I’m a teacher – this is the startling sign middle-class parents have gone too far

There is an uncomfortable truth about the modern 11-plus that middle-class Britain rarely acknowledges: it is less simply an exam, more an industry.

An entire parallel economy now exists around getting 10-year-olds into grammar schools. Tutors, mock exams, practice papers, online platforms and intensive courses – plus parents swapping strategies on WhatsApp groups with febrile intensity.

Children spend the final summers of their childhood doing timed verbal reasoning papers in the kitchen, while everyone insists it is perfectly normal. That’s why the decision by eight grammar schools to move their 11-plus exams from September into July feels surprisingly radical. A minor timetable adjustment? Actually, it is a tacit admission that the current system has become deeply unequal.

Traditionally, pupils sit the 11-plus at the beginning of Year 6 in September. That means the entire summer holiday beforehand becomes an unofficial cramming season. Although only five per cent of pupils in England go to grammar schools, some 100,000 sit selective exams . Wealthier, middle-class families often fill those six weeks with intense preparation – they can afford the extra help. Schools moving the exam to July hopes to tackle that advantage.

Because while grammar schools market themselves as engines of social mobility, access increasingly depends on who can afford the preparation. Places are extraordinarily competitive. At some schools, there are typically more than three applicants for every Year 7 place.

Virtually every parent I know navigating selective education pays for it in some form. Some spend thousands on one-to-one tuition on top of already enormous prep school fees. Others start children in Year 3 or 4 – even six year olds – long before the exam itself. The tutoring industry around the 11-plus has exploded.

Let’s puncture the myth that grammar school entry is simply about “ability”. Of course, bright children from less privileged backgrounds still get in. But we should stop pretending the playing field is level, when one child arrives having completed months of coached mock exams and another simply turns up.

We can also give children their summers back. One of the saddest aspects of the current system is how much it overshadows childhood. Ten-year-olds should be riding bikes, playing in the garden, complaining about boredom in August, not doing non-verbal reasoning papers.

And there is another issue. Year 7 teachers are faced annually with pupils who have been coached within an inch of their lives. They are simply not up to the academic levels of the schools they have been coached into. It creates tangible stress between schools and parents, who cannot understand why their “clever” offspring are suddenly bottom of the class. And, sometimes that results in a truly detrimental effect on an 11-year-old’s mental health.

This at least feels like a step in the right direction. It’s not a revolution or a solution to educational inequality. But at least it’s an attempt to acknowledge that the current system increasingly rewards wealth and preparation over potential and raw ability. When schools start trying to “tutor-proof” their own entrance exams, it suggests they themselves know the problem has become impossible to ignore.

المصدر: iNews