How can state school parents try & bridge the educational gap that's rapidly forming?

[Kenthighst]

Following on from the excellent thread regarding the shambles of state education. What can us parents do to bridge the gap? Our state school children are being failed & we are being kept in the dark.
What can be done outside school to bridge the gap that has formed between state & private?

Day pupil at local private is £1400 a month
£50 an hour x 8 subjects = £400 a week which is £1600 a month

Well I’m in London so private is more & I wouldn’t necessarily think you need to tutor 8 subjects every week. Plus plenty of private school dc are also tutored.
As another poster said there’s a big discrepancy in state school provision. I went to excellent state secondaries & my dc will do similar but obviously house prices can be prohibitive.

I think that most state schools are ok as long as you avoid the bottom sets.

I am not a primary expert at all but I do think lots of reading and establishing basic number confidence is really important before they go to secondary.

The problem is most children just don’t see learning as their job; they think teachers will do it for them. This is even a problem in private schools: there are just more staff and more time to do clinics etc.

In an ideal world, by mid Year 10 a pupil should have some idea of their course, how to look up the syllabus online (it is really easy) and how best to revise. If they get this, they can really help themselves. I also think that buying them a full set of text books (and showing them how to use them) is tremendously helpful. When you are lost in a prep, being able to go to the relevant section of the textbook can really help.

Parents need to keep on top of how their children are doing and proactively liaise with the school if they are not fulfilling their potential.

On top of this I think regular chats about what A levels they might do, what they are thinking of as a career etc are really useful.

Pupils need to feel both valued for their efforts but also made to work to do as well as they can.

There is no magic bullet but private schools are not miraculously good, nor are state schools (on average) as bad as some fear. Private schools are really good at doing all the above but there is nothing good parenting (and maybe a little tutoring, but not much) can’t replicate.

We asked them years ago and they said it was too complicated. Which is madness imo.

@therealcookiemonster thanks for your reply but I find the whole 'general breadth of knowledge' will not help pass the exams.
I am well educated and have many interests and have spent many hours doing all you have suggested throughout their lives so far, but as a preteen/teen I can aid DC if they think there is a point to it....ie they can see direct correlation in learning it to do better in the tests...but general interest...it's not like they are 8 any more and will listen intently or focus on anything other than they want to focus on ☹️
If you have a teen that is willingly engaged with you in those things you are suggesting, then you are lucky.

I live in a very good area with a grammar school and that is the issue as someone else has said.

Here's the previous thread mentioned by the OP https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5019861-our-education-system-is-an-utter-shit-show?page=1

I think those people who are saying 'oh take them to the theatre and give them music lessons' to bring their state education up to the same level as a private one are just woefully misinformed about the current state of state education.

Now you cannot assume that your child in state education will actually have a teacher for all of their subjects.

Ask your child how many cover lessons they've had lately. In secondary, unlike primary where a cover teacher might expect to teach the planned lessons, cover lessons are mostly seen as a doss by the kids and very little gets done.

They may also have a random selection of teachers teaching them various subjects rather than subject specialists.

They may not have a teacher at all and be expected to teach themselves.

@NotAPsycho that's fair enough. I feel for you, the education system in this country have failed diligent parents such as yourselves

sorry, I don't think you have any idea of the scale of the funding shortfalls - £500 per pupil? Say a school has 500 pupils. £250 000? That is not even going to cover the increase in utilities bills

For parents who are involved in their children's education, the school is a tool and a resource, but most individual encouragement and support comes from home. It has always been the way. Nothing has changed.

For children who's parents are not involved, mostly they are not going to get good educational outcomes anyway. For those that are really motivated, in spite of home life, these are the ones who are most disadvantaged by the current state of affairs. Teachers do their best for them

For parents who are involved in their children's education, the school is a tool and a resource, but most individual encouragement and support comes from home. It has always been the way. Nothing has changed.

It has changed. Now parents cannot expect that their child is being taught at school.

Some good suggestions here but we found tutors unnecessary and state comp was good at getting dc to an excellent degree

I don’t think he’d be somewhere else if he had been at private

The hardest part was summer term during Covid but other than that he really did well

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5019861-our-education-system-is-an-utter-shit-show?page=10&reply=133488407

There you go @Ivyy 👍

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5019861-our-education-system-is-an-utter-shit-show?page=10&reply=133488407

@noblegiraffe ,

‘It has changed. Now parents cannot expect that their child is being taught at school.’

Aren’t you catastrophising a bit there in a way which is unhelpful to parents?

Of course most cover lessons won’t get taught, but work should be set, and hopefully covers are only a small proportion of lessons.

Budgets have been pared to the bone and teachers are not paid nearly enough, especially in scarcity subjects like yours. But many are quite well organised into MATs, so share non teaching costs, and function pretty well considering.

You are right to highlight problems and the government are very two faced over education, but my children, who go to a local school, are basically decently taught, though they definitely need to learn more independently or get more help than they would at a private school.

Yes exactly.
Enrichment is easy and I understand most of the content of their GCSEs. What I can’t do is tell them exactly what form of words will be accepted by the examiner, or how to bring their coursework up to a higher grade standard.

At secondary level, it can be hard to support learning.

Many schools are academies now so do not need to follow the national curriculum.

At gcse there are generally revision guides you can buy for each exam board and often websites like Seneca and Tassomai for science, Duolingo for languages and dr fiost for maths.

At ks3 revision guides are not going to align with what the school actually teaches.

The school can choose what times in history to teach and because there isn't a national set list if what to teach there won't be a revision book for it, you'll just need to find documentaries and places to visit yourself based on what they tell you when they come home from school.

It's the same in most subjects - they'll be teaching Spanish in Spanish but the order is up to them and most state schools can't afford or don't have physical textbooks any more for parents to look at.

personally as an ex-teacher I would say that if they leave primary with good maths and english that's a good foundation. if they are behind in one or both when they start secondary it's very difficult to catch up.

Unfortunately I tend to agree with you on this. I cannot trust the school alone with dc's education, the odds are stacked against the school & the dc.

Aren’t you catastrophising a bit there in a way which is unhelpful to parents?

No, I am not. I am trying to communicate just how bad the situation is in (particularly secondary) schools right now.

People know the NHS is on its knees. They know that they might not get to see a doctor or be waiting years for an operation or that an ambulance might not turn up.

What they don't yet seem to realise is that education is in a similarly poor state and that although their might be an adult stood in front of a class, it may not be a teacher, or a teacher who knows what they are talking about.

The recruitment and retention crisis is really starting to bite.

What they don't yet seem to realise is that education is in a similarly poor state and that although their might be an adult stood in front of a class, it may not be a teacher, or a teacher who knows what they are talking about.

But surely the schools with excellent results are doing something right?

Our state educated kids will be competing for uni places & in the job market with children who have been to grammar, public & private schools. Also not forgetting globalisation, some countries are miles ahead of the UK.
State school children especially in secondary are being set up to fail through no fault of their own.

@noblegiraffe, my point was what I see as bridging the gap between my MC kids at a very high achieving state school in an affluent area and those at our local private school. But that’s not the real gap IMO. The real gap is between schools like my local school and schools like the one in which I teach. We have been unable to fill two English posts for 2yrs. Kids are being taught English by whoever we can find willing to do it which is appalling. The Science and Maths departments are in an even worse state and I’m certain Ofsted would close hundreds of secondary schools if they knew half of what was going on staffing wise but schools have no choice. In English we plug the gap by using supply primary trained colleagues to teach across Y7 and sometimes Y8 if we can persuade them. One of my colleagues is newly married and I know our HoD is already stressing about how to cover if/when she may require mat leave as the situation is not temporary. Rather, it’s getting worse. 😔

@Newbutoldfather The part about 'work should be set, and hopefully covers are only a small proportion of lessons'.

Luckily, DC has only had a term of design and technology that had no teacher. It's a series of supply teachers and they did nothing. No one set the work because they had no woodwork teacher apparently. I know of a local secondary who had no GCSE maths teacher and the parents are all paying for private maths tutor to teacher their kids their GCSE curriculum. The state system is broken from lack of funding and a few trips to the museum won't cut it.

And if the school doesn't set homework, like @NotAPsycho said, a KS3 child do not see the point of completing them. It must take a very rare teen to want to read widely around the subject.

My school gets really good results and we are really struggling for staff.

I'm sure there are some state schools out there, grammars, or the really posh ones who are probably ok, but parents who come onto a thread to say 'my kids' school is doing just great' are either naive, or extremely lucky. It's not the general picture at all.

There's always been a gap, and I doubt that it is any worse now than previously.

This!