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.

I happen to believe that my DD's school is outstanding, but OFSTED graded it Good. Her last school had an appalling intake and was on the verge of special measures - which was crippling the morale of the very good teachers, and excellent management team, but was wholly caused by dreadful, dreadful parenting. (yy, judgey pants firmly on, but really crappy attendance, hell hounds and smokers all round the school gates, stand up rows between parents in the playground, no support from parents for the discipline procedures etc. DD was there for 2 years and did well, she'd do well anywhere I think. DS1 was there for 2 terms and spent the whole time hiding/ covering ears and crying.)

At risk of sounding like a 1920s Eugenicist who's had a Guardian conversion...

The 1944 Education Act made reasonable education available to all. The 11+ system skimmed a generation of bright, aspirational working-class children out of their background and into the middle-class, just in time to attend the enlarging redbricks and then staff the new universities, and to provide the teachers for the enlarging secondary sector of the 1960s. Rising birthrate, endless demand for graduates. There was funding for rising university participation and most of the people going to university in the fifties and sixties had parents who had left school at 12 or earlier.

Of the generation who didn't go to university in the 1950s and 1960s, their children may well have done: there were a lot more places in a lot more universities, and there was still funding. By the 1980s, you could get a CNAA degree with a couple of Ds at A level on a full grant, and there was always the OU. At each point, a proportion of the remaining families who hadn't gone to university saw their children graduate.

Unfortunately, that was all that happened. That there were a lot of people left doing manual labour, being failed by the education system and assumed to be beyond redemption (see, for example, the educational provision on large post-war housing estates, which was mostly secondary modern) was ignored. As manual jobs declined in availability and pay, you were left with people who were the product of three or four generations of educational failure, who had watched their peers becoming affluent but had themselves, for all sorts of reasons, remained where they were.

Unemployment and deskilling bit in the 1980s, so today some primary schools are dealing with people whose parents and grandparents haven't worked fulltime or at all, and for whom education isn't the enabler some see it as (I'm going back, at 45, to do a full-time PhD) but is a dull, pointless interruption to the pathway towards the dole or subsistence working. Blaming the parents is easy, but it's a lot more complex than that.

When I was at a comp in the 1970s, the bright kids went to university, the less successful for jobs at The Austin (ie, MG Rover) or became typists. Today Longbridge is a flat field of rubble and managers do their own typing. That the school I went to fell into special measures is regrettable, but horribly inevitable, when about 60% of the pupils are from houses where no-one is in work. Bad parenting isn't as much of a choice as people would have you believe, and there's an air of "Let them eat cake".

nothing stays the same and the school management has to address the change in dynamics with the cohort.

if teaching was outstanding when the cohort was full of 'good' kids then the classroom management style has the change when the cohort is not so good. Once a few techniques are learnt and put into practice then teaching and learning will be more effective. It is a management issue to identify and address the needs of the staff. In the OP's case the problem sounds quite fixable.

Oh, and all schools can't be outstanding. Outstanding by that definition will be normal, or as Ofsted puts it, 'good'.

fascinating thread.

can anyone tell me, please, how I found out what ratings were given to my DSDs' schools?

thanks those who responded to my (hopefully attainable) dream for my future career.

one thing I'd like to do as an intermediate step is be a 'maths specialist' if indeed such a post exists at that time. I'd love to be in charge of a whole school's (or maybe even a few schools') maths teaching and really get it up to scratch and beyond.

gah, people should just use the school nearest to them and then everything will even out.

Yes yes,I know, of course it's not that simple, but when all the rich people move into the rich area and rent houses on top of their own mortgaged property, just to get their child into st barnabus-- the best primary, a disadvantaged child goes to the next nearest school which ends up being the undesirable one.

DS will go to the nearest primary, and the nearest secondary. We're incredibly lucky to have agrammer school that we're in the catchment for (he's 2, i'm thinking ahead) but if he doesn't go there, then I will not move heaven and earth to get him into the poncy village secondary that's just outside our catchment.

sorry, just my own personal view, despite only having a preschooler.

I'm currently undertaking the Maths Specialist Teacher Programme, geared towards primary school teachers who are passionate about improving both the teaching and the understanding of maths by children and teachers alike, I'm trying!!!!!

wow. awesome primarymum! sounds perfect for me

I'm doing a maths degree ATM but I'm thinking of changing it to 'maths in education' where the last 3 modules are based on working in schools etc.

To sum the research:

The single most important factor in achievement in school is the social background of the child. This is overwhelmingly true. Sadly, study after study shows this to be the case.

BUT

The single most important factor in achievement in school, which is within the school's control, is the quality of teaching. This doesn't mean teachers can turn pigs' ears in to silk purses, but that setting, keeping back a year, even subject knowledge are not as significant as quality of teaching. For the last, this doesn't mean that anyone can teach anything, but that being a genius maths wiz does not make a good teacher.

"people should just use the school nearest to them and then everything will even out. "

Huh? Social background is a huge factor, and that correlates with postcode so well that entire businesses (Mosaic) are built on it. You would need to touch the political third rail and start bussing to fix that, and the first effect of that would be a massive outflow of the middle classes from your LEA.

Moreover, even if you could fix the issue of the composition of the cohort, the middle classes are advantaging their children away from school. There were kids at my daughters' primary school whose parents couldn't read, while mine were both living in a house where the main risk is being crushed by piles of books lying in heaps. Fix that, social engineers.

My baby son will go to an outstanding nursery that is rated as such because of its value added.. it is in a deprived area with a majority of EAL learners who enter the setting with limited skiills and enter KS1 with skills within the average range. It's also got its rating as it has excellent links with the community/parent training and support etc.. so it's 'outstanding' status is probably more relevant to the local kids than it will be to our family...
BUT
the staff were so warm and responsive and the curriculum so creative that it was outstanding in my eyes. The Ofsted rating is a guide but not always relevant to an individual family as tribunalgoer has shown: that school is probably still outstanding for its majority cohort but with weaknesses in SEN/parent partnership, whereas another school I worked in was outstanding in those areas but added limited value for its general population.

What to do with the disruptive ones? Get their parent to sit in the lessons? What if they have jobs or a baby though?

I have moved around a lot and tbh have never lived in an area that is exclusively rich or poor.

When I lived in London I lived in a 1 million plus apartments, there were council flats up the road. If my dd had attended local schools she would have been part of a very mixed cohort. I lived in a range of places in London and it was the same.

I have lived in Yorkshire again in a big expensive house and there was a council estate on the edge of the village. There was one primary for that village and we all went to the same secondary in the nearest town.

Where I live now in the same village/ area there a houses worth a few million in walking distance from a council estate. Presently most of the people in private houses privately educate their child, then there is me and the council estate who send our children to the local primaries. That creates divides. My daughter is teased mercilessly at school for being "rich" and "posh" because of where she lives. If all the children from our area went to the local school that would be less likely to happen.

"Get their parent to sit in the lessons? "

That would be assuming that these are children whose parents can control them.

Geography isn't that simple. We have friends who come from a pit village outside Doncaster. Slice it however you like, that area will always have disadvantage. The huge comp I went to now has >60% of the pupils from households with no-one in full-time employment. Adding back in the small number of people from within the catchment area who both work and send their children elsewhere won't help rebalance things to a sufficient extent. There are schools in central Birmingham which are 100% BME and where English is an additional language for >80%: I doubt there are huge enclaves of middle-class native speakers mysteriously sneaking off elsewhere.

I am sure there are some areas that cover such a large area of disdvantage that will not change. I have taught in some.

I teach in a very good school where almost the whole local community sends their children, we are chosen over grammars and independents. We educate children from very well to do historic upper middle class families. children whose parents commute into the city and children from council estates, caravan parks and everything in between.

Geography also seems very simple for my dd who does not go to school with a single child from our immediate vicinity. They are all shipped out over the border to different schools and to independent schools. As I said I cannot think of one parent , other than us, who lives in a non council house in our area who sends their child to the local primary.

One problem is perceptions of aspiration, and I had an interesting conversation with the woman who is now the head of the comp (recently salvaged from special measures) I went to.

She said that what happened in the 80s and 90s was a generation of educationalists decided to start talking about 'relevant' and 'appropriate' education. Which meant that, rather than seeing education as a way in which people might better themselves, that betterment came to be seen as somehow a bad thing as it broke up communities (I forget the phrase she used). So it became someone a bad thing for working class children to aspire to university, because, almost in a return to the 1930s, it wasn't for the likes of them. Even today you hear of schools where bright kids don't consider applying to good universities because of the limited horizons, but it has been a lot worse. Combine that with parents who don't aspire because they don't know the things to which one might aspire, and you had schools which had very low aspirations. Disadvantage was used as an excuse to provide a lower-quality, 'relevant' education.

Even today, think of subjects that are well regarded at A level. They won't be offered in working class schools. Think of A levels that are worthless for decent universities (anything ending in studies', most things ending in ology'): plenty of those, often in diploma/btec/etc form. So the reason the middle classes flee those schools is because it's simply not possible to progress from those schools to decent universities. Problems like not offering separate sciences at GCSE, not offering modern languages, faking their GCSE results with crap like "4 GCSE" equivalent IT diplomas that are in fact worthless, encouraging bright children to do rubbish like A Level Business Studies or, worst of all, A Level Law, etc, etc.

The astute middle classes gravitate to schools where you either do A2 Maths, Physics and Chemistry with AS Biology or English Literature, History and a foreign language with AS other foreign language. Because the former will get you into any science course, the latter into any humanities course.

Until a school offers the subjects that get you into a Russell Group university, the middle classes will flee to the hills. That other parents don't understand the implications (that, for example, A Level Law is worthless, ooh, Law sounds good) isn't an excuse.

But when you look at how the word "excellence" has become abused in the educational sphere... Everybody seems to think their institution can be "excellent."

Having pulled one child out of a "good" school and sent him to a satisfactory school, and pulled two children out of an "outstanding" school and sent them to a "satisfactory" school, I can honestly say Ofsted really don't get to the bottom of what is going in in the schools.

I hope the outstanding school you will be sending your DS to lives up to your expectations, Queenbuzz.

I teach in what you would I suppose term a "working class school"

For A level we offer the traditional subjects: three Sciences, English, History, Geography, Maths, RE, MFL etc. We also offer Psychology and Sociology, and Media Studies, and in addition we offer vocational courses.

For GCSE we offer the same broad range of different qualifications.

I don't think that's a bad thing. Our students are carefully advised when making their choices.

I think alot is hidden when it's inspection time, how can a few inspectors grasp what goes on in a school over a few days?

Ds's old state school was 'good'. They must have forgot about the bullying and work that consisted of children filling in photocopied sheets for the majority of lessons then.

"For A level we offer the traditional subjects: three Sciences, English, History, Geography, Maths, RE, MFL etc. We also offer Psychology and Sociology, and Media Studies, and in addition we offer vocational courses."

Which was one other point the woman was making: that you can only offer a wide range if you're big. If the school can't support the range, there's a tendency to head for the "more relevant" subjects, which are of course of less value for university admission.

"Our students are carefully advised when making their choices."

And that's the key point. Several of our local comps boost the GCSE average by saying that people should just take the subjects they're happiest doing. Which means 14 year olds drop separate sciences and mfl in favour of whatever is the subject du jour, and then get to regret it later. Assuming mfl and sciences are offered at all, of course.

If you can do a degree in X without an A Level in X, that's usually a pretty good sign that the A level is dodgy. If you can do a degree in X and they won't even count X as a serious A Level (as is sometimes the case for Law) that's even more of a danger sign.

This is worth looking at Trinity may be being explicit, but I know admission tutors at a couple of redbricks socially and de facto they are making similar judgements.

tokyonambu, I've read all your posts and found them really interesting.
What do you see as the way forward?

(that may sound like I'm being sarcastic and spoiling for a fight. I'm not!!)

Am asking as someone who believes wholeheartedly in comprehensive education but, as a teacher, sees it failing many.
I can't see that grammar schools are the way forward, I think they fail the majority and leave people on 'the scrapheap' at an early age.

My dad was someone from an incredibly deprived background who, in the 1940s and 50s was 'scholarshipped' into public school and Cambridge. He didn't really know what was happening, so there was no hint of 'pushy parenting' that got him there. That's just what happened if you were 'bright'.

And yet, despite all the advantages that gave him, he is also completely opposed to grammar schools.

I just don't know what the answer is. We are definitely failing kids when the most important thing for your education is where you live, or whether your parents can afford to send you to private school. I'm just lost as to how we solve it all....

Every child will do science at KS4. MFL no.