What is a 'leafy comp' 'good/outstanding comp'?

I have a question. I am planning to move to a "leafy" area and to send my DC to "leafy comp" with outstanding results (including low attainers).

To be honest, I worry that we will be odd one out being mixed race and an immigrant from continental Europe. I would much rather prefer a religious inner city comp with also outstanding results and much greater mix of pupils, but unfortunately we do not meet admission criteria. So for the sake of the best education I am choosing a "leafy comp" over any "bog standard comp".

I am being a snob by worrying that MC parents of a leafy comp will be snobs? EAL in that school is 3% and FSM are about 3%, low number of minorities, too, and though we are none I pray that my DC fit in well.

Blu, try a tiny 11 year old girl who gets As and plays the trumpet

Mention that your child is doing Latin and leafiness is also automatically assumed. A school from which kids go to Oxford to do Latin must be even more verdant.

Umm I grew up on a large Council Estate - we had a lot of trees.

But I wouldn't describe the Comps as leafy - as that is code for MC.

A school can be good because it gets good results with a truly comprehensive in take or a deprived one. Ideally it is also providing opportunities for the less academic pupils. It should also ideally be stretching all bright pupils including those from deprived backgrounds or with SEN. Ideally it also offers a wide and balanced curriculum.

OFSTED have for some time now been saying that it is some of the "leafy comps" that are producing the worst outcomes for their poor pupils. Complacency can creep in when they are assured of a largely middle class intake, or they simply do not have the help and expertise that initiatives like the London challenge built up in schools on how to enable poor pupils to achieve. The inner city schools in cities throughout the UK have transformed themselves from some of the worst achieving schools to some of the most effective. This is from 2013. www.gov.uk/government/news/too-many-of-englands-poorest-let-down-by-education-system Here in an affluent suburb of London with a very high proportion of parkland and tree lined roads we have schools still rated as requiring improvement largely because of their failure to keep certain disadvantaged groups in school and achieving any qualifications at all.

It's all in the stats, as KIllasandra says.

The Dept of Ed Schools Performance tables tell you how well the school educated children of 3 ability bands - do they make expected progress etc.

You can have a school that has very high %GCSEs but it may nevertheless not be supporting all it's students to be making expected progress. Or a school may have high numbers of low ability intake, but be enabling them all to exceed expected progress, while a small number of high achievers also break expectations but till cannot raise the overall %.In this example the second school would be the much better school, even though it's overall % is lower.

Leafy comp - largely a social construct, (m/c intake in housing of low enough density to enjoy the odd tree - e.g Not Council Estates) and a school in which a slight of stature violin-playing boy is thought to be safe from being 'eaten alive'.

Absolutely. You can't judge a school. All you can do is make your best guess and send your child there and then find out if you made the right decision or not.

I only trust talk from local parents who have similar children and views to mine.

And that's assuming you have any chance of getting into said school. In reality, you may have a choice of 1 school, home education, or moving (which might result in ending up in an area where there are no spaces in any schools...).

Oh, yes, but politicians have interfered with the statistics, too, so that is also only partial information (as per both meanings of the word "partial") - particularly this year. Even the politicians are admitting that you can't compare this year's data with previous years.

Basically, you can only judge a school by looking at its website, looking at its published data, looking round the school, talking to people with children at the school, talking to children at the school, taking your children to look round the school and talk to people at the school, and then making a massive leap of faith. Plus, hoping the DfE will stop changing things every five minutes and introduce change at a sensible rate is also something that is likely to cross your mind.

If you're trying to find out if a school is good or not, don't judge by the % passed GCSEs.

Go to the dcsf league tables and look at all the stats. My first point of call is how many low achievers (Level 3 at Y6 SATs), middle achievers (Level 4 at Y6 SATS) and high achievers (level 5 at Y6 SATs) passed.

Pretty much all the schools in my borough get < 10 % of their low achievers to pass. Around 50% of their middle achievers to pass, and above 90% of their high achievers to pass.

So, as school could only have 45% of the cohort pass, but be an excellent school (at first look) because 70% of middle achievers passed, and 25% of low achievers passed (or whatever). It's just they didn't have many high achievers to start with.

Here are the stats for Kent: www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/group.pl?qtype=LA&superview=sec&view=aat&set=2&tab=150&no=886&sort=ks4_14.ptac5emav&ord=desc

On these stats, the best non selective schools seem to be Bennett Memorial, St John's, St George's etc.

Another stat I like is compared to similar schools: www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/group.pl?qtype=LA&superview=sec&view=aat&set=12&sort=ks4_14.ptac5emav&ord=desc&tab=503&no=886&pg=1

Where again Bennett Memorial, St John's and St George's do well.

Those are the stats I'm interested in. Not the headline figure of how many pupils passed.

And I'm most certainly not interested in the OFSTED grade.

pps an academy school can still be a "bog standard comprehensive," or a "high school" or pretty much any type of school, it's just not controlled by the Local Authority any more. Politicians like to muddy the waters and make things complicated.

ps in a grammar area, the non-grammar schools are often called "high schools" or some silly made-up name "academy" (given that they were often considered to be failing and forced to academise, following which they continued to do just as badly, but with a new name and uniform... ).

You have to be careful about Grammars: some areas (eg Kent) have a lot of Grammars so about 23% of children go there. Other areas (eg Birmingham) have very few, so it's more like 2%.

Yes, in a grammar area, you would expect the non-grammar schools to get a lower % of A-C. I don't know what would be considered good for such schools - achieving the national average of A-C grades would be very good, I would have thought, if they are lacking the top 23% who went to the grammar schools...

In a non-grammar area, a community comprehensive school is a school open to all. The waters have gradually been muddied over the years, with schools being allowed to develop specialist status and be partially selective for, eg, sport, or music, or technology, etc, but it really depends on the area in which you live - you have to look at the entrance criteria for each school...

Most schools define their intake by catchment and catchment is often defined as 'nearest the school gate'.
Sweeping generalisation but if a school has a catchment that is full of expensive, middle-class homes with gardens and tree-lined avenues, then chances are that they will get naice middle-class children and hence naice middle-class results.
'Leafy' is shorthand for 'leafy suburbs', so not rural schools.

If you look at the DfE performance tables you can see results (a) for the whole country (b) the LEA (c) the individual school so you can do a meaningful compare-and-contrast.

It's Leafy if another mumsnetter sends her children there and is happy with their education.

It's bog-standard/failing/terrible if a mumsnetter is posting about why it's not good enough for that poster's children.

Often it's the same comp described by different posters.

Nothing to do with actual leaves, and not much to do with Ofsteds.

We are very leafy middle class types and my dc go to a non-leafy comp.

'leafy comp' top me simply means it's in a nice setting and probably still has its playing fields. As opposed to, for example, one outstanding comp near me which is parked next to a humungous roundabout in very gritty inner London with no non-concrete outdoor space at all, as far as I can see, and on that basis alone I wouldn't consider.

Oh yes, and Good/Oustanding are just two Ofsted ratings. This does not mean that everyone thinks these schools are good or outstanding.

Where on earth were you, where an alternative to a grammar school was a comprehensive? In the days of grammar schools, the alternatives were secondary modern and secondary technical schools. The comprehensive school system was brought in to replace that. In counties like Kent, where a large number of grammar schools still exist, the alternatives aren't generally called "comprehensives," because they quite plainly do not have comprehensive intakes in a county where up to 23% of children go to the state grammar schools.

As for "leafy comp," I think, as others have suggested, it is supposed to mean a very middle class intake away from the inner cities - hence the leaves... It doesn't actually have to be a brilliant school. Nor, in reality, does it need to have excellent facilities or particularly wealthy parents - it just needs to be somewhere that looks pretty and leafy to ignorant city dwellers.

I always assume "leafy comp" is one out in the 'burbs with lots of students from MC/Professional families, very little ethnic mix and low free school meals.

Good/outstanding is just Ofsted's judgement, which may or may not be a true picture of the school.

Leafy is used as shortcut for 'in posh areas', and thus receiving only posh kids and thus v unrepresentative of the vast majority of academies of depravity which sell their students short etc etc blah blah insert cliché of your choice as required. It is automatically assumed that any educated, articulate parent who is happy with their offsprings' comp is therefore taking advantage of Leafiness (insert cliché about selection by postcard etc etc).

The local comps to me have between 44% (probably seen as one of the worst) and 82% A to C at gcse with a couple in the 60% level and a couple in the 70% level. Local independent schools have 83% and 85% A to C so I'm guessing the comps with results in the 70s and 80s could be regarded as being the leafy sort. Pretty sure most schools round here are good/outstanding. Am lucky to be somewhere with good state provision.