To think State education is really poor?

I don't think it's as simple as state vs private or 'all state schools are bad'.

Private schools have far more funding than state schools. State schools are terribly underfunded at the moment and have been for a number of years.

Recruitment and retention are dire at the moment and those schools in disadvantaged areas are often the worst hit.

My son is at the state village primary where we live and we couldn't be happier with it. He is doing brilliant academically, lots of friends and they do loads: swimming, dance, PE, trips and visits, guests coming in e.g. a travelling theatre, lovely outside space, he has drum lessons. The staff are fantastic and work hard for the pupils.

I teach in a secondary school that serves a very deprived area. For context we are around 40% Pupil premium, many of those are classed as deprivation pupils, so those from the poorest backgrounds. High levels of SEND, high levels of EAL - many of our children do not speak English in the home. Almost 50% of our current Y7s are below chronological reading age.
With all of these challenges, alongside lack of adequate funding and access to external agencies for support, we have to work tirelessly to provide a good education for our children to hopefully enable them to break out of poverty as adults.

I can hand on heart say, as a staff team, we are absolutely driven and committed to providing the best we can. Not just curriculums but extra opportunities we provide such as extra curricular clubs, events we put on in school, competitions that we support our pupils to enter, making sure we discuss their reports with them. Supporting families as well - I can't tell you how many hours I spend on the phone as a form tutor, all on top of teaching a full timetable and managing a core department.

The local private schools probably do provide more than we do in terms of facilities and extras but please remember that those of us who work in state schools, especially disadvantaged schools, do so because we genuinely want the best for those kids and we do it on very limited resources.

I think it’s too simplistic to say that all state schools are rubbish and all private schools are great. There are certainly some private schools which I wouldn’t spend my money on and which aren’t as good as some of the better state schools.

However, generally, the private sector will be able to provide a better standard of education because they have greater funding and are able to ensure their classes don’t have disruptive pupils (those pupils will be asked to leave pretty quickly).

These threads are always full of parents trying to justify how the state system is better than private. I’m intrigued as to how some state schools can apparently afford specialist teachers, endless extra curricular activities such as horse riding, great sporting opportunities, long school days etc and yet some can apparently barely afford paper. The reality is that the vast majority of state schools do not offer such long days, as many specialist teachers etc as the private sector can.

From the TES magazine:
“this year, the proportion of A* and A grades achieved at private schools was 47.4 per cent, which is up 2.6 percentage points on 2019‘s 44.8 per cent.
This percentage-point rise is larger than the rise in the proportion of A*/A grades achieved by comprehensive secondary state school entries: this figure rose from 20.1 in 2019 to 22 per cent this year.
Meanwhile, 25.4 per cent of academy entries and 39 per cent of selective school entries achieved top grades this year”

The fact is that the private sector, as a whole, achieves better exam results. Of course there will be pupils who get straight As in the state sector, but there is more than double the proportion of top grades in the private sector. They also outperform selective state schools. Why is this? It’s not because private school pupils are inherently more clever.

The gap has probably grown more since covid. Yes, there were some state schools who were excellent in lockdown. There were far too many which weren’t. s an example, our private school provided a full daily timetable of live and recorded lessons, including art and sport for example. The local “good” state primary provided 2 short worksheets per week.

With regard the the OP’s post, I’d be wary of a private school claiming to be 2 years ahead. A decent private school shouldn’t need to make those claims. I’d also query how many places they have available because many private schools don’t have any available space. It would be a red flag to me if a school had several places per year group available.

All children deserve a good education. Unfortunately not all children are given that opportunity. I’m not convinced extra funding will solve all the problems in the state sector. Extra funding isn’t going to magically improve classroom behaviour for example.

I make these comments as parents who were both state educated. Did we do well in exams and end up in very good professional jobs? Yes. Do I think that my children’s private schools provide a better, more pleasant learning environment? Yes.

We considered private. Those excessive facilities and straw boaters are exactly what put us off, as well as the fact DH teaches many privately schooled kids at undergraduate level and they are far too dependent on being spoon fed with limited capacity for independent thinking. Sparky comp kids fair much better.

DD16 is doing 13 GCSEs at our local, very mixed ability, cross city comp. She’s predicated 9-7 in them all. Two of these - additional maths and triple science - are taught in ‘sixth period’ so on two days school finishes at 4.30pm. Ok not all kids will take these options but the options are there.

There are 14 in her GCSE geography class. in a recent cross City geography quiz day their school team beat all the others, including the privates (of which there are many in our city), with the highest score ever recorded.

Not loads of sports time but we take care of that with extra curriculars, active holidays etc.

I don’t for a second think she’d be a more rounded person as a result of attending the private school. In fact the opposite.

I'd be interested to hear from people with experience of both private and state schools, both primary and secondary of the behaviour of the pupils is any different.

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If you can afford it, a private education will set your kid up for life. State school children will never get the same experience in this country as those at private schools. It will never change. So if you can't beat them, join them. Our number 1 priority is school fees. I would down size our house to pay for fees if it came to it. State schools in the UK are not fit for purpose.

Thank you.

Yes we are. Accident of birth really and I do feel desperately sad/angry for other families in the state system in areas that don't have the same opportunities.

@Passepartoute at a time when there is an obesity crisis and too many kids do not enough exercise, 4 days of sports at school is good imo. Especially for girls as adolescence is the key time when many girls stop doing any form of exercise. Sport has so many positives especially for mental health.

PE 3x a week. Sport every day

That sounds excessive to me. They must waste an awful lot of time just changing clothes.

I didn’t “tar all comprehensives with the same brush”. And, as I said, I didn’t go private with any of my kids. Read my post again, carefully this time.

🙄

I taught in a state primary for 20 years. My DD started off in a private school (class of 12), but the education was no where as good as the state primary where I taught so we moved her when a place became available at my school into a class of 30. No regrets. PE was netball high fives, tag rugby and hockey with plastic sticks. Music and French were taught by specialists. But the emphasis was on the academic curriculum, good manners and good behaviour. DD was one of 18 children from her class of 30 to go to Grammar school. The following year her brother was one of 14 to go to Grammar.

I now teach at a local prep that is highly regarded, 20 is the maximum class size. The uniform of straw boaters, blazers and kit bags that are bigger than the children are very much part of the school's identity. PE and Games every day in the Prep school, played on extensive school fields with proper kit, wooden hockey sticks, gum shields etc. There is specialist teaching for PE, French, music, forest school and art. Lots of homework etc. But the core academic learning is no where near as rigorous as the state school. This year one out of 20 in Year 6 got a Grammar school place.

If I had my time again, where would I send my children... the state primary. If you want lots of expensive trips, fixtures, balls, enrichment activities, hours of homework each evening... go private. I was happy to do enrichment myself- Brownies, cubs, piano lessons, weekend trips to the fire station open day etc.

@Willyoujustbequiet you must be very rural but it sounds a lovely school so you are very lucky.

We have a 3 tier system. Her class with 8 is high school.

Some of our first schools are tiny. Less than 30 pupils.

We've experienced both, kids at what is thought to be the best local primary - great academic results etc. and quite a middle class catchment so lots of interested parents from professional backgrounds, but we've never been happy with it. School leadership is awful, comms with parents awful, school staff seem under a lot of pressure and unhappy and unfortunately this is impacting the kids. Oldest had gone from happy and thriving at nursery/ lower school years to putting in minimal effort and starting to get into trouble, never wanted to go to school, school weren't able to give him challenging work and covid didn't help (they repeated so much work over multiple years), wouldn't recognize there was an issue.

Moved them to a local private (only really option for a change and thought smaller classes/ more attention may help to challenge them) and it's like it's a different child - more sport (state school regularly just cancel one or both of the two pe days because "the hall was booked for someone else"), forest school every week, greater range of academic work to keep it interesting, happy teachers (that have the capacity/support/ environment/security) to be able to be kind and caring, interesting extra curricular activities - mainly they feel happy and supported.

State schools are under so much pressure I can understand it must be nearly impossible to provide adequate provision to over 30 kids, with the combo of a good reputation of this school historically meaning standards have been allowed to slide considerably by poor management, parents told "you're lucky to be here, if you don't like it you can leave" if you raise any concerns at all, no open line of communication. It's awful, primary school should be a lovely happy carefree time. Other kid doesn't want to move but I'm desperate for them to even though it would make things very difficult financially, because the difference is so much greater then I imagined.

Schools need proper funding, sensible education policies crafted by teachers who understand what is needed on the ground, proper social support so that schools can focus on education and other services pickup social care issues, sensible class sizes with adequate provision for SEN so that teaching can become a properly paid and enjoyable profession that retains good teachers. Of course there will be exceptional state schools and poor private schools - but there are so many poor state schools and I do believe the situation is getting worse.

@thegreenlight that's because not all private = good and not all state = bad. Very area dependent. Every school and child is individual so as a parent all you can do is find the best fit for your child.

Also, I’m a primary teacher at an outstanding school and have had children transfer from the local private. When I received their books the work was dull, uninspiring and of poor quality and the judgements were far too high for the quality of work evident. However, he was good at sailing.

The very old, very famous private secondary in our town charges £45000 a year but didn’t manage to get a single child to Oxbridge last year. One year they taught the wrong syllabus for the English exam and last week the nationals were full of stories about a teacher using inappropriate sexual language to students. They are not better, they are just more exclusive and that is the appeal. Sports facilities are amazing though!

Other than emphasising that privilege is real, what is the actual point of your post?

@BethDuttonsTwin "Educated enough to carry out the donkey work but not educated enough to organise and throw off the status quo. Didn’t you understand that?"
Yes, I do understand that. Do you think that's how it is? That 93% of the school population is destined for the "donkey work"?

Primary or secondary? We were rural primary and yes 16 in DDs class which is why we chose state for primary however for secondary that jumped to 30-35 per class. In my own humble experience primaries can offer an equivalent to private however this gets a lot more difficult at secondary. Our local state secondaries are very poor (not according to Ofsted but by the experience of parents we know who send their kids there/results etc).

Plenty are though. Its a horrendously over subscribed profession which I'm advising dc against.

@HerMammy I think it's less that the state school kids are behind and more that the private school kids are expected to be working ahead. 2 years seems excessive though.

I live in a rural county. The average according to the stats county wide is currently 17 but DC class is 8 at the moment.

If you're already a solicitor then you didn't g to school under a Tory government since 2010...

@Willyoujustbequiet definitely depends on where you live! I would be surprised if any state school could afford 18-20 per class though but I am happy to be wrong.