By James Coombs
Earlier this month campaigners from Time’s Up For The Test (TUFTT) organised a session in Canterbury to discuss ending selection. Parents were surprised to discover children in other parts of the country don’t have to take a test to go to secondary school. Kent is very selective but is it the most selective?
The data.
We downloaded the latest data from the DfE website, plotted the total number of school places (light blue) then overlaid the number of grammar school places (dark blue) for each local authority.
Kent has the largest absolute number of children in grammar schools, 28,795 out of 93,480, just over 30%. That is puzzling because Kent County Council recently confirmed that their test identifies the top 25% of the ability range “calibrated according to national norms“. Buckinghamshire educates fewer grammar school pupils but a greater proportion of them. 11,814 grammar school places out of a total 33,278. That’s over 35%!
The data shows where children attend school, not where they live. Perhaps both counties provide excess grammar school places to become net importers of high prior attainers thereby boosting their raw GCSE league table results.
The Isles of Scilly appears to be missing but there are only 98 secondary school age children on the island – too few to show up on the graph. On average that is 20 per year. Sending them to different schools based on ability, sex or religion would be quite a challenge!
