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>> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with" I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar s

>> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with" I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well. A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.

jgust 10y ago
> failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Possibly. Although there were also many people in that school who did well in the entrance exam and did not succeed in the school. Thinking about both groups of people it's very obvious in retrospect that that the people that managed to get accepted despite the bad grade in the exam worked very hard and wanted to succeed no matter how difficult they found it. They'd put in 3x as much work as everyone else.

jgust 10y ago

> failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?

k-mcgrady 10y ago
Possibly. Although there were also many people in that school who did well in the entrance exam and did not succeed in the school. Thinking about both groups of people it's very obvious in retrospect that that the people that managed to get accepted despite the bad grade in the exam worked very hard and wanted to succeed no matter how difficult they found it. They'd put in 3x as much work as everyone else.