Comprehensive Future

Why are we still dividing 10-year-olds into “winners” and “failures”?
This powerful article tells Jack’s story. He “failed” the 11+ at 10 and again at 18… yet went on to get three A A-levels* and a First from Cambridge.

Jack’s experience exposes the truth: the 11+ isn’t a measure of ability. It measures tutoring, inequality, and who’s been ‘drilled’ to take a test.

He’s now part of our Time’s Up For The Test campaign because he saw first-hand how selection damages children. His friends who didn’t “pass” were left believing they weren’t clever. At age ten.

The article shows the wider picture too:
• grammar schools taking tiny numbers of disadvantaged children
• state-funded schools behaving like private schools with overseas branches
• selective sixth forms displacing pupils for the sake of league tables
• relentless tutoring costs shutting out ordinary families

All of this worsens inequality, and it starts with the 11+.

If we want a fair education system, we must end academic selection.

Should grammar schools be abolished? Would it be an attack on working-class aspirations, given that not many working-class kids actually go there?

Buckinghamshire Council’s modelling for the High Needs Block proposal showed something deeply worrying: non-selective schools — the schools with the most diverse and high-need intakes — would have absorbed almost the entire funding reduction, while grammar schools saw no cut at all.

The proposal has now been paused, but the issues it exposed have not gone away.

We’re sharing a powerful letter from CF steering group member Derek Berry, calling for a fairer, more honest review of secondary education in the county.

Read the full letter here:

Bucks’ Non-Selective Schools Deserve Fair Funding — Not Another Hit – Comprehensive Future Buckinghamshire Council recently consulted on a proposal to transfer 0.5% of the Schools Block into the High Needs Block to fund early ... Read more