AS thousands of children prepare for their 11-plus tests, the education minister has accused grammar schools of using the exams for social reasons.
Grammar schools are hosting unregulated entrance exams for the seventh year in a row meaning P7 pupils will sit as many as five papers over the next four Saturdays.
Schools remain split into two camps using either the Common Entrance Assessment (CEA) or multiple-choice papers set by GL Assessment.
The Association for Quality Education, which runs the CEA papers, said it received 7,800 entries this year, 500 more than 2014. The first paper will be held on Saturday, with children taking the second and third on November 21 and 28. Numbers taking the GL tests, which will be held on November 14, have been in the region of 7,200 in each of the last two years.
The assembly this week supported an Ulster Unionist Party motion calling on the minister to convene talks "to build consensus and agree a way forward on the issue".
Speaking in the assembly, education minister John O'Dowd said there was no reason to separate children into non-grammar and grammar settings at age 11 when every post-primary school offered the same curriculum.
"Individually, pupils are disadvantaged, but the evidence shows us a more disturbing thing," Mr O'Dowd said.
"Academic selection damages your education system, and here is why: international and local evidence shows us - many fine non-selective schools in our society prove it to be true - that when children of different abilities and from different socio-economic backgrounds are taught together they all do better than they would if separated: all of them do better than if they were separated.
"Therefore, why are we separating our children at 11 or at 14? It is not for educational reasons but for social reasons."
The last state-sponsored 11-plus was held in November 2008, when this year's P7s were in their final pre-school year.
"We could produce a state-sponsored test. It would be very easy to produce a state-sponsored test, but it would not solve the problem in the system. You would still be dividing young people on the basis of social class, not educational ability," Mr O'Dowd added.
"The international evidence shows that the highest-performing education systems are non-selective. Why do they benefit from being non-selective? Children from different socio-economic backgrounds and with educational abilities learn from one another. Therefore, why do we divide them?
"If they learn from one another, and all boats rise in the high tide, why do we separate them? Somebody needs to explain to me the educational purposes of dividing children, if the evidence shows that they do better when they are educated together. No one has done that thus far."
