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Original poster

Quality of teaching in your grammar school

52 replies

fcsale · 24/06/2023 10:33

With the decline in the number of teachers, I am curious to find out both the quality of and the number of vacancies in your DC's grammar school.

• Selective/super selective
• General area of school (eg South East)
• Are you happy with the quality of teaching?
• Are there are lot of teaching vacancies and if so which subjects?

My DC are upper primary age but I've been searching for schools financial benchmarking and found one of the super-sective schools around my area (SE) spending at the lowest 10% of similar schools (not sure what that truly means) for teaching staff and wondered how other schools are like.

schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk

OP posts:
Foxesandsquirrels · 24/06/2023 12:19

Interestingly, it's one of the arguments the conservatives have used for small budgets. Look at all these grammar schools getting incredible results on tiny budgets. Unfortunately standing in for lack of social workers and provision for SEN are both incredibly expensive and something grammar schools, especially the super selective ones, don't tend to need in the same way comps do.

Foxesandsquirrels · 24/06/2023 12:07

Generally speaking they have the smallest budgets as they have very little pupil premium and SEN so they've always had to be very frugal in terms of costs. A lot of grammar school buildings aren't in a great shape too.
However, they've always had less teachers. Kids in grammars tend to be easy to teach and don't need small classes. They're usually bright, eager to please and mostly have the same attainment level across the board. Obviously this will differ school to school but having small staff numbers is something I would definitely expect from a super selective. That doesn't mean their teaching will be bad.