11+ hell
The second and final part of my daughter’s 11-plus is this week and it does not look particularly promising from the point of view of a stressed parent who would prefer their bright child to ascend to the top table of county education – a grammar school – and be surrounded by the most motivated children. That is, those children with the parents who care most about education, who are the most ambitious for their children to ‘make something of themselves’.
I’m conscious as I write that I am voicing the prejudices that the 11-plus system encourages: that somehow the non-grammar schools, secondary moderns I think they are called, are full of the dross, the unmotivated or maybe demotivated children who will drag your own child down. So the system builds a fear: if I don’t coach my child to pass the 11-plus, or pay a professional large amounts to do it, then my child will be disadvantaged. I will have failed them.
The comments among the decidedly middle-class parents at my kids’ Bucks primary school are predictable: ‘We hate the system but you just have to go with it…’ I wonder why we have to ‘go with’ anything. Why have the ruling Conservative group of Bucks County Council been voted in repeatedly for as long as I can remember, when parents seem to despise the main plank of their manifesto – selective secondary education? (Apart from the fact that this is stockbroker belt!). It’s because the parents think such elitism works. Well, it works if you are in the elite, going to a school with possibly more county funding and definitely more covenanted cash from cajoled parents.
So maybe we have the system we deserve – I can’t stand the discrimination and elitism and the ramping up of pressure on children at the tender age of 10, with the attendant feelings of failure if they don’t pass. But hey, the system works, just look at the lovely league tables!
I have to confess that my partner, with my reluctant agreement, has coached our daughter for a year now, lately sending her off to the garden shed to sit a paper every Sunday morning. I’m paranoid that it is just another part of her educational experience that will crush the curiosity and creativity of her young mind. So while encouraging her to practise the exam we both tell her that it doesn’t really matter at all, to cushion the blow of possible failure! How perverse is that!
Of course my daughter has a different take on the subject altogether – she only wants to go to the same school as her friends and as they are all from ambitious families, peer pressure is motivating her to try hard in the exam. But she also tells us: ‘If they fail and I pass I’m still going to the same school as them!’
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