to think 'outstanding' schools should be norm?

[Queenbuzz]

My ds has a place at an ofsted rated outstanding primary and I am elated, why? because I sent my my other older dc to the local primary and now want to pull them out because their education is blighted by seriously disruptive boys in their classes.

The local school is tiny and has done well with SN children but now people with undiagnosed disruptive dc have brought theirs too, the teachers were good but are now overwhelmed and all the bright dc have left or are leaving or are ignored in class due to the time and resources devoted to managing the troubled ones.

OMG I feel sorry for those dc who are left.

So why isn't your post titled 'All parents should be outstanding'?
Send us children that are disciplined, socialised, fed properly and emotionally secure. With an understanding of boundaries and an enthusiasm for life and discovering new things.
Read with them every night, support their learning at home and parent them to the highest standards.
Then it will be easier for all schools to become outstanding. Teachers would then have to raise their game higher too, no reason or excuse not to achieve if the initial cohort is excellent quality material.

If all schools are outstanding, then the term becomes meaningless.
I agree completely with Goblinchild about needing outstanding parents though.

What is outstanding for one child may not work for another.

tribunalgoer, that's not outstanding, that's just smug and arrogant.

I've heard of even the Ofsted ratings being a bit meaningless. hope not though as our local preschool AND schools are all rated highly!

totally agree about parents. it is incredibly hard for a school to do well when its intake is full of children who have no support at home. not impossible, mind, but hard. my DSD's old junior school was dreadful but I can't help feeling they were disadvantaged from the start, seeing the attitude of many of the other parents

I want to be a primary school teacher and I'd love, in the future, to move higher up and be a headteacher. the personal dream is to take a failing school in a rubbish area and turn it around to really give the local kids a chance. naive perhaps, but hey it could happen, right?!

MMM, I've seen it done on several occasions and been a part of it once.
It's an incredible high, but relentlessly exhausting. You get attacked from all sides, including those you are trying to help. Some of the obstacles and objections are so unexpected you just don't see them coming.
Go for it if your heart and health can cope.
It's very tough on any family you have too.

tg, an outstanding school should enable all children to make good progress.

Both my Ds' go to outstanding schools. However, when Ds1 was at his outstanding primary, we battled with them constantly about the support he needed but didn't get. Ds1 has a dyslexic profile, yet apparently didn't warrant support.

Rather funny that when it came to yr6 SATS he was then given a scribe- nothing at all to do making sure their SATS result remained high.

I complained to OFtsed when they did their inspection as did other parents with children that had additional learning needs, but it was pointless.

Ds2 however, thrives at the same school, he is bright and eager to learn and this school meets his needs excellently. I cannot fault it for Ds2.

My long ramble is really just agreeing with Buzzing noise, that what is outstanding for one child may not be so for another.

They recently changed the criteria so that most 'good' schools have been re-rated as 'satisfactory'. And apparently 'satisfactory' isn't actually satisfactory. So the labels are quite meaningless.

Also, the rating is overall. Some things that are important to you might be rated well/badly despite a different overall rating. Best thing to do is look at the report and decide for yourself what's relevant.

I did once work in a school that had excellent overall results. The 'clever' children were indeed stretched and achieved highly. Unfortunately, if your child was struggling they were generally ignored. The way we planned (all classes in the year group did exactly the same lessons, practically from a script) meant that they did get left behind and there was little an individual teacher could do.

one of the big problems is the heavy emphasis on attainment, not progress. So, if you have a school in a deprived area, where the majority of the children start with significantly low skills, then no matter how hard you push it's very hard to get them to the level that Ofsted wants to see. They might make adequate or good progress, but as they started lower, they are just not catching up.
It can be very disheartening working in a school like that, where you work really hard to help your pupils make good progress, but it never seems good enough.

It's a dilution of terms to wish that "all" are "outstanding" - as bad as saying "quite unique".

All part & parcel of people expecting (in a deluded manner) fairness for all.

SkiHorse, you won a wean?
Have they moved on from offering goldfish as prizes on the pier?

goblin I had sex and won a baby for an outstanding performance!

"one of the big problems is the heavy emphasis on attainment, not progress."

Au contraire, the key metric for schools now is contextual value add, which is all about progress. Any parent who doesn't look at that number is missing the real story, and sorting the league tables on that can give some really interesting results.

It's not foolproof. Just because a school is doing an amazing job lifting children with poor home backgrounds and english as an additional language doesn't mean that it's ideal for doctor's suburban children. But a school with a high CVA is clearly working better with the cohort they have.

My daughters are, rather against my wishes but I don't want to sleep in the spare room, at a "high-performing" selective school, which skins the top one or two percent off the city's comprehensives on the basis of a bogus test. The CVA over the whole seven years has error bars that include 1.0, so it's perfectly possible that the school is doing nothing which couldn't be done by giving the children a textbook and a stub of pencil, and it's quite clear that had they gone to the local, outstanding, comp they'd do at least as well.

Ds is at an outstanding primary school and I agree that the quality of teaching is really good- it's varied and imaginative and learning there is fun. Of course every child should be entitled to that, I totally agree OP.

But... this school is batting off an easy wicket in a relatively middle class area with an unusually high percentage of graduate parents.
And if you try raising any kind of legitimate concern you are totally stonewalled and met with 'but we are an outstanding school'!

For years and years I've taught in secondaries in deprived areas and you can be an outstanding teacher in those schools but still find the kids are making less progress than they should, because of a massive range of factors, all of which are working against teachers and kids alike. It's hugely frustrating.

On the other hand in some 'good' or 'outstanding' schools you can have teachers who are hopeless and lessons that are dull but it matters less to the overall judgement of the school because attainment is still OK- parents will hire tutors etc, the kids have similarly articulate friends, all that kind of thing.

An outstanding school in a deprived area, with a high proportion of sn and fsm kids is truly an outstanding school, imo. For the rest of it, you might as well grade the postcode sometimes.

I'm fed up with dc who cause mayhem in a class, what should be done for the dc who want to learn but are constantly waiting for the troublemakers to behave before the teacher can deliver?

When I said about circumstances making it hard in some schools it sounded like I was making excuses, but really sometimes there are impossible factors. For example, you can have a really bright girl student in year 11, all set to do well, and a few months before the exams she is thrown out of home and stops attending... or becomes pregnant.. or the dad returns out of the blue and moves back in and starts beating the mum up again- all these have happened to year 11 kids I have taught, you just throw your hands up in the air in despair.

My parents both taught, my mother in everything from trouble secondary moderns to well established grammars to shiny new comps, my fathers first in secondary of various stripes and later in FE and HE. Both say that the worst standards were in the grammars, because the expectations simply didn't match up to the pupils and therefore the schools could get away with murder.

Up until 1976, when the 11+ was abolished, Birmingham had a system whereby if you passed the 11+ you could (a) go to your local grammar schools (b) if you also passed their exam go to one of the semi-private schools and have your fee paid (although there were only a few hundred such places available) or (c) go to one of the nascent comprehensives anywhere in the city. (b) only covered a small number of people, but is the bit that's still left distorting Birmingham's secondary system. (c) was a very popular option, and the comp I went to - I was the second cohort not to take the 11+ - had a large number of people who were avoiding their local grammar schools.

How things have changed. Now people are tutoring their kids almost from birth to get them into the few hundred King Edwards Foundation places, which has the result that every child there has the ability and the parental support to excel anywhere. Complex calculations are done as to if seven (cheaper) years at a pushy private primary is a good investment for a free foundation place. the reality is that the schools do roughly what they say on the tin, but with an intake like they have, their results are nothing like as stellar as they first appear. Ofsted get all excited, but the reality is really much more banal: schools where parents with PhDs are routine and there's a Professor or Consultant's child in every classroom (we both have decent first degrees, which barely register on the scale) can't help but succeed, and the quality of the education on offer is almost secondary.

All schools should be average. That should be a very high standard.