To assist browsers who may be unfamiliar with the Medway story over the past 12 years (and beyond), you will find a catalogue of some of my articles over this period here, highlighting many of the common themes. 

The first of the three problems in the statement above is that nearly a fifth of all places in Medway's grammar schools were left unfilled on allocation this March after Medway children were accommodated, although most were then taken up by children from outside Medway, including 81 from Bexley and Greenwich. It will therefore take many years of growth before there is a problem with capacity. Secondly, the proposal to make the three grammars co-educational does not add a single extra place to capacity so this is another false claim. Thirdly, the Medway Test pass rate at 23.11% is the highest since 2017, see here, so there has been no decline whatever in recent years, as claimed. The sole reason the selection process regularly identifies below the target 25% of the Medway peer group is because of the hopeless Medway Review process, which this year saw fewer than nine extra children selected against a target of 70. 

I have tried not to replicate issues examined in my previous articles in this article, but there are plenty of them, most recently here.  I appreciate that some of the reported views from Medway Council in the article, may not be the exact wording quoted. For further details of the failures of the Medway Test process go to Medway: Supplement to my 'Review of Seventeen Years of Support for Families'

It is unfortunate that the hapless individual who wrote this rubbish betrays such a complete failure to understand the system that s/he contrasts two very different measures which are not at all comparable. To be clear, the Kent selection procedure identifies 25% of the population as suitable for grammar school for the whole county although unsurprisingly the pass rate varies in different districts of the county in the same manner across Medway, as can be seen here. This is the same level as the target Medway procedure, although the latter's perennially failing Review process drags the selection rate down.  The Medway Test pass rate was 23.11%, very close to the same figure that it has been for the past 15 years at least, and slightly higher than at any time since 2017. Fewer than five Medway boys and five girls were successful at Review this year (against a target total of 70), the exact number not being provided because of the rules about small numbers. 

Both of these are very different from the number of pupils who attend grammar schools as measured in the October schools census  and explained below, so there is no point of contrast or comparison. There is no indication of who the person is who is described as ‘it claims’, in the above, but as I believe I am the only person who collects and has published data in this area (the Local Authorities don't), I presume it must have been me. I have certainly explored the effect of successful appeals and Local Tests (for admission to six Kent schools serving areas with high levels of social deprivation) on numbers arriving in schools the following September. 

To take one of the most extreme examples, Chatham Grammar School. For entry last September, 106 children were offered places of whom 49 were from outside Medway, including 20 from Greenwich and 15 from Bexley. Many of the latter are likely not to follow through, subsequently gaining places at schools nearer to where they live. Some of these children will not have passed the Medway Test, as 16 children gained places through entry by the Kent Test which is accepted as an alternative (there were 37 at Holcombe). Because the school is so short of pupils it encourages appeal panels to be very generous with upholding appeals, with 38 out of 45 being successful, at 84% the second highest success rate for any grammar school across Kent and Medway (averaging 27%). None of these girls have previously been found selective by either route, and some are from outside Medway. The October census has 130 girls from Medway and elsewhere attending the school in Year Seven.  There is no conceivable way this can be related to the Medway pass rate as claimed, nor be comparable with any other school in Medway or in Kent, which all have very different circumstances. I can expand upon these if necessary.

The second sentence is also rubbish, astonishingly once again showing a complete ignorance of the Medway selection process. Quite simply, the pass rate for the test itself is set for 23% of the Medway peer group, without any regard to boys and girls separately, which would in any case almost certainly be illegal. The fact that the Test is not fit for purpose, so that typically this year 21.4% of Medway boys and 24.8% of girls passed as I have explained at length in my previous articles,  underlines the stupidity of this claim.

There was another attempt, vaguely made in the preliminary Cabinet paper, but subsequently missing from the Proposal: ‘All of Medway’s primary schools are mixed, as is higher education, and nearly all work environments are mixed.  Medway’s School Place Planning Strategy 2018-2022 states, at section 6.2.5, that the Council will ‘extend co-educational places when new schools are established’, highlighting the Council’s commitment and preference for co-educational settings’. However, it makes no reference to wishing to change current arrangements. 

The latest comment includes: ‘Pupils will not have to travel as far to go to school’, which may be true for some, but certainly not all, as the law of unintended consequences applies here to girls living on the Hoo Peninsula. My last two articles are followed by multiple comments, nearly all appreciative of my point of view, one of the neatest being: 'So why is Fort Pitt and its fine traditions for educating girls to be trashed to save Holcombe, short of boys and hoping to fill up with girls and Chatham, short of girls and hoping to fill up with boys! Meanwhile FP will have both boys and girls queueing up and those of us on the Hoo Peninsula will lose out! PETER: I could have saved a lot of space by putting it this way!'.   

I guess this may mean a new pattern of papers: two Reasoning Tests, Verbal and Non Verbal, but still with separate papers in English and Maths carrying a double weighting, and no minimum standard in any paper. However, although it adds a third multiple choice paper, this still leaves the unfairness of the subjective English writing exercise, which can lead to extremes of marks even through the standardisation process, for not even the National Foundation for Educational Research, is in favour of such an assessment. Perhaps it is someone's pet 'vision'. Why not change that to an objective test at the same time.