Guardian Article
Where you challenged enough at school or given an easy ride? Should Grammar schools be brought back?

I was a day student at a private primary and secondary school and went to a state high school so I got to experience a bit of both and to be honest I couldn't tell the difference.

I'm sorry but is anyone surprised that schools that get to filter out underperformers and the most disruptive pupils provide a better overall outcomes than those that have to take everyone regardless of ability?
The things that deliver the best outcome for the sudents are smaller class sizes of students of broadly similiar ability levels with teachers able to tailor the lessons to suit those ability levels and the ultimate end goal.

If you have wildly different ability levels in a large class and have to meet OFSTED's acceptable inspection standards then by default you have to focus resources on getting the kids who fall below that standard up to it - that takes time and effort to achieve and that's time and effort that most likely can't be spent pushing the top performers (without more staff anyway).

Govt blames the teachers for grades, GPs for the NHS etc


When I was in primary school, it was only in the final year that we started getting split up based on ability. Hence for maths, we had dedicated maths where the brightest were together, the average together and the numbnuts together. I went from being one of the two brightest in the class to being average in a bright class. It made me work harder and put more effort in. It also stressed me out because of the pressure of competition. Never experienced anything like this since.

Indeed.
At secondary school I found streamed classes has good teaching, but subjects with random classes were rubbish. The teachers spent most of their time trying (and failing) to control a few trouble makers.

I was a grammar school boy in the 70's.

Selective entry, but everyone took the test. My parents were told it was a waste of the place.
We were further streamed after year one exams.

I feel that mostly now they teach to the average and undoubtedly not stretching the most able. Not sure if that counts as failing them though.

I was at a selective private school that was streamed further once you got in. I did everything I could to avoid learning, but the way the school worked meant that some of it stuck. I dread to think what would have happened if I were not pushed. Even so, I still managed to massively under achieve.

Having gone to school in Scotland I have no idea if I was streamed or not (well, not on entry to secondry school anyway).
At standard grade level we were defintiely 'streamed' into foundation, general or credit (everyone did general so classes were foundation/general or general/credit) although everyone was generally taught together. The banding only applied to which set of exam papers you sat at the end of 4th year. It was, somewhat depressingly, nearly 20 years ago mind.

I coasted through school and college. In technical subjects, especially computing, I taught myself everything I learnt on my own time, I never learnt a thing in lessons. In fact, in computer studies, the teacher would always ask me to answer questions, because he was taking the exam with us!

At college, we were supposed to learn COBOL, I learnt it in the summer before I started the course. In fact, the first day of the course, we had to write a simple program in BASIC to allow the input of a number and to work out the minimum number of coins you would receive in change. I had it finished in 10 minutes and had another hour to waste, so I added a bunch of machine code to draw borders on the screen, split it in two and write huge numbers on the screen (given that computers back then only had an 8x8 matrix of a fixed size for characters, that wasn't so easy). Then, at the bottom of the screen, it made "piles" of coins being given back.

The lecturer looked at my program and said, "I didn't know you could do that with a computer." Out gunned the lecturer in the first hour an 10 minutes on the first day of the year.

All school taught me was how to look busy, once I had complete my work, so that I filled out the available time.