The only exam allowed to go ahead in the pandemic was the 11-plus, which labels more poorer children as failures
Amid all the Covid upset, one significant but barely noticed change took place this year: Northern Ireland, the last national bastion of academic selection, was forced to abandon its 11-plus “transfer” test.
Thanks to the pandemic, a tradition that has divided generations of children was tossed aside at a stroke because it was simply too difficult to manage reliably in a national lockdown. For the first time in more than half a century all Northern Irish schools have been obliged to find alternative ways to admit secondary pupils.
