AQE is right not to give up yet on this year’s transfer test

Last evening the Association for Quality Education (AQE) said that it was pressing ahead with an entrance test for grammar schools.

The body said it would only have one test in late February, instead of the three planned in January.

Sitting a transfer test is nerve wracking enough for a child of 11, but this added uncertainty has made it all the more so.

With hindsight it seems clear that the tests should have gone ahead in November.

It is almost likely that the AQE test will be further delayed or scrapped altogether.

But it is highly unfortunate that so few politicians have spoken up for the tests, and instead encouraged parents, and indeed children themselves, to feel they are being treated badly.

As we report today, and as has always been clear, many pupils want to sit these tests and to get into a grammar school.

It is highly misleading to suggest that there is some painless way to allocate grammar places in the absence of tests. People who do not qualify on grounds such as having a sibling will lose out on a place, which is profoundly unfair.

The grammar schools themselves, and their supporters, share some blame for the current situation. Aside from a handful of people, such as the academic Dr William Kitchen on these pages (see links below), there has been a serious failure to challenge the emotional rhetoric around testing.

Northern Ireland needs grammar schools, albeit perhaps a smaller number of them. It also needs outstanding non grammar schools. There should not be a winner-takes-all system.

Meanwhile, it is good to hear teachers such as the retired principal Hugh McCarthy, opposite (in the print edition, see link below), to the head of St Ronan’s Primary School in Newry, Kevin Donaghy, speak up about what the latter describes as the “disaster” of school closures.

We need always to be mindful of that disaster.

Instead of thinking in terms of long closures and cancelled summer exams, we need to think in terms of getting pupils back to class as soon as is practicable.

• Dr William Kitchen: Grammar schools in Northern Ireland are right to stand by academic selection

• Hugh McCarthy: Education is life-changing and it is shameful to deny it to children

• Closing NI schools a disaster for children – principal

• Dr William Kitchen: Scrapping the transfer test this year could be the end of grammar schools in NI

• Ben Lowry: Covid will be used to undermine grammar schools

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