This is going to sound horribly elitist, but I would have loved to have had the opportunity of going to a meritocratic grammar school and left behind my useless high school and it's horrible mixed-ability classes. Yes, let's slow down and lower the quality of everyone's education for the (dubious) benefit of the less interested and less intelligent. Bollocks. Classes should be taught according to ability and people who don't want to be there should be kicked out
I don't agree. Streaming doesn't work any better at all, if anything it just increases the disparity between the 'high achiever's' and the failures. Both my own personal experience and a whole load of research backs this up. I guess it's OK if your in the tops sets, but it' can be pretty awful if your in the lowest sets. I was in the lowest set for every class , and anyone who thinks just dumping all the most troubled, challenged and disruptive kids all in one class will work, is sadly mistaken. In my experience it amounted to this: half of the class is stoned, one guy whips his knob out and tries to convince one of the girls to perform fellatio (and even achieves an extent of success on occasion), at least one boy is hyper aggressive and succeeds in chasing our teacher out of the class at some point, after which everybody either starts smoking cigarettes out the window or assume the lesson finished and leave.
I'm not exaggerating, in fact it was often much worse! We had a different teacher for every subject (accept our science teacher, everybody liked her) virtually every two weeks, because no one could handle teaching these classes, or just gave up trying to teach us. It was completely fruitless.
I think league tables and entry exams are also no good at all. It turns the pupils (and parents) into consumers, and who will always end up with more purchasing power? Those from more materially wealthy families, or with 'cultural capital' will end up in the better performing schools, while poorer students will often not. Our Education system isn't egalitarian at all.
The core problem with our school system is the idea that clumping everyone into groups of thirty or so students from varied backgrounds and marching through a standardised national syllabus with no attempt to adapt anything to the pupils is flawed. It works for a few people and for everyone else it's just a sloppy mess.
This is a very important point, and is a primary reason why our system is failing. It doesn't adapt it's teaching methods to suit the needs of pupils at all! It forces students to learn in a standardised way that, as you say, cannot work for the vast majority of students. It doesn't just come down to streaming, there are more inventive ways of getting through to pupils. One example could be a set up where pupils do more teaching amongst themselves (and this has actually proven effective).
And it's interesting to ask why this system is still consistently failing afro-Caribbean children (who are still by far the lowest achieving group), sure it is the case that a higher percentage of these kids are from working class families, but is that all it is? I think if schooling was more relatable for them, with more teachers from their background in the schools, things would different.
Placing so much importance on standardized tests is huge mistake. Children need to learn in different ways and at different paces, and making them take standardised tests all at the same time, will just unfairly end up failing students.
