London (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Grammar schools in the UK have been instructed to publish particulars about their admissions tests.
The order by a first-tier tribunal required the Lincolnshire consortium of grammar schools to unleash anonymised results for children who posed its 11-plus entrance tests, including raw scores and results modified by their dates of birth. Lincolnshire’s 18 grammar schools operate age-adjusted “standardised” scores to welcome pupils, but the group had rejected requests to publish the full results until the court ruled that denial was “not by the law”.
how will releasing results impact 11-plus exam oversight?
Campaigners stated providing the data showed greater oversight into how 11-plus entry exams were distributed throughout England, adding that the tests were not controlled by the government or Ofqual, the exam regulator for England, unlike Sats national assessments, taken by children of the same age, or GCSEs.
Nuala Burgess, the head of the Comprehensive Future group that campaigns against selective education, stated: “The 11-plus test is utilised to decide the schooling of some 100,000 children a year and yet it remains unregulated. The Department for Education delivers no guidance on its use and carries out no checks on its enactment. The 11-plus remains the only formal test utilised in any part of the UK which never comes under scrutiny, and how it is kept is shrouded in secrecy.”
Mark Fenton, the chief executive of the Grammar School Heads Association, stated: “We are currently considering whether or not this judgment has any substances beyond Lincolnshire but we do not believe that the details released will be of any practical benefit to parents.”
Although state-funded selective secondary schools were repealed in most of England from 1965 onwards, 163 still function with an exemption from the school admissions code’s post on admitting pupils by academic proficiency. Eleven local authorities are tagged as highly selective, including Lincolnshire, Kent and Trafford, with almost a quarter of pupils attending grammar schools.
why did Lincolnshire grammar schools refuse to publish data?
The tribunal ruling heeds a four-year fight by James Coombs, whose freedom of information request in 2020 for the consortium’s 2019 results was initially rejected by the group and then by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Coombs then petitioned the tribunal, which this week ordered the schools to free the data in an anonymised form. Grammar schools in Essex already broadcast similar data.