"I could never send my dcs to grammar school....

[winkywinkola]

...because I think it's unfair on all those children who can't get in because they couldn't afford tutoring for 11+. But I will send them to prep and boarding school."

I was a bit perplexed to hear this from a mum at the school gate. Aibu?

"Interesting Bertrand you don't give the fsm% for Outstanding comps across the country."

I didn't notice I'd been asked. I don't know the answer. It's very easy to find out the % for any given school., though.

Sorry, we keep cross posting. Well what you'd need to do - and it might be a useful exercise - is to find out the data for all superselectives and then find out the stats for DC on FSM achieving good L5s in the broad area each superselective serves. Of course if Confucious is correct about L6s (which she's not) then the numbers would look even better! (Not that they're ok, because more FSM DC should be achieving good L5s).

So it's oversubscribed,but takes mostly local children has no catchment, but level 5 is the benchmark for entry.Curiouser and curiouser.

Locally, data on pupil premium in selective and non-selective schools:

The grammars are not evenly distributed geographically, which means that some areas / towns are more affected by their presence than others.

Grammars (listed in order of their historic difficulty to get into)
1.6%
3.5%
3.3%
5.8%
6.6%

Other schools serving exactly the same geographical area as the grammars (range from being almost-comps to definitely SMs, depending on geography)
44.4%
8.2%
15.7%
45.1%
33%
55.1%
41.1%
22.5%

The ranking of the Ofsted ratings, btw, exactly match the % PP.

All those with less than 10% PP children are 'Outstanding'.

All those with less than 50% are 'Good' (which is pretty good going for the 40+% schools, as that's better than the national picture)

The school with >50% PP children requires Improvement.

"Interesting Bertrand you don't give the fsm% for Outstanding comps across the country."

Seems that, not only are you expected to be psychic, but to know everything as well.

I would be interested in what the lowest rate of FSM they can find is from anyone citing 'selection by postcode'.

Bertrand does not like 'outstanding' comprehensives, because clearly she believes every school should be the same ! Hence there would be no outstanding just all the bloody same...

The other reason Bertrand will not quote outstanding schools FSM rates are (with the exception of London ) always seem to below 10-15% which does her argument no favors.

The belief that schools should effectively draw lots for pupils is hugely unfair on parents and pupils by denying any choice. The other problem with it which the 'all size fits all ' crowd seize to argue against grammar schools is that it breaks up schools friends from Primary Schools.

They can't have both ways, either they hate any system that separates children in to different secondary schools or they don't...

One size fits all..

Sandy,

As there is a strong statistical link between %PP and Ofsted rating, 'having FSM rates below around 10%' makes it very likely indeed that the school, of any type, will be graded Outstanding. The two are not independent variables, as the Ofsted grading process does not sufficiently control for variations in intake when considering the performance of a school.

As I said above, the most direct way to address this is at admissions level - devise an admissions system that, as far as possible, equalises intake of PP children between all schools.

Cecily, the 8.2% in my list above is distressingly low for a comprehensive. Very leafy postcodes.

The GS my daughter is going to is outstanding and has 12% kids on FSM. I'm presuming this is quite high? Which can only be a good thing.

So the mean %PP in the area described by my data above is around 21-22% (it is skewed by the extended effective catchment areas of the grammars, so the likely PP figure in the actual communities is probably 24-25%)

If all schools had to admit that % of PP children (whether by lottery, or by giving priority to PP children who apply to them until that mean figure is reached - but that does disadvantage those with the least pro-active parents) then we would get a much better idea of how good the SCHOOLS are at education, rather than how good their intakes are.

Mike, it depends on the %FSM in the general community.

12% is higher than grammars in some other communities - but say in my area the overall mean % PP is c. 24%, whereas in yours it is c. 60%, then with 12%, while this is at the absolute level 'better' than the 1.6-6.6% local to me, the gap between this school and the general community it is located in is still huge IYSWIM?

Still higher than any of your grammars though, teacher. And while you might expect a popular school in an affluent catchment to reflect that catchment, a grammar school would be taking from a much wider area.

Bertrand it's not that curious. Our school is oversubscribed in that three to four DC compete for every place. The figure hasn't changed for years, nor has the cut off mark for being offered a place. A good L5 is not merely what's advised as the indicator of likely success, it is actually what the Dc coming in achieve, in the main. And if you were to draw a circle around the school on a map covering the entire area from which pupils are drawn, you'd see a heavy concentration in the areas close to the school. I don't see what's odd.

I think the real question about grammar school intake should be not FSM, but how many children they take in from families where neither parent has continued in school past 16.

There are plenty of children in grammar schools who are only disadvantaged in respect to one thing: family income, but who have educated and hugely supportive and proactive parents. If it's found that pretty much an entire large demographic is missing from these schools intake (as I suspect it would be) then I think we have to question whether they're a tool for social and educational mobility.

Cecily, absolutely. 12% is definitely better than 1.6%.

On the children coming in - certainly here, parents have to pay the cost of transport, which means that children travelling longer distances are likely to be more, rather than less, well-off than those who come from the local area.

mimi, absolutely. As maternal education is - worldwide - the best statistical marker for educational success, that would indeed by a very good way to interrogate the data ... it just isn't available at present!

Yes, I SWYM teacher I don't know the % of all kids on FSM in the county/catchment but it is pretty high at my DDs primary (just finishing year 6) and my DSs school has quite a high % of FSM also. I know that for those that came close but didn't pass the GS selection does give priority to kids in care then FSM then siblings etc.

Cecily, sorry, didn't address the full point that you were making.

I would expect the calculation of 'mean %PP' to be made at a quite large geographical scale - my 24% covers a very significant population (about a quarter of a million).

The non-grammar schools currently reflect their immediate postcodes very well, which is why the postcode lottery is a chicken and egg thing. You would have to average it over a much larger scale than that.

Mini. In answering your question 'that the marker for grammar school admissions should be the number of children accepted from parents who left education at 16'. I commented up thread that four of my school friends who left education with me at 16 got all of their children in to grammar school.

This also applies to me given that i left school at 16 with limited formal qualifications (undiagnosed ASD) and prior to under taking a degree with the OU 6 years ago , i had no post compulsory education.

I really don't think the fsm figures are enough. In addition to the parents education, we also need to look at low income homes. There is a huge difference between just being over fsm cut off, and coming from a home with an income of 50,80, 100k plus.

I think it would also be interesting to see data on the outcomes of l6 children, in both fully comprehensive and selective areas. I can't imagine the l6 dc at good comps or grammars have the same outcomes as l6 dc at schools with high fsm and smaller numbers leaving with 5 gcses.

teacher as a primary teacher - I'm guessing a senior one - who will know very well what the outcomes for PP DC have been at your school in recent years, could you tell me how the PP DC have fared in terms of SATS? Do you see any difference in achievement between PP DC and the remainder of their cohort or do you detect no material difference? Perhaps this depends on the type of primary, its location etc, but assuming you get a truly mixed intake?

Lurked I've just been looking for that kind of data. There's not a lot, or I'm not Googling right.

I've found a Sutton Trust report that seems to report that FSM DC are half as likely to get the 5 good GCSEs as non-FSM, and a Guardian article discussing the fact that the gap remains consistent whether you look at 'Outstanding' schools or those rated as good, satisfactory or ineffective. So it looks like they perform poorly compared to their peers be it at a Grammar, Outstanding Comp, Secondary Mod, failing inner city comp or whatever. There have been efforts to close this gap for years with little success. This would seem to support a previous poster's observation, 2stripedsocks I think, that even in outstanding comps the FSM DC are languishing in the bottom sets not up there with those that would have been 'Grammar material' if they had been in a selective area.

Goodbye, for reasons of postcode, my primary is not sufficiently socially mixed, and not large enough as a dataset, for the PP data to be meaningful or statistically valid.