it to Oxbridge.
Sitting outside the school’s sprawling collection of unremarkable, modern buildings on the outskirts of Rugby, year nine pupils Jessica Dillon and Lydia Roberts are sweetly enthusiastic about their school as they conduct a tour.
The lunches are lovely, they say; the atmosphere is really welcoming, and the cake sales are the best, regularly raising £150 for charity. “We love cake,” says Lydia.
It resembles any number of secondary schools up and down the country – an out-of-date sports hall in need of replacing, A4 posters stuck all over the walls, the smell of piri piri chicken lingering in the canteen.
Jessica and Lydia, both 13 and smart in their dark navy uniforms, say the 11-plus was “a bit overwhelming”, but they love their school. They enjoy the fact it’s all girls and “there are no boys to interfere”. But sometimes they get teased a bit for being clever because they are at a grammar school.
Their headteacher, Marten, says she doesn’t remember worrying about sitting the 11-plus and wasn’t that concerned when she failed. “For me, personally, I went on to go to university and I’ve had a very successful career.”
Both Allen and Husbands say grammar schools do a good job in teaching the highly able pupils they take in.
“If you find highly able poor children and you somehow manage to get them into grammar schools, I think they are likely to do really well out of it. But they don’t get in,” said Allen.
“The best in-school predictor of long-term outcomes is quality of teaching. So all the obsession with structures, with grammar schools and secondary moderns and so on, is a complete red herring,” Husbands says.
Anna Vignoles, a Cambridge professor who studies the interaction between social mobility and education, said the 11-plus was by no means the only inequity in school admissions.
“The most frequent method of selection in our schools is by mortgage, so we do have segregation by catchment area. But there are lots of alternatives we could use,” Vignoles said.
“Yes, schools in comprehensive areas are socially stratified. But they are nowhere near as stratified as schools in grammar school areas,” said Allen.
Source:Grammar schools 'could be fantastic for social mobility – if any poor kids went to them'