“Brutal system” of academic selection for 11 year olds slammed

In a 3 February debate, nationalist and unaligned Northern Ireland Assembly members (MLAs) pilloried the selective education system used on 11 year olds in the region. MLAs described their own experiences of feeling “like a failure” after not passing the test, which determines whether pupils will go on to a selective grammar school via success in the test. Those who get a lower one of the six bands in the Schools’ Entrance Assessment Group (SEAG) exam will typically attend a non-selective school.

Cara Hunter, Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MLA for East Derry, described the stress young children are subjected to. She recalled from her childhood:

…breathing exercises in a circle [and] relaxing music before going to sit the exam.

If schools are deploying on 11 year olds techniques more common to a trauma counselling session, it’s fair to say you’ve failed to produce a humane education system. Danny Baker of Sinn Féin recalled speaking to parents of a child who didn’t leave his room for three days after failing the test.

The politicians made their points during a debate on a motion that called on:

…the Minister of Education to produce a time-bound plan to end academic selection and transfer tests in post-primary admissions and to develop and implement a fair, inclusive and non-selective system of primary education that ensures equality of opportunity for all children…

Northern Ireland unusually focused on tormenting 11 year olds with academic selection

The non-binding motion passed by a margin of 48-30. Voting was split between nationalist and unionist camps, with all ‘no’ votes coming from the latter bloc. No unionist MLA voted for the motion. Nowhere in Britain maintains a system where academic selection features to such an extent. In England, only around 5% of state secondary are grammars. In the North of Ireland, that figure is over 40%. Scotland and Wales have entirely comprehensive (i.e. non-selective) systems.

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MLA David Brooks was the most staunch defender of the current approach. He declared that he “absolutely believes in academic selection”. Describing his own upwards trajectory as a working class pupil who passed the old ’11 plus’ test and went to a grammar school he said:

…a generation of children from working class families – many without an academic tradition at home – have used grammar school as a ladder of opportunity.

This is a little like the fobbing-off exercise deployed by private schools when they grant scholarships to a handful of less affluent students. ‘Ignore all those people drowning,’ they effectively say. ‘Just keep focusing on the few we’ve granted a lifeboat.’

The man at the centre of the debate, education minister and rabid Zionist Paul Givan, said MLAs were failing children by labelling them failures for children not passing the selection process. This dishonestly misrepresented what was actually being said – that children were made to feel like failures by a system that pressured and graded them at such an early stage in life.

Nick Mathison from Alliance criticised the test itself, saying it doesn’t offer any “objective measures of ability”. The current format focuses on evaluating ability in English and Maths, which is indeed a limited spectrum of human capacities. It ignores social, musical, physical and empathic qualities, along with many others, in favour of a narrow definition of what we ought to value.

He also decried the missed opportunity for “deep learning”, saying:

From P5 [around age 9], certainly from P6-7, almost all focus is on exclusively teaching to the SEAG test, an exclusive focus on numeracy and literacy.

Only ending inequality can fix education gap

Baker denounced the pressure the transfer test puts on the “same schools doing all the heavy lifting”. These schools take on a disproportionate number of children with additional support needs and those from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, leaving fewer resources to dedicate to teaching. Qualifying for free school meals is a strong indicator of poverty. Around 16% of children at selective schools have this entitlement, against roughly 39% in non-selective ones.

In what was a largely intelligent and civilised debate, only leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the insufferable Jon Burrows, sought to inject inanity into proceedings. He made a nonsensical point about selection providing choice, and followed up with a smear on how this preference would be “ideologically inconsistent” for Sinn Féin MLAs to back, given their apparent support for Marxism.

A) A society drawing on the best of Marx’s thought would likely be considerably more democratic and choice-rich than our current system of fake free markets; and B) It’ll be a fine day when the targets of his ire are even one quarter as Marxist as his fevered imaginings.

His unionist fellows Brooks and Givan did make one valid point – the observation that no school system, be it selective or otherwise, can ever be truly free from existing inequalities. Affluent parents will always have the option of buying tuition for their children, or moving house to within the catchment area of the best schools.

Like so many societal ills, the underlying cause is an economic system – capitalism – that distributes resources so unequally and gives some children unfair advantages from the moment of birth. The true solution is to fix this shoddy foundation which everything else is built upon.

Featured image via the Canary