James Coombs has won his recent tribunal to access 11-plus ‘raw scores’

A recent court decision promises to make the 11-plus test more transparent in future. Parents are accustomed to being given ‘standardised’ scores with no explanation of how these are derived or relate to the number of questions their children correctly answered. In future they will be able to understand:

  • How scores are adjusted to account for differing ages of children taking the test.
  • Whether the test is easier or harder to pass compared to previous years.

Transparency campaigner, and CF steering group member, James Coombs, requested the relevant information from the Lincolnshire Consortium of Grammar Schools in October 2020 but was refused. In August 2024, Judge Findley ruled this refusal was “not in accordance with the law” and ordered disclosure of anonymised candidates’ raw and standardised scores, and date of birth.

This decision overturns a string of decisions by the Information Commissioner which can be traced back to 2013 when Buckinghamshire grammar schools announced they were introducing new tutor-proof tests. In 2016 a Tribunal ruled that as the test provider was profiting from these “tutor proof” tests they were exempt from disclosing information which could challenge those claims. The Information Commissioner accepted unfounded assertions that disclosure would assist tutors and upheld numerous decisions to withhold information about the test as it may damage the commercial interests of the test providers.

The first robust challenge came in December 2023 when the judge presiding over another appeal described evidence given by 11-plus test providers as, “an unhealthy combination of mere assertion and creative speculation.” This latest decision records, “The Tribunal has considered carefully Mr Hilton’s witness statement but attached little weight to it because it contained a number of inaccuracies making it unreliable. Mr Hilton is the Head of Admissions Testing for GLA which produces and marks the 11-plus tests used by the Consortium.”

Coombs, who brought the appeal, requested the information because he believes there should be greater transparency around how 11-plus results are calculated. Last year parents of one 11-plus candidate were told their child had failed by just three quarters of a mark. No explanation was given of how that score was derived. The parents who want to remain anonymous said, “The process our daughter has been subjected [to] has been arbitrary at best and profoundly unjust at worst. She was one mark off the pass mark and recommended for grammar school by her primary school but our appeal didn’t succeed. The idea that one mark could in any meaningful way distinguish her from all the children accepted by grammar schools is farcical. Unfairness has been heaped on unfairness.”

Coombs cites research by Durham University that a typical test misclassifies 22% of candidates. He said, “It is delusional to expect 90 minutes of multiple-choice questions to accurately distinguish which individual candidates will do well at GCSE, but these tests are held up as infallible. It is far from clear how age weighting is used to ‘distinguish’ [sic] between candidates. For all we know this girl might have ‘passed’ the test if she was born a day or two later.”

Dr Nuala Burgess, Chair of Comprehensive Future said, “The 11-plus test is used to decide the schooling of some 100,000 children a year and yet it remains unregulated. The Department for Education provides no guidance on its use and carries out no checks on its implementation. The 11-plus remains the only formal test used in any part of the UK which never comes under scrutiny and how it is marked is shrouded in secrecy. We applaud James Coombs’ efforts to shed daylight on how 11-plus marks are calculated each year, and the percentage of test pass and fails. This recent victory will mean parents can be better informed. Most of the country manages their school system without the 11-plus. All the more reason why there should be total transparency in those few remaining areas where this archaic test is still used. The more information families have over a test which decides their child’s future schooling, the better.”

The Guardian report on this news, ‘Grammar schools in England must publish details on entry tests, tribunal rules’, can be read here.

Coombs v The Information Commissioner and Lincolnshire Consortium of Grammar Schools (EA/2022/0245) can be found here.