To wonder if there are supporters of grammar schools who didn't go to grammar schools themselves

[WildebeestH]

Just that really. The only friends I have who support grammar schools went to grammar schools themselves. I'm intrigued to know if there are many people who support them having not been to a grammar (or other selective) school and if so why?

can't to be fair I was thinking of green complaining that she couldn't buy a house next to a top school in London. Very few people can!

Out of interest, what's the progress 8 for your honeypot school? So often parents' heads are turned by raw results.

Green, but you have already said (here and elsewhere) that there are some comps that you would have been prepared to use - just not your local one. So it is not that ciomps don't work as a system, just that not all are as good as the best - so why is it that you don;'t want to improve all comps so they are as good as the ones you would have been prepared to use?

(The other reason you might not want to use a comp is because it contains 'peope not like you' - I'm afraid that I can't do anything about that, though as PP said, IME my comp-attending children have like-minded, able friends)

I think you do want your children to have friends there. So you possibly want to choose a school where the most likelyhood of finding friends there - so lots of people like us would be a draw I imagine.

Head, but that's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, isn't it? Otherwise you end up with the My children must go to the grammar because there aren't any children like them at the secondary modern', which isn't really an argument for creating more grammars!

To be fair, noble, it's a good school and I understand why it's a honeypot. However I would rather people worked on fair admissions policies, and applying learning from the honeypot schools in other schools, rather than saying that there must be grammars because we can't all afford to live in the small honeypot area....

Why would I not want to send my Dec to a comp because it didn't contain people like me? What exactly is that supposed to mean? What a crap spiteful remark.

Sorry, Green, that wasn't personal. I have encountered it as a reason why some people choose for their children to attend grammars, and I was not certain whether it applied in your case.

However, the other point - that as you would have been prepared to attend certain comprehensives, it is not the system that you object to, just the specific schools you have available - still stands.

Absolutely. Would I rather my children attended a school that is 'perfect', but which disadvantages others, or would I rather that they spend their adult life in a world where everyone, including them, has been to a decent, but not perfect, school?
Absolutely. You've summed my views up.

think you are looking at it from a teacher perspective rather than a parent maisy
Most parents are looking for a school for their child not to even out the countries ills!
In terms of sitting filling in your school choice forms, I get the choices because there's lots of improvements needed in some schools. My parents moved house part way through secondary. It was a big move and trying to get me into a school that was better than the failing one I was in formed part of their decisions.

In terms of making a decision about education policy moving forward, then a push for something divisive that shafts some children so the middle classes can continue to do alright isn't something I agree with.

By being ok with free school and grammars means a situation like near me where money goes to a free school that is half empty, they can offer horse riding etc despite there being surplus spaces in great schools. Meanwhile, almost every other school in the area (including excellent schools) is getting funding slashed. That free school was not for the benefit of all children. It was in response to a middle class pressure group who were annoyed some children from the town were going 10 mins by bus because there's wasn't a SECOND secondary school.

And there are schools in the county making people redundant. I simply can't sign up to free schools and grammars being for all.

Also there's another school in another town that was set up as a free school, failed spectacularly within 2 years.

If my memory serves me right, some of the same board have been in talks with the DfE to run a cut price independent grammar school with reduced fees and no selection (no idea how that works).

There's no convincing me that these decisions are made in the interests of local children.

all these awful schools that kids couldn't possibly attend (according to some on MN) and tutoring, appeals etc are so far removed from what a lot of people experience.

And here we go again. 22% of secondary schools, according to Ofsted, are less than 'good'. Then there is the question of whether Ofsted's judgment is reliable or not. As Noble pointed out a couple months ago, Ofsted ratings really aren't the be all and end all of how good a school is.

We also know that Ofsted relies heavily on GCSE data, and that we have no idea how much of that data is corrupt, due to schools cheating on controlled assessments (next year's results should be interesting for some schools in that respect).

And yet somehow it's 'strange' that a handful of the recorded 7.5 million users of Mumsnet should have children who attend schools that aren't good?

"So i like it in theory (fair, not influenced by purchasing power) but I worry about the transport / traffic implications?"

Yes, I agree. It needs working on. But a lot of children travel to secondary school already- so it is doable.

Horse riding? Blooming heck. my idea of choice is rather more limited.

They judge by much more than that. Local schools were pulled down because of data within year groups despite feedback being teaching was outstanding.

And I'm not doubting that some schools aren't judged good (remember that grade 3 was satisfactory but it got rebranded). I don't need you to quote % at me.

What I do doubt is that all these schools are in areas where people routinely have money for tutoring and private school fees (which is the classic mumsnet take).

Headofthehive55
Yes horse riding. And no homework because the school has all the teachers work a longer day and they have frees build into the day.
In other words, teachers work longer week for the same salary so that middle class parents can have their wrap around care paid for.

It's being given enough money as if it's full but only has half the year groups in.

And people wonder why I get annoyed that local comps get told there's no money for site repairs and teaching supplies.

Now I'm thinking Henry ford had an argument when he said you can have any colour as long as it's black!
I'm rather glad I don't have to give school admissions any thought whatsoever! (Even if our school is a bit poor at times)

Horse riding. wanders off to lie down....

cantkeepawayforever

If it were just they way that you describe it it would be shoddy enough. As it doesn't take into account any circumstances that influence how a pupil performs.

but what also happens is that a range of probabilities are generated.
55% probability of gaining a "C" grade (or whatever)
If the pupil has a (lets say) 40% probability of gaining a they are pushed from the fft b band to the fft d band.

Pupils are expected to do better than the average to get a neutral score.

Boney

This explains it:

Official document

It's not the same as FFT predictions, which i think you have it confused with, which schools use to generate 'target' or 'predicted' grades. it is a calculation made after the exams are taken.

The thing to note is that it is a school-level thing. As the document says, it is not meant to be used at a pupil level, but at an aggregated level.

Yes, some pupils in all schools will under perform (either at the baseline SATs point or at GCSE). However, unless the school is very tiny - in which case the confidence interval will be very large - that sibngle pupil will be statistially insignificant when comparing school with school, especially as pupils experiencing e.g. tragedy at the time of their GCSEs will be randomly distributed across all schools, and so will not influence the comparisons.

Look at the DfE performance tables entries for each school to see how they are used to compare schools against the national picture.

cantkeepawayforever

And that isn't taking in to consideration that the new gcses will be marked on a bell curve with only a set percentage gaining each grade.

So if 6% of the countries pupils are expected to get a 9 (or whatever) only 3% (not sure of the actual figures) can only achieve the grade meaning that a pupil can be marked down even though the pupil has done well.

So progress 8 becomes a nonsense

Boney, have you read the document?

I do think you have it confused with FFT predictions.

FFT uses SATs + background information to generate predicted GCSE grades, whuich the school can then use to set high, medium or low targets.

Progress8 is used by the government after GCSEs are taken to assess the progress children make from their starting points in secondary.

So wrt to 1-9 GCSEs - if school A gets 6% of its pupils who started at Exceeding Expectations across the board to level 9, whereas School B gets 2% of pupils from this starting point to that level, and the same on down the numbers, School A will have a higher Progress8 score. the limied number of available Level 9s doesn't matter -0 what matters for Progress 8 is progress from the same starting point in different schools.

I think, by the way, that the real issue wuith progerss8 is going to be the new SATs grading, because it is so coarse-grained compared with old sublevels. 'Expected' is a very wide band, so they may end up using normalised scores (e.g. 103) to generate the starting point points value from wich to compare.

Spelling, sorry: which

can't have a read of this: teacherhead.com/2017/02/24/more-issues-with-progress-8/

Outliers can distort the progress 8 score, disproportionately so, and Ofsted issued guidance in March that this should be taken into account. I think they're considering ditching a school's bottom and top end results and calculating on the middle to make it more representative of the school.

I agree that FFT predictions (though not Progress8 analysis) are currently useless for the 1-9 GCSEs.

There was a long thread a while back about whether schools could accurately predict 9s / give 9s for internal pieces of work given that no exams in which 9s have been awarded have yet been marked, let alone the limited %. I should imagine FFT predictions, and the internal targets schools set students based on them, will settle down again in a couple of years once it has all bedded in.

Candidates with 'new' Year 6 SATs are currently in Y7, so it will be 4 years before that quirk goes through the system as well.

Thanks, noble. I agree that progress8 has issues - though at least it is better than raw results!