Eleven Plus Exam - Controversy

Controversy

The Eleven Plus was a result of the major changes which took place in British education in the years up to 1944. In particular, the Hadow report of 1926 called for the division of primary and secondary education, to take place on the cusp of adolescence at 11 or 12. The implementation of this break by the Butler Act seemed to offer an ideal opportunity to implement streaming, since all children would be changing school anyway. Thus testing at 11 emerged largely as an historical accident, without other specific reasons for testing at that age.

Criticism of the Eleven Plus arose on a number of grounds, though many related more to the wider education system than to academic selection generally or the Eleven Plus specifically. The proportions of schoolchildren gaining a place at a Grammar School varied by location and gender. 35% of pupils in the South West secured grammar school places as opposed to 10% in Nottinghamshire. Due to the continuance of single-sex schooling, there were fewer places for girls than boys.

Critics of the Eleven Plus also claimed that there was a strong class bias in the exam. JWB Douglas, studying the question in 1957, found that children on the borderline of passing were more likely to get grammar school places if they came from middle-class families. For example, questions about the role of household servants or classical composers were easier for middle class children to answer but far less familiar to those from less wealthy or less educated backgrounds. This criticism was certainly true of the earlier forms of the exam, and as a result the Eleven Plus was redesigned during the 1960s to be more like an IQ test.

More than half a century after its introduction, selective education in the UK remains a contentious issue for those supporters and detractors of the selection process. To date, there are over 160 grammar schools which follow academic selection in the UK.