Rebels in Volvos drive selection campaign

EVERY YEAR in Kent worried parents dispatch their offspring to private tutors to study for the 11-plus exam. They do so in the hope that their son or daughter will gain one of the coveted places at the county's 33 grammar schools.

Kent has the highest concentration of the country's 163 selective schools. In a system long banished in most other counties, 10-year-olds learn the joy of success or the crushing sense of defeat in the playground, while their parents fret about percentages.

Jackie Denman's daughter is about to go through this process. It has proved traumatic for both mother and child. "You do want your child to have the best but at the end of the day they are only 10," said the 42- year-old former teacher.

Mrs Denman is among those who will be signing a petition to try and bring about the end of the exam. She said: "I grew up in a small village and I was the only girl to pass the 11-plus. I lost all my friends overnight ... I just think it is awful in this day and age to have to go through this."

Softly spoken and with little interest in politics, the suburban mother of three is one of an army of Volvo-driving parents planning a revolution against the local education system.

Sitting beside the lily pond in her green and pleasant garden Rebecca Matthews does not look like a raving Trotskyist. Yet her opponents would like to paint her that way for, as the secretary of the Stop The Eleven Plus (STEP) campaign, she is leading the anti-selection movement.

"It is not us who are the minority of extremists. I am sorry but it is the grammar school heads and supporters who are the minority of extremists. Most other places in this country have already consigned the 11-plus to the dustbin of history," she said yesterday.

Mrs Matthews arrived in Kent five years ago with her two sons and husband - a regional housing manager. The former teacher was stunned , upon asking a neighbour for advice about a school for her four-year-old, to be bombarded with percentage rates for 11-plus passes at local primaries.

"I said `You don't understand. He is only four'. But parents around here start thinking about it when their children are three."

Mrs Matthews believes that it is unfair to pigeonhole children at the age of 11, and that the comprehensive system provides a far more socially balanced and rounded education for youngsters. She sees no reason why 25 per cent of the county should receive what she describes as a "privileged" education.

She says she and her supporters will stand outside local schools through rain and shine to collect the estimated 80,000 signatures they need by next July to bring about a ballot to end the 11-plus.

"We don't call it the 11-plus anymore. It is a grammar school assessment," said John Harris, headmaster of the successful Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury.

Mr Harris, 61, is the vice-chairman of the National Grammar School Association. He is convinced that abolishing selection will cost the county millions and disadvantage pupils who are currently sectioned according to ability.

One of his three, now adult, children went to a comprehensive and he believes each one received the education that was right for them.

"They (the campaigners) think they are going to phase out discrimination but the system works at the moment. Will an alternative system actually benefit the pupils. That is the most important thing," he said.

The issue is increasingly raising temperatures in Kent. But then there is nothing more ferocious than a protective parent. Right now the combatants are maintaining a veneer of civilised opposition. For now, at least, they agree they are bound by a joint "concern for the children".

But even Mr Harris admits that as the battle hots up "it could become rather undignified".