Along with falling leaves and Indian summers, another marker of the British autumn is the sight of harassed-looking parents pulling year 6 children along on a merry-go-round of secondary school open days. These can be exhausting, although you do get a cup of tea and a biscuit at the end. At the private schools, you sometimes get posh sandwiches and teacakes.
At selective schools, both state and private, one thing you will always get is a speech from the headteacher about how, although results are important to them – just look at the league table results, the Ofsted report and so on – the school’s ethos is, for want of a better word, holistic. It’s not just about producing the best grades, but well-rounded individuals and fully-realised human beings.
There is a problem, however, with the process by which these schools attempt to achieve this. In fact, the entrance criteria used by selective schools are anything but conducive to the creation of well-rounded individuals.
Go and have a look at a verbal or non-verbal reasoning paper online (if you haven’t already had the pleasure). You’ll be confronted by a series of strange shapes and hieroglyphs, with instructions like “find the figure most like the first three” or “identify the vertical code in this pattern”. They look like tests the secret services would have used to root out potential code-breakers for the Enigma programme. Or something developed in Stanford in the 1950s to pit robot brains against human.
A few years ago – lured by amazing results and the headmaster’s inspirational speech about the emphasis on identity, creativity and non-academic achievement – we put our daughter in for the entrance exam at a local state selective girls’ school. It ruined her summer that year, as she spent most of her holiday with her nose stuck to the verbal and non-verbal reasoning grindstone when she should have been out enjoying herself.
She did, eventually, get her head around answering those dry, brain-twisting questions – because it’s a cognitive trick, that you have to learn how to do – and she seemed fairly confident. But she came out of the actual exam in tears. The atmosphere in the room had been so pressurised and so stiflingly competitive that she’d cracked up and not finished her paper. It made me feel terrible about having put her through that tortuous, soul-crushing process in the first place.
We know, and have known for years of course, that these exams are a gift to those parents who can afford to tutor their kids to become specialists at passing them, thus completely upending the whole point of state selective schools, which are supposed to create a level playing field for bright children from less-privileged backgrounds.
But the tests are also about as far as they could be from encouraging the individuality and original thinking these institutions say they foster. Some schools make a point of detailing the emphasis they place on interviewing potential pupils to find out more about them as people. But without fail, each child still has to get to a certain level in the terrible tests to be interviewed.
I’m told some selective schools are changing. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex has scrapped the verbal reasoning paper and replaced it with an exam more in line with the national curriculum. But most of them still stick with the box-ticking tests they’ve been using for years. And none of them have found a way of establishing entrance criteria that might evaluate and appreciate, say, idiosyncrasy or lateral thinking or wit or emotional intelligence. All the things that do, in fact, go into making fully-realised human beings.
Our daughter eventually went to a non-selective state elsewhere, where she is very, very happy and doing extremely well. Now we’re looking for a secondary school for our son, and taking him around those exhausting open days. Wherever he goes, though, we won’t be ruining his last summer holiday as a primary school child.
David’s latest book, The Person Controller, will be available on 8 October 2015 and can be pre-ordered now.
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