Q19 Mr. Dave Anderson: Whatever system you put in there is going to be some sort of selection system and there will be winners and losers. One of the things that sticks in my mind, going back to my mother, is that my mother failed the 11-plus in 1932 or 1933 and the fact that she failed stuck with her all her life. What, in any system, either the one you are proposing, Dr Morrison, or others, would do away with that fear of failure at 11?

Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Could I reply to that? I get very tired sometimes of the terminology of winners and losers. "Fitness for purpose" is the phrase you want to keep in your mind. It is in the interests of the child to go to the school that best suits him or her. Not everybody is academically strong. That is a reality. They have many other strengths. We need a community where some people become PhDs and get first-class honours degrees and we need a community where other people do the rest of the work that society demands. If I, for instance, who am the most awful sportsman in the world, were sent to a school that majored on sport how miserable I would be. Fitness for purpose is what we should be aiming for above all. The terminology of winners and losers I think is profoundly unhelpful.

Mr Cosgrove: The concept of failure really only came to the fore after 1989 when the common curriculum came in. Prior to that people went, based on the selection system, - and we are not arguing in favour of the 11-plus here - to the local intermediate schools where they had lathes and woodworking machines. I am an accountant; I am not an educational person at all. I deal with businessmen, loads of guys who went through the local intermediate schools and who are a lot wealthier than most of us. They have done extremely well and they are saying to me, "Where are the young kids like I was 30 years ago?". Our schools are not producing them. In our Concerned Parents for Education group we have teachers who teach electronics in the technical schools and they are saying there are no kids coming forward to do electronics any more; they are doing beauty, hairdressing, media studies. They are not coming to do the hard-core, engineering-type subjects that the old CSEs would have brought in. We did not have this thing about failure. It is the middle class, to criticise them, who are most sensitive if they have a kid who might not get the 11-plus and they do not want their child to go in a different uniform from the other children. They are the ones that have been more wrapped up with this concept of failure since 1989. It is a class thing. If a child of working class people gets the 11-plus and goes on to grammar school, great. If the child does not he is going to go to a local technical school and they will get him out as a plasterer or a bricklayer and they will just think about their tea, what they are going to eat next. They are not going to anguish over it. The concept of failure comes, I think, from the common curriculum. I go down to my local intermediate school. I live in East Tyrone where we do have a greater degree of diversity of education and mixing between the schools. I myself went as a Catholic to a Catholic school up to my O-levels and then I switched to a Presbyterian school for my A-levels. We do have effective organic integration, but as a mathematician I also argue in favour of differentiation. We have to have differentiated schools in order to work to people's skills or academic strengths or whatever, and then we have transfers. I make a point of going to my local intermediate school in Cookstown regularly because I take on quite a lot of their students as temporary employees in my office either for a couple of weeks or for a couple of months over the summer. They come in, we talk to them about whether they will go to the university or not and things like that, and they are, I find, very resilient kids, but I believe that we have to emphasise the differentiation in core subjects and then the concept of failure will evaporate.

Mr Young: To take head-on your question, the concept of failure is there; there is no doubt about it. It is maybe exaggerated a bit, but I know a lot of primary school teachers who would say it is the parents, particularly middle-class parents, who put the pressure on. Nevertheless it is there, and it is a two-test, sudden-death system and it would be very difficult for this not to be there. The system that we are talking about is much more gradual than that. It is computer adaptive testing where young people can do it at any stage in their primary school. They can do it again and again. If you are asked a question and you get it right, well and good, you get a harder question; if you get that right you get a harder question. If you get it wrong you get an easier question, so the levels are given.

Q20 Chairman: Who wants to be a millionaire, eh?

Mr Young: Absolutely. You understand that we are very aware of that. I think the effect it has may be overplayed but I take your personal experience very much. We want to have a system whereby that is minimised as much as possible, and I do feel that this system that we propose does that.

Dr Morrison: I share that experience. I failed the test but went on later and joined a grammar school, and so there is movement back and forward. One thing I would want to say is that the grammar schools do perform a service as well for the secondary schools. I teach in the Graduate School of Education. We currently have on our PGC course - and we reject lots of people - 38 mathematicians, qualified around 3Bs/3As standard at A-level, with degrees, in many cases Cambridge degrees, so we do not have any of the problems of recruiting teachers. Those teachers come in, maybe attracted to the idea of teaching in a grammar school, and teach in the secondary school system and enjoy teaching in the secondary school system. In a sense, therefore, the system is organic and we talk in terms of the system's performance rather than the performance of the grammar schools and secondary schools separately. It is a system thing.

Mr Young: Just taking on what Dr Morrison talked about in modern languages and the hard sciences, we all know what is happening in England at the moment, that certainly in the state sector there are ones teaching physics who do not even have an A-level in physics. We do not have that problem here but we will have that problem if we go down this road. From our very good secondary schools and from grammar schools there are ones in the hard sciences going to university and coming back into the system to teach, and that is a strength which we must not forget about. If that is removed then the specialists will go, and for youngsters from the deprived areas I have seen in school there is no greater escalator than a young person from a poor background coming in and being grabbed by the specialist, being excited by the specialist and saying, "That is what I want to do with my life".

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT