How best to manage school transfers?

The coronavirus crisis upends society, changes the way we live and presents huge challenges to every sector, including the education sector. The crisis has both led to immediate and dramatic changes and prompted a deeper analysis of how we structure our system in the future. The initial response of closing schools led to the challenge of how examinations would be managed. In the unprecedented circumstances of school closures, DE rightly decided that GCSE and A level exams would not take …

Read more…

Time to make academic selection History

Writing in last Friday’s Guardian on the 75th anniversary of VE Day , and seeking possible parallels between the social changes that followed the war and those which might ensue from the Covid pandemic, Dame Joan Bakewell singled out the significance of the introduction of the 11-plus examinations in 1944, which she credited with having ‘completely transformed schooling in Britain’. While most of the welfare state provisions that followed the war were piloted through by Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government, …

Read more…

Peter Weir – broaden the scope of your underachievement report…

The announcement by Peter Weir of a new report into the underachievement of working-class protestant boys will (as noted by Brian) stack up on a dusty old shelf in the Department of Education, the eighth since 2011 and these official reports are not isolated in the wider discussion on the issue. It got me thinking when Deirdre Heenan this week said about having a ‘philosophical debate’ about what we actually want from education in NI, as noted by many Slugger …

Read more…

The not-so-elitist grammar school education (with the exception of Lumen Christi and Rathmore)

An article in today’s Belfast Telegraph [some detail now online] contains the results of this year’s Freedom of Information trawl around NI grammar schools to find out about their Year 8 entrance policies for the 2011 intake. With two different exam systems (AQE and GL assessment), varying degrees of using the overall scores or grades/quintiles, and some schools , the results are even more difficult to compare than last year (which I posted about in September). The chart below shows …

Read more…