This is part of a series of posts from Datalab on how the 11-plus works in practice in Kent. Find the other posts in the series here. So, pupils sit a test and those with the highest scores get to go to grammar school. Right? Wrong. The process of securing a place at a Kent [...]
This is part of a series of posts from Datalab on how the 11-plus works in practice in Kent. Find the other posts in the series here. Welcome to the first in a series of blogposts from Education Datalab on the experience of those who sit the 11-plus in Kent – determining who does, and [...]
Last week, we heard a lot from the government about their interest in children from ‘ordinary working families’. (For our initial take on the topic, see here and here.) In its new consultation document, the Department for Education has provided information on the GCSE grades and progress of these children – defined as those not [...]
The new government consultation on ‘ordinary working families’ is being used as the latest piece of arsenal to shore up support for grammar schools among the general public (the majority of whose children will, of course, get to attend secondary moderns). From it they conclude that the children of ordinary working families stand a good [...]
The Department for Education has published a consultation document on family incomes, pupil attainment and school attended that will either fascinate (if you are a data cruncher) or terrify you (if you are a privacy campaigner). For the first time, the records of pupils sitting in the National Pupil Database have been matched to parental [...]
This morning the Social Mobility Commission published our research examining the choice of courses and institution made by students at age 16. We could see there were differences in the choices made by social background, ethnicity and gender of the student and wanted to measure the extent to which these arose through differences in: GCSE [...]
Since the government’s announcement that it wants to see the return of more widespread selectivity to England’s education system we have written quite extensively about grammar schools and the impact of selectivity. In this post, however, we’re going to step back a little and offer a more descriptive overview of the existing network of selective [...]
This post was updated at 8.30 AM on 22 November. An earlier draft of the piece had originally been posted in error. What is the reasoning behind the government’s proposal for more selective schools: greater choice or better schools? Numerous studies have demonstrated that both have flawed foundations, including from the Education Policy Institute [PDF] and ourselves [PDF], [...]
There are striking differences in the propensity of different ethnic groups to gain access to grammar schools. If we look at high achieving eleven-year-olds in the four fully selective local authorities of Kent, Medway, Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire, just 29 per cent of the white British pupils who achieved a fine grade score of 5.0 on [...]
