Fiona Millar (Education, 23 August) lists arguments made for grammar schools, including the “thoroughly unscientific idea that there are ‘clever’ children and the rest”. Those who believe 11-year-olds are inherently of two types, academic sheep and practical goats, should consider some real-life examples. Is the child who excels at maths but finds it hard to string two sentences together a sheep or a goat? What about the one who likes reading and writing but loves drawing and making things? Or the talented refugee who performs poorly in the 11-plus because she’s not yet fluent in English? Is the child who falls just below the dividing line in test results because he’s missed weeks of schooling through homelessness really a goat? Is the one who scrapes through because of private tuition really a sheep?
The whole idea is a nonsense, as is the idea that two types of school are needed to provide sheep-education and goat-education.
Janet Dobson
London
• I was delighted to read the letter from Michael Liversidge (24 August) in which he outlined his academic successes despite his poor performance at O-level. I was a pupil at the same school, which at the time held direct grant status and at which my father, Don, was one of Michael’s history tutors. Shortly before our O-levels I recall overhearing Don referring to a number of my contemporaries as “nice lads but not very bright”. One of them, Chris Penny, went on to work at GCHQ where, so he said, he was just a cleaner, although the attendance at his funeral last year suggests a more significant role. Another, Matthew Harding, left to become a tea-boy in a finance house: he ended up owning that business and also Chelsea football club. Good results in academic exams are a clear indicator of being good at academic exams, nothing more.
Dick Willis
Bristol
• The selective school system not only resulted in the majority of pupils being rejected at 11: it also segregated children within families. In 1958, I passed the 11-plus and went to a grammar school; my twin brother failed and went to a secondary modern. I was not good enough however to continue in the sixth form, so went to a further education college instead. There I met someone who told me he had failed the 11-plus. His parents were so concerned about the stigma of the local secondary modern that he was sent to one in the next town whose uniform the neighbours would not recognise.
Bert Clough
Newbury, Berkshire
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