Are Academic Selection Tests Unlawful?
In all the talk about selective admission tests recently, with Northern Ireland quietly dropping theirs this year, one question has been floating around my head. Are the tests even lawful to begin with? They openly discriminate against children with learning disabilities (a protected characteristic since the 2010 Equalities Act), so how do they comply with this? Is there an exemption I didn't know about? This is not, it seems, a widely asked question, so I'd assumed the issue must have been dealt with a long time ago. The more I've been looking into it however, the more I feel it's just been swept under the rug in the hope that no-one will ask any difficult questions. Some were raised last September, when the parents of a visually impaired boy, with the support of the EHRC, took their nearby grammar school to court for failing to take his impairment into consideration during the admissions tests. They won their case, on the grounds that the school in question failed t