What Stories Do YP Tell about Their Experience of the Selective Education Process

Very little has been researched about the experiences of young people who undertake selective education tests in the UK. An explorative narrative research design was used to gain a better understanding of the six (age 10- 11) participants’ experiences of sitting the 11+ test and not gaining a place at a grammar school. Questions from the Little Box of Big Questions 2 were used as a tool in semi-structured interviews, in addition to questions devised by the researcher. Each of the participant’s narratives were storied using Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) notion of human experience that is defined in terms interaction, continuity and situation. The resulting narratives were written in the ‘third-person-omniscient’. This phase of the study was followed by a ‘commentary phase’ that aimed to describe the connectedness between the young people’s stories. Young people discussed aspects of their lives that enabled them to learn at school, and spoke about their future hopes, dreams and aspirations. The research used Positive Psychology, taking a strengths based approach to explore the skills young people thought they brought to their education, skills they would like to develop, and their plans for the future. The research highlighted the impact and importance of parents in young people’s life and how vigilant young people are to ability grouping in schools. The study also sheds a new perspective on the divisive grammar school debate in UK education.