Model of intelligence behind the 11-plus has been discredited
I ATTENDED both the Education Department's presentations on their report 'The Future Structure of Secondary and Post-16 Education' at St Sampson's High School recently. One young person, a former head boy at Les Beaucamps High School, expressed his support for the 11-plus. He was of the opinion that he had never felt like a failure, and indeed with 13 GCSEs to his name, who would label him as such? He said that, with school, you get out what you put in. A truism that applies to most things in life and will serve him well.
Maybe that young man did not realise it but, while he did not fail, the system failed him. If there was a GCSE in 'The History of the 11-plus', nobody in the school hall that night would have been arguing in favour of retaining the test. It would have been abandoned and consigned to history back in the early 1970s, as it was in England.
The problem we have in Guernsey is that selection has been around since soon after World War II, and strangely, most people never really question why.
When pretty much everything else has changed or been replaced in the last 70 years, the 11-plus remains.
In educational terms it is archaic in the extreme.
The truth about the 11-plus exam has been known for decades and that is why so many headteachers, over the years, have been arguing for it to be abolished. It is the political will we lack so badly.
The story of the eminent educational psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, the father of the 11-plus, is only a click away on Google, but it appears to be relatively unknown.
Burt's model of intelligence allows a 10 to 11-year-old child to be tested because he claimed that his experiments with identical twins, separated at birth and raised apart, proved that intelligence was 75 to 80% hereditary.
After his death, in 1971, things started to unravel. It was found his notes had been burnt, and much of his data had been invented to fit his theories. His two assistants have never been traced.
In short he was a fraudster, but he had influenced educational policy in Britain for half a century, from the 1920s until the 1970s.
It goes without saying that Sir Cyril Burt's model of intelligence and the 11-plus, which was a direct result, have now been discredited, and in fact fly in the face of modern thinking about intelligence.
The real question we should be asking ourselves is, if the facts have been known for so long, why are we still trying to predict a child's academic potential using an exam which is so wrong and based on a fabricated theory?
Are we really providing the best for all children or simply maintaining an artificial division at 11?
Historically, the main justification for 'selection' was to allow students from deprived backgrounds to elevate themselves, if intelligent enough, and gain a good education at a Grammar School.
It was an experiment in social engineering in the 1940s and 1950s, but by the 1960s was already problematic. In today's totally different world, it has been distorted over the years beyond recognition, to try to make it work.
For example, in the past, boys were given a positive weighting because it was found girls were doing better overall in the test. More recently, this was deemed discriminatory and removed. Currently in Years 7 and 8 we have 98 girls and 66 boys at the Grammar.
As for social mobility, there has not been a student with a social housing background at Elizabeth College for seven years.
Figures are not available for Ladies College or Blanchelande, and only a handful of such students get into the Grammar each year, so claims that the 11-plus allows for inclusion and social mobility are no longer valid, if they ever were.
The Medical Research Council's survey, carried out by Dr James Douglas on thousands of babies born in one week in 1946, has shown the waste of talent in childhood.
It found that bright children from poor backgrounds were less likely to pass their 11-plus.
In my view, we need to stop listening to politicians who talk only about 'centres of excellence', without any reference to our secondary schools, and instead listen to the headteachers, who have been telling us for at least the last 15 years that selection and the 11-plus have no place in a 21st century classroom.
TIM LANGLOIS
Tim_langlois@outlook.com
