state comprehensive secondary schools stretching able pupils - opinions?

Atia- DH didbthe Oxford paper for maths twenty years ago. He said it was stinkingly hard that year, many did very badly. He also did.S level, which I seem tonrecall used to be available in other subjects too? He said that one was a walkovers. He ended up elsewhere nut got a fir

rabbit yours is the 'real' perfectionism but nowadays you might have found it harder to find that difficulty to tackle within school.

ikkenu the exam driven perfectionism that I am talking up IMO is just as prevalent in some grammars and selectivd private schools, just more are expected to achieve it.

Twenty years ago selection was partly by grades at further maths.

um, well ... when I was applying for Oxbridge maths 26 years ago, entrance to Oxford was entirely based on the entrance exams and interviews, and they were still giving EE offers. And Cambridge were asking for STEP results for Maths.

The situation where someone gets excellent results without understanding the material fully definitely exists. Think about the notorious Edexcel 2013 C3 paper - loads of people not realising that sin x = cos(90-x) because they've been so trained up in trig manipulations that they'd forgotten about what a triangle actually looked like; people getting stuck on the last question because "it looked like a mechanics question" and so they assumed it wasn't on their syllabus and they couldn't do it, instead of reading the question.

I'm not sure this is entirely relevant to the OP's question, but it's an interesting wander off the path!

Ridicuous in what way, notinaminute?

I am a strong opponent of the view that "a bright child will do anywhere", because I see underachievement first-hand on a regular basis (and I am living proof that the statement is trite bullshit). I do agree with a poster above (maybe several) that said it's perfectly possible to get high grades/levels without having true understanding, or indeed being able to do any deep thinking. Thinking is hard, achieving a level 7 is not, if one is taught what is required for level 7.

I reserve judgement on the perfectionism thing, as I believe my DD has essentially been a perfectionist from birth, and we have spent most of nine years trying to re-programme that part of her. My DS was born with a preternatural thirst for knowledge and a desire to understand how all things work, yet he dashes off schoolwork as quickly and poorly as he can get away with in order to focus on what his interest is piqued by this week.

"I have no duty to also sacrifice my child to that end"

What a ridiculous statement!

That's a really interesting observation Scottishprof. I've always thought bright children do well wherever they are, and are actually more used to independent study and generally being creative at a state school rather than most privates. But perfectionism is another aspect. So without spending money or moving to a grammar school area, how do we mitigate that as parents?

Hmm. That's interesting. I guess I'd never viewed perfectionism in that way. I've always viewed myself as a perfectionist, but have never directed this towards getting 100% at something I found easy, which would be intensely boring, but instead always focusing on confronting anything I find difficult and refusing to give up until I've proved to myself I can achieve it if I want to, and if I do decide I really want to, then always thinking I could have done more, so seldom being satisfied that I've done my best. Is that just masochism, then?

rabbit this is the type of perfectionism that is all about not making mistakes and being afraid of not immediately knowing the answer -driven by a syllabus and exams where you can get 100% even in English.

More bright DCs are being channeled that way because they are n't having the chance of facing problems where there is n't a drilled approach to solving it and so are measuring their ability in mistake avoidance and knowledge regurgitation.

scottishprof I agree, education that doesn't challenge children can be found in both sectors and should be railed against whenever and wherever we find it.

cauchy I'm sorry. Perhaps my DD's levels are irrelevant. It would have been more relevant if you have emphasised in bold what I said next, ie. that since y1 teachers have been discussing with me how to challenge her. Which To me is exactly what you are suggesting when you say "think more deeply about harder issues". The discussion with teachers has been about helping her challenge herself and get used to having to deal with problems she does t immediately know the answer to. The last thing I meant to suggest was that challenge was simply about getting to next level!

A lot of people think that, rabbitstew, but it simply isn't true. Carol Dweck's work is very interesting on this. Perfectionism is best read as an understandable, but maladaptive, reaction to lack of challenge. Of course it can end up running in families for many reasons, some of them genetic or otherwise hard to alter, but there are definitely things parents can do to make their children less likely to develop perfectionism.

And there was me thinking perfectionists were born, not made.

She's 4c in numeracy and literacy.

This typically does not say anything about whether she has been made to think more deeply about harder issues. A really good primary maths teacher would be able to challenge and stretch a bright pupil without teaching ahead in numeracy, i.e. the pupil's NC score reflects being taught ahead rather than being challenged.

Posters seem to quote high NC levels and GCSE/AS/A2 grades as signs that students are being stretched. Yet how much the brightest pupils are being challenged cannot be measured by national curriculum levels or by A*s. The whole system rewards perfectionist high marks on (what is for bright students) rather easy work.

Nowfeeltheneedtopost, excellent, I'm glad your DD is getting a good education. Note that nothing I said implied that this can't be done in the state sector - it often can be and is. I said "do whatever it takes", and I said that my child isn't in a state school. Perhaps that has been read as suggesting that "what it takes" will always be a private school, but that's not what I said and not what I meant. In my particular circumstances, given the particular schools available to me and my particular child, one particular private school is currently the best choice I can make for him. State schools may be the best choice for your DD, and might have been for my child if we'd happened to live somewhere else. I was railing against education that doesn't challenge children. It can be found in both sectors.

cauchy, you perhaps don't disagree with me, because I didn't say and don't believe that "private schools are necessarily better at challenging pupils".

minifingers, nonsense. So far from perpetuating inequality of opportunity, I am dedicating my life to educating young people from all backgrounds to the best of my ability. I have no duty to also sacrifice my child to that end, even if I did believe that putting him in a comprehensive school would improve other students' education to a degree that would more than compensate for the extra taxpayers' money that having him there would consume, which I don't. What are you doing to improve young people's education, then?

As a previous poster said, you can't generalise about state and private. My DD is only year 3 so obv not secondary yet but she is bright and loving her state school. She's 4c in numeracy and literacy and since y1 her teachers have been talking to me about how best we ensure she is stretched, challenged, deals with getting things wrong etc etc. And she's not alone, there are a whole group of children like her. So this idea that children get to GCSEs or beyond without having achieved less than 100% is just too limited a view. Many state primaries are perfectly capable of instilling a work ethic and sense of achievement into their higher achieving pupils. Now, I obviously haven't had my DD go through secondary yet but I feel confident that she has developed a sufficient work ethic and excitement at being confronted with challenging problems. I wholeheartedly agree that it is essential that children in Secondary school ate given good advice about GCSEs and A levels .aligned with their aspirations but I am optimistic that this can be done in the state sector.

"The results they showed are consistent with a quite different hypothesis: private schools, on average, get the same young children higher grades than those children would achieve at comprehensive schools."

Well, of course they do - because students at these schools get much more teaching (smaller classes, longer school day) and are protected by the deliberate and comprehensive exclusion children who may slow down pace of learning.

It's also the case that having a lot of clever children in a class accelerates the pace of lessons; bright children will often have a very wide frame of reference - something the whole class benefits from.

Parents of clever children who reject the state sector are part of what makes it second rate. They are creating and perpetuating a sort of social and intellectual apartheid in education and have no intention of doing anything about it because inequality is actually a great thing if your child is benefiting from it.

Consider maths students at Oxbridge. Twenty years ago Oxbridge was taking pretty much the same number of students as they do nowadays. They are choosing from the highest achieving students, so the fact that the total number going to university has increased is completely irrelevant.

Twenty years ago selection was partly by grades at further maths. Nowadays Oxbridge maths certainly doesn't use A levels as more than a preliminary filter: MAT and STEP are used instead, because all maths students should get 2 x A in maths easily. Getting As in maths definitely isn't challenging for the top maths, economics, physics and engineering students.

So the demographics haven't really changed but nowadays as ScottishProf says it is far more common to see students who have never been challenged and don't know how to deal with anything for which the answer is not obvious to them. This is precisely why STEP was made compulsory for Cambridge maths and why interviews are very challenging.

Where I would disagree with ScottishProf is in the statement that private schools are necessarily better at challenging pupils. Many private schools are indeed good at this, many do teach beyond the curriculum, but not at all do. I'm sure they are also some very good non-selective state schools in which teachers really push the top pupils. However, like earlier posters on this thread, I find it depressing during outreach visits to realise the poor choices some non-selective state schools are making for their high ability pupils. I also find it incredibly depressing to interview students who have been taught to get A*s but not to understand the material. (Yes this is possible.)

I think you are describing the de-professionalisation of teachers in the state system. They aren't given much trust or discretion. They also aren't paid adequately. I think this makes it hard to keep teachers in the profession.
I don't say this out of disrespect, I say it with sadness. My mum and SIL are both teachers.

You may be right, Springisontheway, I don't know, but I think a lot of it is not so much about the teachers as about the teaching. Compare teacher A who is in a job where she has time to complete their necessary workload and still spend some time thinking about what a few unusual children may need and maybe planning some extra help for one and an extra challenge for another, and she can still get some exercise and enough sleep, with teacher B who can barely get through her marking and paperwork load for her much larger classes before collapsing into bed at 3am. They could be equally good teachers - they could be the same person! - but teacher A is going to do better teaching. This matters already at primary.

I think the challenge you would like for pupils Scottishprof is not always possible because the caliber of secondary teachers isn't consistently as high as it would need to be.

titchy, do read my post, I carefully didn't say it applied to all children. I have only ever taught cohorts of young people who would always have gone to university so the increasing numbers going has no impact on what I've seen. Sure, there's been inflation, but without saying too much about where I've been and what's happened to their admissions policies, I know that the position in the school cohort of the average student I see has risen considerably.

minifingers, no, there are many many children who are not intellectually challenged by getting A at A level. The difference between an A and an A, in STEM subjects at least, is the level of perfectionism required, not the intellectual challenge encountered, anyway. In fact the introduction of the stars at both GCSE and A level has been a wholly bad thing in my view: it has given schools incentives to encourage perfectionism, taking time and energy away from out of school activities that might have provided children who were going to get As anyway with genuine challenges. And no, I'm not saying schools don't encourage children to achieve high grades, though I'm sure there are some that don't; I'm saying they don't encourage children to think about hard problems. There's a difference.

minifingers again, let me not understate the professorial salary, my family is not impoverished; and I am angered far more by what I see in my office than by thinking about my own child, who was always going to be challenged one way or another.

My reply above is to minifingers post immediately following my earlier one; sorry, many posts have intervened.

Your understanding is faulty, but the research that I think you're referring to was widely misreported, so that's not too surprising. What it showed was that if you match school leavers for A level grades then the ones from non-selective state schools do better by some measures than the privately educated ones. If I remember rightly, even that only applied to A level grades below the ones my current university requires anyway, by the way, i.e. it doesn't apply to the children who are most at risk of being unchallenged at school, so it's off the main topic. (I haven't checked just now, but if I remember rightly, once you got to BBB, you'd be overcompensating if you gave the pupil from the worst school an offer that was 1 grade in 1 A level lower than the offer you gave to the pupil from the best school, and at AAA the effect has gone altogether.)

But since you ask: suppose you take two young people who both achieve BCC at A level, and I tell you that the one from a comprehensive is more likely to finish with a good degree than the one from a private school. You want me to conclude that this means the one from a private school has somehow been invisibly damaged by the education, compared to the comprehensive school pupil. But what seems far more plausible to me is: those results were the best the private school pupil could achieve even with more support than the comprehensive school pupil received. Probably, the comprehensive school pupil is cleverer, or harder working, or less troubled, or in some other way doing better than the private school pupil who had more help but achieved no better grades. Now if we put them in the same environment, sure, we expect the one who achieved given results with less help to do better.

It's the wrong question. What parents want to know is: given this 4 year old, or 10 year old, will they do better at university or in life if I send them to this school or that school? Comparing students with the same A level grades tells you nothing that helps to answer that question. The results they showed are consistent with a quite different hypothesis: private schools, on average, get the same young children higher grades than those children would achieve at comprehensive schools. Some of that advantage may well be retained at university and throughout life. But, since not 100% of the advantage is retained after the pupil leaves the school (that's all we can tell), private school pupils don't quite keep up with comprehensive school pupils who have the same grades when they leave. Who's surprised? It would be absolutely astonishing if the only advantage private schools gave their pupils were via mechanisms that would last all their lives.

ScottishProf That's an extremely interesting argument and one I've genuinely never heard before.
DS always complained of finding the work too easy and never had to try hard for anything. He is certainly a perfectionist and never happy with less than 100%.
What we did - because the school didn't, was to stretch and challenge him at home.
I think sixth form made the difference. He self taught some maths that the school couldn't deliver and so did find for the very first time something that wasn't easy. Hopefully this will help him avoid falling into the trap you describe at uni.