AQE

Once again it has been a long time since I added to this blog, but the month since my last entry has not been without incidents or excitements, among which, of course, have been the three AQE common entrance assessments sat in BGS by 210 P7 children. The last was yesterday, the end of a long haul for the children and their parents. The relief was palpable. Our orientation day was virtually in the middle of October, so the testing has been drawn out over seven weeks and that, remember is only a short section of the entire process which winds its slow and wearisome way until the end of next May, which is when the children find out which school has admitted them.

No grammar school will have decided to become part of AQE or PPTC willingly. We entered it with deep foreboding, not the least of which was whether we would have the skills and the resources to run the tests humanely. I can hear the hollow laughter of the opponents of selection in the far distance, who will see such reservations and diffidences as simple hypocrisy; there is an easy way to be humane, they will say, and that is not to select pupils for Year 8 on academic grounds. There is not the space to detail the case here and now, but it seems to me that an academic means of selection is more reasonable than that based on the initial letter of your surname. If we believe that, then we proceed as best we can in a way that makes the procedure as straightforward as possible. That is why we try to beak the ice in our orientation day and why we are as welcoming and friendly as we can be.

Transfer, as we now call it, has always been fraught with anxiety. Never forget, however, that when the then 'qually' was introduced, it was seen as a liberating process which allowed access to grammar schools for children who might never otherwise have thought it was possible. Do not forget that we have in Northern Ireland a fully state system and, barring Rockport, no independent schools. Why no independent or private schools? Because the population base is probably too small to support one which is fully fledged and, more importantly, because, by and large, parents have confidence in the system. Many years ago, in the time when to be liberal was the default choice for students and most of us would have considered independent schools immoral bastions of the upper classes, when the term 'upper class' was used and possibly even meant something, I remember one of my tutors on the PGCE course in Durham, Ernie Bowcott, arguing that there was only one defensible and morally appropriate way of 'abolishing' what were then called public schools, and that was to make them unnecessary through the quality of the state sector.

One footnote: serendipitously, last week, my son, while ferreting through the bookshelves to find something to read, discovered my own old admissions card for the 'Qualifying Examination for Admission to Grammar Schools' in 1963. Yes, 1963; I was 10: go figure! Astonishingly, in those days, we sat five tests: two verbal reasoning (IQ?) tests, each of 45 minutes in December and January; then three further papers, all sat on one day in March, a one hour English paper and, after a 15 minute break, a one and a half hour arithmetic paper. Then lunch and we finished in the afternoon with a one and a quarter hour English paper. That's three and three quarter hours of test in one day to add to the one and a half hours of verbal reasoning.

All were sat in Templemore Intermediate School. I remember being walked down by Miss Wall, our teacher, from my own school to the centre for the verbal reasoning tests, about twenty minutes walk or so, but as far as I remember - to be truthful, I'm not sure -  we were on our own for the big day. Certainly no orientation, no welcome, just a come-in-sit-down-get-on-with-it-and-no-bloody-nonsense-sonny approach. I came from the perhaps rather precious purlieus of the Foyle College Prep School and to the other primary schools we were considered 'duffers', the worst insult I suppose which could be thrown. It probably meant wet or soft and, in fairness, I know I probably was. Did the anxiety and the shock affect my academic performance? Well, my arithmetic was so appallingly bad that nothing could possibly have made it worse - those old enough will remember train journeys, telegraph poles and baths being filled which seemed to form the completely bewildering content of the problems we were faced with - and by the grace of Heaven, my English was good enough, or so it seemed, to provide adequate compensation for my numerical incompetence. Anyway, I got the qually, but I remember my best friend didn't. He went on to become a doctor by the way, so what did anyone really know?

What does this tell us? That we should not be so soft and let the children 'man up'? Of course not. But it suggests a significant shift in the way we think about children and  the way we - adults, teachers - treat them. Above all, it shows that the normative relationship between parents and their children has also undergone a sea change. My parents left me to it and I expected nothing more; nor did any of my friends. Nowadays, the closeness of parent and child, the sense of sharing the experience, is very evident. My own son, who discovered the card, treats me like an annoying older brother. Not something that my father, whom I loved, but by whom I was slightly scared,  would have tolerated. The long term social effects of this changed relationship remain, literally, to be seen.