Widening access to grammar schools : the educational impact in Northern Ireland

26 more academically orientated, general education. Specifically, we consider the consequences of a reform that affected access to grammar schools in Northern Ireland, when England is used as the comparison group. The two regions of the UK differ in that the grammar school system has been retained in Northern Ireland whereas it was gradually dismantled in England in the 1960s and 1970s. The hallmark of the grammar school system is that children are selected on the basis of measured ability at the age of 10 or 11 whereas in the comprehensive system, children of different abilities are educated in the same schools. The ‘selective aspect’ of the education system is currently under review by the new administration in Northern Ireland. Although the education systems of England and Northern Ireland are also different in other respects (for example, the schools in the latter are mostly segregated by religion), there are important similarities. The two regions have broadly the same curriculum and they have the same examinations for students at the ages of 16 (GCSEs) and 18 (A-levels). The important considerations for our research are that the examinations are comparable across the two regions and that the reform only occurred in one of them. That reform consisted of widening access to the more academic track within Northern Ireland at the time of the ‘open enrolment’ reform in the late 1980s. This is the only differential change that happened across the two regions. Our research shows that the reform enabled a very significant increase in the number of Northern Irish pupils who could attend the more academic track (grammar schools) at the end of primary school, between the pre-reform birth cohort What are the overall effects on educational attainment of widening access to the more academic track? Research by Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally investigates using the ‘natural experiment’ of the grammar school system in Northern Ireland, which has survived long after its dismantlement in England.