for 2017 entry (tests taken in 2016). Northern Ireland The system in Northern Ireland differed from that in England. The last eleven-plus was held in November 2008. A provision in the Education Order (NI) 1997 states that "the Department may issue and revise guidance as it thinks appropriate for admission of pupils to grant-aided schools". Citing this on 21 January 2008, Northern Ireland's Education Minister Caitríona Ruane passed new guidelines regarding post-primary progression as regulation rather than as legislation. This avoided the need for the proposals to be passed by the Northern Ireland Assembly, where cross-party support for the changes did not exist. Some schools, parents and political parties object to the new legal framework. As a result, many post-primary schools are setting their own entrance examinations. Controversy The 11-plus was a result of major changes which took place in English and Welsh education in the years up to 1944. In particular, the Hadow Report of 1926 called for the division of primary and secondary education to take place on the cusp of adolescence at 11 or 12. The implementation of this break by the Butler Act seemed to offer an ideal opportunity to implement streaming, since all children would be changing school anyway. Thus testing at 11 emerged largely as a historical accident, without other specific reasons for testing at that age. The test, composed of Maths, English and Verbal Reasoning could not be passed by 10-year-olds who had not been trained for the test. A former highmaster of Manchester Grammar School asserted on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze that no child who had not seen the verbal reasoning tests that formed the basis of the 11-plus before attempting them would have a "hope in hell" of passing them, and he had dispensed with the 11-plus as "worthless". Instead he used personal interviews. Children in school were drilled in the 11-plus until it was "coming out of their ears". Families had to play the system, little booklets were available from local newsagents that showed how to pass the exam and contained many past papers with all the answers provided, which the children then learned by rote. Criticism of the 11-plus arose on a number of grounds, though many related more to the wider education system than to academic selection generally or the 11-plus specifically. The proportions of schoolchildren gaining a place at a grammar school varied by location