‘IT is 11-plus day tomorrow, a bleak day for me their teacher. I see Ian going off with his two sharpened pencils and his name card neatly printed, aged 10 years 8 months. He is not sure whether he wants to be a doctor or a poet. Left in his desk is a half-drawn picture of a mother suckling her baby, and a partly carved beechwood hedgehog. He will not be going to a grammar school, although I must not tell him or his father that. He will write me another poem tomorrow.

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Sheila loves exams. Even if she is ill tomorrow she will score the highest marks. At 11eleven she questions everything I say and she reads Tolkein for breakfast. She will get her A-levels, her PhD, whatever she tries for without effort. Her parents will thank me for teaching her so well when she passes. I shall thank them for giving her the cultured home which allowed me as her teacher to leave well alone. Her father is a factory worker.

It is a black day. Nervous children foredoomed to failure as certain as night follows this day, will sit tense in their seats tomorrow, their visions obscured by the glimpses of promised bicycles, train sets and even ponies, dripping slowly away in the torture of irrelevant questions. They are certain failures because the grammar school will only take four at the most from my class, and I have known who they will be for two years. That is as long as I have been teaching at this school.

The unfairness lies not in the competition; some children are always better or worse than others in all ways. The unfairness lies in the fact that parents believe that all children have a chance and that there are enough places for those that merit it. They are therefore disappointed when Jane and Roy and Alan and Mary, and Sue and Peter, all above average children, fail.

But they are not failures. I remember the dismal evenings when the parents were consulted. How should I advise a mother who has already bought her daughter’s grammar school uniform that Patricia is at least 15th in line for the four places, although she is above average intelligence? How do I tell her without sounding crude and patronising that Patricia is a gifted mixer and is friends with everyone? Socially she heads any list, but the 11-plus will call her a failure, abolish the exam and she will still be called second-rate because she will go to a secondary modern school anyway. Either way mother will be left stunned holding a grey blazer and a velour hat. Why the hell should she put up with this?

Stephen is an 11-year-old artist in paint and clay. His fingers have fashioned a clay snake charmer this week that actually breathes. He is a walking ornithological encyclopaedia. Can you describe an avocet and draw one accurately? Stephen can. He writes touching prose in a beautiful italic hand. He never hears what I am saying, thank God, his head is too full of ideas. He will be called a failure tomorrow, and a ‘C stream sec. mod.’ next year and a ‘bloody teenager’ after that I suppose.

Jean, who reads five novels a week and keeps on telling me she likes me whenever I am depressed, is not taking the exam. Her mother thinks she will be happier at the secondary modern. She probably will; strangely she is one of the four who would have been likely to pass.

Mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and neighbours are anxious and friendly towards me now. In a few weeks after the results of this farce, four sets of people will be pathetically grateful, the rest resentful, shocked or just sadly resigned.

To the grateful ones, I return their thanks, I have done nothing. Their so-called success started when mum told them stories as babies and dad had time to take them to the zoo and answer their questions.

To the resentful and shocked, I admit that I have in cowardice, failed to shatter their false hopes. To the resigned I salute them, but remind them that in this democracy, we the parents and the teachers make the system.

I try to ignore it while doing what I can to change it. In the meantime my class will be branded as failures before they are 12 years old. A century ago they could have been down the mines or at the looms – 100 years of progress has unchained their bodies, but has it unshackled their souls?’