Kent 11 plus: Possible overhaul?

[yoyo123]

My first ever tutees were the children of a friend's friends ( iykwim) . we were talking after a school quiz night and they were worried that, although they wanted their boys to go to grammar school , so many children were tutored and they just could not afford it. I didn;t know much about the test then ( no epe site!) but we worked hard and they both passed. I feel sad when I look back. That was 1996 , it has got far worse since and we are far from being a super selective area.


PS : as for grasping tutors, I was really pleased when they bought me a bottle of wine as a thank you when they passed!

[tigger2]

I will readily admit that I have put both my children through the Kent test ...one was expected to fly through it and one wasn't but still wanted to have a go. Dh and I have lived in West Kent since birth and when we were at school everyone took the test and I think only the Doctors daughter had a bit of parental help before the test. Fast forward to the present day and we now have an insane situation.In our school an average of 20 children in year 4 and 25-28 children in year 5 receive 11+ tutoring. Two teachers at our school tutor for the Kent test and earn anything from £25-£50 per hour..children have to go onto their waiting list when they are in year 2 to stand a chance of being offered a place. Clearly there was a problem before the test was brought forward to September and the equal preference system came into being but in the last three years things have got much worse. I have to admit that if the prospect of an unknown test had been on my dc's horizon I would be very upset but ,on the other hand, something at some time has got to change and it would be a level playing field , everyone would be in the same position.

[Okanagan]

Here in Warwickshire we have had CEM tests for several years now - for which no past papers, or even example papers, are available. It is claimed to be tutor proof - and it seems that for the first year or so that might have held true to some extent. However over time, as tutors have been able to gather feedback about what the content has been, and been able to adapt to this. With the tutors having access to more information about the content than the non-professional attempting home tutoring, it seems that the numbers being tutored are now higher than ever as you cannot just buy suitable papers and home tutor knowing that you are doing the right thing.

If you end up with this style of exam it will have a lot more focus on good vocabulary and spelling abilities, and less on the formulaic VR codes etc (these don't appear on CEM papers at all). And you can forget about top scores of 420 and lots achieving virtually the maximum - the tests are standardised against those who take them, not the whole population, and potential maximum scores can be a lot higher (483 this year). But nobody gets anywhere near the maximum - the average raw score in the numerical reasoning (maths) element of our exam this year was 10 out of 41. And that's in an area where we don't have many grammars and less than 25% actually take it which gives an idea of the level of the questions!

[bromley mum]

Here in Warwickshire we have had CEM tests for several years now - for which no past papers, or even example papers, are available. It is claimed to be tutor proof - and it seems that for the first year or so that might have held true to some extent. However over time, as tutors have been able to gather feedback about what the content has been, and been able to adapt to this. With the tutors having access to more information about the content than the non-professional attempting home tutoring, it seems that the numbers being tutored are now higher

This was exactly my point earlier. Although exams in this part of the world have many scoring the maximum marks, atleast if you don't/can't go down the tutor route, you can DIY as papers are available commercially. Your post seems to suggest that adopting CEM style of papers won't level the playing field at all.

[mystery]

Whatever the nature of a paper people will have a bash at tutoring if they feel it will help - either at home or paid for. It all seems an illogical review to me, done just to be seen to do something. And why would you ask headteachers to do the review?

Round here many people get some tutoring in year 3/4/5 whether or not the child is likely to pass the 11plus, and it's not just the people loaded with money either. Some people share a tutor, or some people invite a friend along free to their own child's sessions. I've seen lots of variations on it.

People do this not because of the 11plus, but because they are concerned about their child's progress at certain schools. Kent is interesting in terms of school results - there are some schools with phenomenal results but overall, considering it's overall prosperity (yes it is not all prosperous, that's not what I'm saying), the results for Kent overall are not stunning. This would suggest that there are quite a few schools that are, shall we say, "underperforming". Quite a few parents like to try and do something about that if they can.

A good reason for doing such a review would be if you were finding that the current 11plus was really not fit for purpose. The sign of this would be that a high proportion of children who were selected "grammar" were being outperformed at GCSE and A level by children who were deemed unsuitable by the test. Individual heads do not have access to this information.

It's a PR exercise in my opinion.

[tigger2]

I agree Mystery...it is all a PR stunt... that is why I said that it was misleading to talk about a possible new provider of the 11plus in Kent when the contract was due to expire anyway. It is a load of old flim flam in the hope that it will appease parents. I can't see how they could possibly ditch multiple choice papers either as this would mean that that they would all have to be manually marked.

[mystery]

Yeah, and can you see what most teachers would say if asked to continuously assess for the Kent 11plus in addition to everything else including teaching children to pass year 6 maths test without a calculator (shock horror)?

[tigger2]

Outrageous suggestion! The very thought..........Our year 6 teacher is very fed up that dd's class have to take an additional sats paper to assess their knowledge of English Grammar next Spring...when this was announced one boy asked if they would know the school in advance. The teacher was a bit baffled so asked the boy to explain what he meant and he said...'will it be a history of grammar schools or one in particular like Judd or Skinners?' I don't think that any of us are expecting outstanding results

[neurotic kent mum]

Thank you for that Tigger2 - made me laugh!

[mystery]

Brilliant! Presumably your school thinks that the teaching of grammar should be left fresh and untouched for the grammar school.