The question of who will get in lies at the heart of the debate about the new generation of grammar schools that the government has proposed. As we, and plenty of others, have pointed out, children eligible for free school meals (FSM) - a commonly-used proxy for disadvantage - are disproportionately unlikely to get into [...]
Progress 8 is the new measure by which secondary schools will be judged. It works by comparing each child’s achievement in eight subjects at GCSE with the average GCSE results for other children who got the same results in exams taken at age 11. The Department for Education designed it to incentivise schools to provide a [...]
1. Academic selection creates winners and losers Children who attend grammar schools make more progress than they otherwise would, while children who attend non-selective schools in selective areas (secondary moderns) make less progress than they otherwise would. In any selective area, a majority of children will attend non-selective schools – the gains of those who [...]
Education Datalab has produced a briefing note, setting out some of the main evidence on grammar schools and giving Datalab's initial views on the government's green paper. Click here to download the research briefing [PDF].
Sections of the Tory party seem determined to open new grammar schools, or at least to expand provision at existing grammar schools. One condition of grammar expansion is likely to be that they make a greater effort to ensure that children from low income families can secure places. A minority of the existing 163 grammar [...]
Academic selection into separate schools tends to polarise commentators into those that think it is acceptable and those who think it is wrong. And yet most people agree that selection is acceptable at 18 and wrong at age 4. So the point of contention is surely what the right age to allow academic selection is. [...]
One of the reasons that decisions to open new selective schools should not be devolved to local decision-makers is that it affects pupils and schools in other local authorities. This is because families are able to seek a school for their child in a different local authority to the one they live in, thanks to [...]
We recently published a report with the Social Market Foundation showing that schools serving more disadvantaged communities appeared to have greater difficulties in recruiting suitably qualified teachers. Ofsted contacted us to ask whether these inequalities were more or less pronounced in areas with selective secondary schooling because this has been an area of inquiry for them. [...]
The decision to allow a new grammar school to open in Kent drew a lot of media attention recently. With the exception of grammar schools, state schools in England are required to admit children irrespective of their ability. A number of developed countries do have school systems, however, which select children into different-ability schools at [...]
