The Cheerful Insanity of Me

Model school where a third of pupils can't get a place at a state secondary

Found a copy of the observer on the tube yesterday and was interested by this article. Seems strange that the education system has come to this.

Given that the tripartite system proved only to strengthen class divides, why are we taking so many steps back towards selective schooling? Ok, the postcode lottery wasn't a good thing, but in some ways its so much better to this.

Children need to intermingle regardless of their academic abilities. Learning is a social process and their is so much more to learn through discussing and explaining things to each other across the ability range than could ever be portrayed by a teacher alone.

Given that most of the research I've seen finds against setting within schools, why are we pushing towards a system where your not just set or streamed within your school, but you are being set on a per-school basis?

By labelling children as being suitable for the "best" or "worst" schools we are only setting expectations of what we think they should grow into and then we're somehow surprised that some of those from the so called worst schools meet our stereotypes.

All children have massive levels of potential no matter what their ability level is. They can understand immensely complex concepts as long as you explain them in terms that they understand and the best people to do this are their peers. A process that is beneficial to both participants, after all, a good way of understanding something is to explain it to someone else. Why, in that case, do we go to so much lengths to stop this from happening?

Outside the tower at lunchtime I was passed by a group of school children. Most of them seemed to have various badges sewn onto their blazers saying things like "Academic", "The Arts", "Music", etc. I'm guessing this must be some variation on the scouts badge idea. I've never heard of schools doing this before.

Not sure how good an idea badges like that are in general though. Although, yes, they probably do act as an encouragement for many children to do the activities associated with them, they do seem to promote their use as a social scale (i.e. more badges is better).

Then there's the question of when do you award a particular badge. If you decide you need a achieving a certain performance in that particular area for that badge then surely you risk disaffecting the lower achievers. If you decide on a more varying scale depending on personal ability then you risk making the badges look meaningless.

At least with the scouts there is enough variety that you can cater to an individual's strengths. However, I'm still not convinced by them.