Parents in the North need to be more pushy like their Southern counterparts.

Sixisthemagicnumber perhaps you migh like to include the underlining from my post?

a) How many private school achieve anythig like 5 times more top grades than state schools?
b) How many of those private schools have an entrance exam?

Six

I do agree that whilst PISA results are often interesting and headline grabbing they are not necessarily that relevant to the UK education system. Interesting though that kids in London have historically done less well than kids in the rest of the country in them:

repec.ioe.ac.uk/REPEc/pdf/qsswp1604.pdf

Sixisthemagicnumber Wed 07-Dec-16 06:02:33 mumtrying I have said more than once that not all fee paying schools do well. Are you deliberately ignoring those bits of my posts?

No but you appear to be deliberately ignoring the fact that my posts were responding to posts made by PhilOBox, not you.

MumTryingHerBest Tue 06-Dec-16 14:41:00

PhilODox Really? Why do you think fee-paying schools do so well then?

Do all fee-paying schools do well? How many of them include resits in their results? How many of them actually place their results in the public domain in a way that they can be easily compared to state schools?

PISA Results out today. Hidden in the Executive Summary is this little gem:

"Students in private schools score higher in science than students in public schools: but after accounting for the social economic profile of students and schools, students in public schools score higher than students in private schools on average across OECD countries and in 22 education systems."

Understand that this thread is just about the England, but one should not blindly think that children will do better at private schools.

"....who then had to take a step back and go to College instead."

Have you seem some of the fantastic college courses you can do now? Many 4 A level equivalent, none of these courses and many others are considered a huge step forward and them some, not at all a step back.

I really thought the mind-set of A levels and uni being THE ONLY routes to life success had died years ago

'Ooop North' right here in Cheshire we have Kumon, tutors and everything!

I've heard both sides here, too pushy because the parents ask too many questions, want more feedback, interfere too much or not pushy enough if they don't write in the homework diary every night or helicopter with a 100 questions outside the classroom door each day! It seems you can't win sometimes.

There is huge aspiration in this little market town, my son in is Y5 and the grammar school entrance exam talk has been alive and well for years, the 'local comp' is the best performing secondary school in the borough, there are many private schools - so the choice is good.

The report headlines are boiled down to it seems sweeping generalisations, I lived in London for 15 but moved to Cheshire when I had children mainly for family, house prices and access to a decent state schools. I have friends still in London who've done the state and private route. I don't think the data proves much and it can all be taken in many different ways.

London gets shed loads of arts funding plus into the infrastructure to get there.

Feeling slightly peeved that I started a thread on this yesterday in the "In the News" section and it only got 3 posts, but who's counting ...

Anyway, at the risk of repeating myself, I probably fit the Tsar's definition of being relatively pushy - encourage my kids to do well at school, do lots of extra-curricular stuff etc. I also live in the South. However, I'm from the North-East. I moved south after Uni because it's where the work was (and also because it's a little warmer). Many thousands of others do the same. London is not just full of people from abroad - it's also full of people from other parts of the UK!

So if all the aspirational (a much better word than pushy) types gravitate towards where the work is, maybe they should solve the work (and weather) problem in the North first. Perhaps they will then find the aspiration spreads itself more evenly.

I don't live in London but I live in a city with a wide range of free cultural activities in my doorstep. There are so many things I can take my DCs to which can put learning into context. Hearing Tim Peake was a five minute car ride away, my DC had two years of summer camps at the local zoo. Where I grew up, everyone worked on farms, in tourism or occasionally admin for the local council. Lots of artists (I knew more willow weavers than accountants) but I really had little concept of any kind of professional employment. It was quite hard to work out what I wanted to "be" and whether it was worth striving for when my primary source of info for most jobs my DCs see being done every day by people they know was the telly.

Pushy parenting is not good. We have seen more than a few car crashes. However DC have picked up a lot from the sky high aspirations of their central London peers. They really do believe anything is possible. Not something that I think they would have had if they had grown elsewhere.

mumtrying- DfE tables do not include igcse. The dfe performance tables have the results (2015) of 2 local to me independents, but not the other 2 which do IGCSE (because that does not count in 5 A*-C measure, so it look like 0%). 2016 will be published in January.

reallytired- I do not consider getting "children to school on time and ready to learn" as supportive- that's the bare minimum, surely? I'm talking about parents whinging about being expected to hear small children read every day because "that's the school's job", not just the odd one either.

Sixisthemagicnumber just to reiterate my previous point - Do all fee-paying schools do well? How many of them include resits in their results? How many of them actually place their results in the public domain in a way that they can be easily compared to state schools?

Sixisthemagicnumber Tue 06-Dec-16 21:03:42 The reason not all private schools are on that data mumtrying is partly because some schools do IGCSEs rather than the normal GCSEs.

I was responding to:

PhilODox mumtrying- that's the telegraph - schools choose to submit to that. Most choose not to. I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.

"Reallytired Private school parents are supportive of education - how many do you actually know? Many I know say education is school's business, that's what they pay for, and are completely hands off and non-supportive."

I met plenty of private school parents and they have all been supportive, but not necessarily pushy. By supportive they provide a comfortable place for children to do home work, they get their children to school on time and ready to learn. They often see school as important even if they aren't ultra pushy.

I am really quite cross about this article blaming the parents given the funding inequalities and weakness of the schools available in some places.
But of course it is all our fault for not being pushy enough, I suppose if we really cared about our kids we would have made sure our area was better funded.

PhilODox Tue 06-Dec-16 20:24:46 I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.

Really?

None of the private schools I know have any GCSE data on the dfe performance tables. I must be looking in the wrong place. I must be looking in the wrong place. Perhaps you can provide a link?

mumtrying- that's the telegraph - schools choose to submit to that. Most choose not to.
I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.