SELECTION BY ATTAINMENT AND APTITUDE IN ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS

ABSTRACT: 

This paper presents the findings from a study of the admission arrangements for all secondary schools in England. We sketch the history of selection, answer questions about the scale and extent of selection by attainment or aptitude including an account of partially selective schools, consider the similarity and differences between selection by aptitude and by attainment and analyse some of the issues associated with both kinds of selection.

Keywords:

• Grammar schools
• school admissions
• selection by ability
• attainment
• aptitude

Notes

¹ Currently about 7 per cent of all children opt out of the publicly funded sector.

² The 1944 Act allowed for the creation of comprehensive schools which would combine these strands, but only very few were founded in the decade and a half after 1944 and they maintained the principle of differentiated provision within the same school but not determined by a single test at the age of eleven. (See for example Holyhead County School 2008.)

³ This right not only applies to schools in the Specialist Schools Programme; any admission authority may decide to give priority in this way, although it appears to be the case that schools currently choosing to select by aptitude are predominantly designated specialist. We have not currently calculated how many schools not in the Specialist Schools Programme select their intake on the basis of aptitude; however numbers are thought to be very low.

⁴ A definition of a highly selective area is not straightforward but in our study we took this to be one where the proportion of selective places is approximately 20 per cent or more, which in effect means that all schools in the area are significantly affected such that the non-grammar schools have what could be called a secondary modern intake.

⁵ Figures quoted for maintained secondary schools; includes grammar schools, CTCs and, from 2002 onwards, academies.

⁶ It is important to emphasise when considering these figures that they relate to planned admission numbers (obtained via secondary school admission prospectuses) and are therefore not the same as the number of pupils actually admitted.

⁷ Dissimilarity index for selective authorities (mean = 0.36, median = 0.37) and non-selective authorities (mean and median = 0.27).

⁸ The category ‘Test’ included tests for specific modern languages as well as unspecified tests for technology.