Why school choice is about so much more than grades

Written for Heywood de Ferrer Associates, an educational consultancy and advocacy service for parents.

The Telegraph reported last week on comments made by geneticist Professor Robert Plomin of King’s College London. Plomin told the Hay Festival that sending children to places like Eton College is not worth it, as academic success is embedded in our genes.

He argued that schooling and upbringing have no bearing on academic success, citing studies where separately adopted twins have achieved broadly the same results despite vastly different educational and familial experiences.

Fundamentally, Plomin doesn’t believe that schools add any value, as he feels a student will get the same exam results regardless of where they are educated. But there is a major flaw to this view: Professor Plomin is under the belief that a student’s educational experience can be quantified, measured through our fallible exam system.

Academically speaking, plenty of exams do not measure or reward skills learnt at school. A particular type of lateral thinking may be of some use in a GCSE Maths exam, but perhaps of far more use in other professional or personal contexts later in life.

Exams also don’t necessarily reward the full breadth of knowledge taught at schools. While there are undoubtedly many schools and teachers who are primarily focused on getting kids to pass their mandatory exams and meet the specific assessment criteria – we can’t pretend that is all schools are. Schools are more than exam factories, and while our education system is undeniably under pressure at the moment – there are certainly teachers teaching outside the exams. They are providing knowledge which goes beyond the world of AQA and Edexcel, which could never be recognised in specific academic grades. And parents make school choices based on this.

Schools with smaller class sizes, good records for behaviour, or particularly inspirational teachers will be offering academic skills and nuggets of knowledge which are immeasurable in our current assessment process. A student who gets an A*, but knows nothing about their subject beyond what they wrote in their exam, is a very different student from one who also gets an A* and has an extensive breadth and depth of subject knowledge which goes unrewarded in their exam.

Perhaps Plomin has far more faith in our exam systems than I do; maybe he feels our exams do reward alternative ways of thinking or knowledge beyond an exam specification. He’s still wrong about school choice.

Beyond the academic, Plomin is ignoring the myriad of other factors which go into choosing a school. If a child is particularly gifted in art, music, or sport – parents may want to pursue a school which has particularly exemplar facilities in these fields, or offers a subject choice combination another does not. A school may have a reputation for great pastoral care or a fabulous special educational needs programme. In some cases parents may want to send children to the same school as siblings or close friends. All of these are valid reasons for choosing a school, and to reduce school choice to exam results alone is a very reductive view of our education system.

Plomin did concede in his speech that sometimes parents may choose private schools for networking advantages – but fails to see any other reasons beyond that.

None of this is actually an argument for private schools over state schools, or specialist schools over non-specialist schools – instead, it is simply about recognising the thought process which goes into selecting a school for a child. It is a complex, multi-facetted decision which, despite what Professor Plomin argues, cannot be solely based on exam results alone.

Written for Heywood de Ferrer Associates, an educational consultancy and advocacy service for parents.