AIBU to think the English school system is bonkers and needs a complete overhaul?

[coffeeisnectar]

Just that really.

I used to live in Scotland which has a fabulous system where every child is offered a place in the closest school. You can apply to a different school but you will only be offered a place if you have a valid reason and they have places after all catchment children have been admitted.

You don't need to apply for a school, you just get a letter saying your child has a place and that's it. As a consequence 90% of kids can walk to school, the kids walk with local kids and there are no parents stressing because they have to ferry their kids 6 miles each day.

Surely this would be a much better system! What am I missing? Why isn't this in place?

arethereany They certainly do it in France and Spain which while not as densely populated as the South East of the UK overall have large densely populated cities.

dinosaurs some of those things could easily be done in the UK, eg build more schools.

The big difference in France is that no state school can opt out of nationally-agreed admissions criteria - you can't prioritise admission based on religion for eg (not even in the private sector) which seems to be one of the big issues for my friends in the UK - they are locked out of their local school because they are not practising Christians.

In my state we have class size limits. When schools reach capacity, they build an addition to the school or build a new school and hire more teachers. School districts do long-range planning based on demographic models to try to anticipate where needs will be. We have just had a brand new middle school and new high school built in our district. We are in a fast growing area that also has one of the best school districts in the state so it is very popular. But we also still have land to expand and build on, so that makes a difference.

I think that a system where every child could be guaranteed a place in their closest school is great in theory.

But in practice, not all schools have capacity to accept all children into the closest school. DS1, and a number of other children living nearer to the school than us, didn't get into our closest school as it was oversubscribed. Judging by recent stuff in news media about baby booms and rising numbers of schoolchildren, there seem to be plenty of places in England where there's more children than there are local school places.
Unless schools are going to be forced to create extra classes for such children, a system like that won't work.

I imagine if you did have a rule whereby everyone could go to their local school, you would have to forgo any rules on class sizes being kept to a reasonable size. I think that would cause more uproar.

I'd love the English education system to be overhauled by experts in education, teachers and child development specialists, with politicians kept well at bay.

Ditto the NHS with doctors and nurses leading the way.

Actually, a lot of the over stretching of primary schools was known about years ago, I seem to remember reports in about 2010 saying that we would need more schools etc.

Problem is that the free schools policy designed to solve this issue has failed dramatically. Many free schools have opened up in areas where there are school places available, and have diverted funding from other areas that this money could have been spent on. Westminster for example has a spangly new 6th form sponsored by the eponymous local public school and run buy Harris academies. This had £45 million pounds spent on it at a time when budgets for 6th from colleges are being slashed, the other 93 6th form colleges in London had a total budget of £60 million in the same year.

The free schools thing has failed miserably, and sucks money away from where it is really needed.

Lots more houses mean lots more people and therefore children. But no schools are getting bigger (some through choice and some just can't) and no new schools.

This is shocking to me. Where I live, part of the planning permission process is that developers have to provide information about impact on schools. And in some cases, they will agree to provide land and money to help expand/build schools if the impact is great.

Misti - they could be, it's just haven't historically and there's a boom with no 'slack' in the system, and no political will to build more schools. There is a point where parents start resisiting puting on yet another class, I think anything above 3 form entry (so 90) is just too big at primary school. We've had a huge housing development built in our town that is just pretty much finished and the first families are moving in, but there's been no additional school built.

With faith schools, the problem is the churches usually own the buildings/land, there has been times in the past when the idea of stopping faith entry to state schools has been considered, but as the state doesn't own the schools, the churches could just take them private (reducing further the capcity for state places), or just close them all together. I believe at the start of the Blair government, they looked at buying the schools off the churches to remove the faith entry criteria, and dismissed it as far too expensive.

seneca you are telling me! It's outrageous. Across the LA there are enought places. But this leave kids, who live a mile from a school, having to travel 15 miles to a different school. Because a new estate has gone up opposite and has 300 houses on it.

Another 300 houses are going up this year, no plans to extend the schools or build more.

Dd is the furthest pupil attending her school in this year 7. We got in on appeal. Before that they only manged to give places to children up to 0.4 miles away.

coffeeisnectar

"However I wonder why schools are failing. Is it that the standards set by ofsted are so high they are doomed to failure to force schools into academy status?"

When I started teaching I went through 4 ofsted visits (some whole school, some departmental and one census) all had different criteria for success.

The current gove changes won't be fully integrated in to the system till all areas have gone through an exam, some specifications are still not ready and are not going to be ready for teaching until 2017 (first exam 2019).

The government are already looking at putting new changes in place, this is before the existing known changes are fully implemented.

As an addendum to this the government are in the middle of changing the SEN(D) areas of education, funding, spending and TA support.

Available money is being reduced for all education areas.

And finally the government wants to make all schools academies which are sold off cheap to the chains and have no real accountability, a failing academy is just moved to another chain.

your very lucky arnt you. Schools closest to every family good schools, no under achieving ones, no bun fight to get into the closest ones, you have obv missed all the programs about families attending the closest school all of a sudden having to travel away for miles due to over subscribing.
Lucky old scots!

As a addition to my previous post

The continual changing of the moderating system for exams.

YANBU

Introduce choice into any system, and you are introducing a market.

Only parents who have the ability to negotiate the system, who understand what is on offer and how to access it, people with money, or those who have children who are particularly bright or talented benefit from there being a market. The rest get what's left over.

It makes me weep how year after year, the least bright children from the poorest and least educated families in my dc's school, end up with the school places nobody else wants - at those establishments where disadvantaged children are already over represented. And that takes many of these schools into a downward spiral.

The government has got to address this failing for the sake of fairness. They need to get rid of all forms of selection - by postcode, by 11+, by faith.

All schools should be good enough for all children and we have to stop creating systems which reinforce social apartheid.

Glasgow is densely packed for Scotland, but rather pleasantly empty compared to parts of southern England.

When did you live in the East End? From about the 1990s to the mid Noughties the population there just fell and fell (as evidenced by the closure and amalgamation of most of the schools). However, the trend has now reversed and the schools are beginning to burst. In the next 10 or so years Glasgow City Council are going to have to buck up and do something because if the numbers continue to rocket, we're going to have to either start going to school in shifts, classes of 40 or building at top speed.

Of course, falling teacher numbers isn't helping either...

I probably ought to know this and I could google, but how are schools funded in England? In the US, for the most part, schools are funded largely through ad valorem taxes on real estate so, for example, in my district, each new house represents new dollars going to schools.

I echo everything Nicole said.

The market though, is an illusion. Yes children whose parents know how to game the system can have some advantage, but there really is no secret trick for guarenteed access to your school of choice.

The most local school must be on your list because they are most likely to take you, but in some years they may not be able tobecause of all sorts of reasons, so even moving to a good area ( and higher house prices) isn't a get out of jail free card.

Education is a massive political football, and it is always tinkered with, but apart from a period in the last Labour administration really didn't get enough funding.

The schools for the future project was cancelled almost as soon as the coalition entered office meaning that not enough schools have been built, yet money can be found for Toby Young and his ilk to build free schools in undersubscribed areas.

We are here in NJ and it is a requirement of our township to provide a school place for our DC. If you don't like the school you move. Within town you have some private schools and a couple of charter schools. The charter schools are funded by the township so are free to use but the private schools are fee based receiving zero assistance from the township.

In most towns every house is zoned for a school within the district so you know when you live in a house exactly what school your child will go to that year. The towns can rezone but tend to just transfer kids into schools which have an open spot. If the commute door to door is more than one mile the town is responsible for providing transport for that child.

I like the system here because you know what you are signing up for. Our school district has horrible results but its a function of the demographics not the teaching. As the town itself changes so too will the ranking of the schools. The private schools here are not good enough to warrant the fees they charge and their class sizes are bigger than in the public school!

In our township we will mark down our choices and then apply for the charter schools (we don't expect to get a spot but figure we should give it a go). They have a clear system for determining who gets placed in which school first. I love how the system they have here takes the stress out of it. You know your DC are going to get a local spot and it will be in town. Our town is tiny so a long commute is never going to happen! Right now DD is attending school 2 blocks from our house and DS attends daycare in a school one block from our house. We always walk to school.

I left Glasgow in 2012. My oldest was 13 and youngest was 6. One school had amalgamated with the nursery and secondary school so pupils went there from aged 3 to 18. My youngest was at a different primary school which hadn't been doing great when dd 1 started but they got a new ht and she turned the school around, winning awards and it was a sad day when we left. I used to volunteer with the p1 classes and now I do the same thing at a primary school here.

The east end of Glasgow is predominantly tenements hence the dense population and maybe further out population was in decline but where I lived it was thriving.

I just googled populations per square km and the highest I could find was Islington...14,500 people per square km

Here in NZ every child automatically gets a place at the school they are zoned for. So if you are in zone for a school, they have to accept you. You can also apply to an out of zone school if they have places, some don't so they won't accept out of zone applications, some do and have a ballot for places. We actually have smaller class sizes than the UK, normally between 17-20 for a new entrants class, up to 30 for year 6. Children start on their 5th birthday and classes open as needed, a new one opening when the last one is full, so with this and new additions to the other years a school might start the year with, say, 450 pupils but finish the year with around 550. Schools are allocated a minimum amount of teachers for the expected roll. They like people in zone to register their child around 3 to help with planning of classes.

If areas get over populated, which has happened here due to people moving out of the city due to some areas now being unhabitable due to earthquakes, and into the towns surrounding, they build more schools. Areas are less densely populated here in general though.

We don't seem to have the massive difference in schools here though as there is in the UK, at least not at primary level. It does cause some problems at secondary though, particularly in Auckland.

tiggytape I simply don't get this argument. Across London as a whole, there must be approximately enough school places (yes I know some kids don't get allocated a place, but they are a tiny minority). So the issue isn't school places, but an insane admissions procedure.

I concede that in London you might have to draw catchments to include several schools, due to population density, and to build some flexibility into the system. You would have to remove sibling priority for parents no longer in catchment.

The faith schools issue mentioned above is a non-issue too. Simply make it illegal for schools receiving state-funding to discriminate on grounds of religion.

Misti the OP is talking about children going to their closest (or local) school, not just any school across a town or city as a whole. There may be enough school places for every child to get one somewhere in a city, but I think the point is, even if you remove religion from the equation, that these school places aren't necessarily near to where people live.

Near us, for example, there's a small town with 5 or 6 primary schools. They were originally spread fairly evenly throughout the town. But in the last 10 years or so, new house building has been concentrated at one end of the town, with no new school built. The school's nearest the new housing are oversubscribed because of children from the new housing applying to their nearest school. There's enough places in the town overall, but it's not possible for all the children to go to their closest school. Some of them have to travel several schools away from home because there's not space any closer.

misti that's the point. There are enough places in most LAs however it leave some children traveling (in this area) upto 15 miles for school. So children are going to school in their area but not to their local one., which is what the OP is talking about.

That's the issue here. The best school is also near a motorway with easy access to 2 cities, close to a good hospital etc. Its a sort after area and house prices are going through the roof. It also has a really good primary close by. Houses are being built in their hundreds meaning more and more children aren't getting a place and having to travel further out. There is no school near by this one. As I said, the pupil who lived furthest away that got in on general admission was only 0.4 miles away. Anyone over that had to travel miles to the other schools.