According to campaigners, the data will greatly oversee 11-plus admission exams and expose them to scrutiny.
Campaigners say the requirement of Grammar schools in England to publish details about their admission tests will expose them to potential legal challenges and greater scrutiny.
A first-tier tribunal ruled that the Lincolnshire consortium of grammar schools should publish anonymized results for kids who wrote the 11-plus entrance exams, including the raw shows and dates of birth.
Lincolnshire’s 18 grammar schools refused a request to publish results even through the use of age-adjusted “standardized” scores. However, the court ruled that the refusal was “not by the law”.
According to campaigners, providing the exam data offered greater oversight into how 11-plus entry exams are carried out throughout England. They went further, noting that the government or Ofqual does not administer the tests, the exam regulator for England, unlike Sats national assessments, written by children according to their ages, or GCSEs.
The chair of the Comprehensive Future group that campaigns against selective education, Nuala Burgess, stated: “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 does not check 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.”
The Grammar School Heads Association chief executive, Mark Fenton, said, “We are currently assessing whether or not this judgment has any implications beyond Lincolnshire, but we do not believe that the information released will be of any practical benefit to parents.”
163 state-funded selective secondary schools still function with an exemption from the school admissions code’s bar on admitting pupils by academic ability, although they were abolished in most of England from 1965 onwards. About 25% of students attending grammar schools in eleven local authorities, including Lincolnshire, Kent, and Trafford, are classed as highly selective.
The tribunal ruling came after a four-year battle by James Coombs, whose request for freedom of information in 2020 for the consortium’s 2019 results was initially denied by the group, followed by the Information Commission’s Office.
Coombs later appealed to the tribunal, which ruled this week that the schools should publish the data in an anonymized form. Grammar schools in Essex have already published similar data.
According to Coombs, he thinks it was necessary to appeal because it will increase transparency around how 11+ results are calculated, specifically how age adjustment is determined and how pass rates vary from year to year.
Coombs said, “It has long been common knowledge that the 11-plus results are age-weighted, but this disclosure puts an actual figure on it. Parents can look at the data and see what difference it made to their individual child.”
He stated that disclosing the age-weighted results could “pave the way” for parents to take legal action over their use. The statistics from Lincolnshire disclosed that a few days’ variance in birthdays could alter the standardized score required to pass. In 2019, a child born in September needed 53 correct answers in the verbal reasoning test to pass, while a child born in August needed 46.
Critics of selective schools argue that 11-year-olds are too young to rank children by academic ability, while relying on test results favours families with access to tutors or private schooling.
