Michaela School and behaviour - AIBU

[herculepoirot2]

AIBU to think that you might read this behaviour policy and think it is authoritarian and unnecessary, but to also think that, with results four times better than the national average, these people might have a point about the benefits to young people of being expected to work hard and behave well?

mcsbrent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Behaviour-Policy-11.02.19.pdf

Namenic in maths 30% of kids will not get a 4, and that’s decided before they even sit the exam.

I’ve never claimed that teachers in London schools teach better. One of the things that I think massively helps is the fact that parents in London are much more supportive of strict discipline in schools. My school is made up mostly of BME students with parents who value discipline and have high expectations for their children. I’m sure Michaela is similar.
That doesn’t mean that strict behaviour policies can’t work outside of London though. It will be interesting to see how some of these very strict schools outside of London fare when their results start coming in but my gut instinct tells me that they will do very well.

I do tend to accept that strong discipline works and would love to see more of this in my school. But my school is huge, way larger than average. Our student come at age 13, too. It is underfunded and it is not brand new.

But it does have a genuinely broad and balanced curriculum. My issues with Michaela are group think, academic elitism, its working against rather than with other schools, and a narrow curriculum , not its discipline. I'd like to think you could have a broad, challenging and inclusive curriculum whilst maintaining high standards of behaviour.And I am sure those school exist but ,a s they are not free schools , run by someone who ahs spoken at a Tory conference, Boris Johnson and Nick Gibb don't tweet about them. Sabine, it sounds like Boris should be tweeting about yours, but am guessing its not a free school!

Haha, ours is not a free school... worse than that, we’re not even an academy. One of those pesky “maintained” schools that were all the rage back in the day.
Nick Gibb was actually meant to come visit us. The visit got cancelled at the last minute and he went to an academy in Haringey instead.

My school is made up mostly of BME students with parents who value discipline and have high expectations for their children.

But you dismissed ‘the children are from immigrant families’ as criticism from people who just don’t want to accept that your school is doing a better job than theirs.

Statistically it definitely helps. We have other things that work in our favour too, like being a girls’ school. I’m not a better teacher than teachers that I know in neighbouring schools with less good results.
If I was spending 20 mins of every lesson dealing with poor behaviour, waiting for quiet and trying to manage kids that SLT were unable to deal with then my results would be significantly worse.
All teachers deserve to be able to teach in an environment where behaviour is good and all children should be taught in such an environment.
Of course that is easier to achieve in Eton than in my school and easier in my school than in a boys’ school in a mainly white, working class seaside town.
That doesn’t in my view change the fact that strong discipline is the most important difference, regardless of whether it’s easier to achieve in some settings than others. You can be the most skilled teacher in the world but if the kids are pissing about then they aren’t going to benefit from it.

@noblegiraffe and @Piggywaspushed - does seem crazy that a lot of higher/further education and jobs demand 4 in gcse as a pre-requisite. Given that most people will need jobs and most jobs don’t require gcse material and 40% will always get below 4... utterly bizarre.

Given that most people will need jobs and most jobs don’t require gcse material and 40% will always get below 4... utterly bizarre.

It's because colleges and employers are using it as a proxy for a reasonable level of intelligence/ability to work hard. Of course, it's not always accurate, but that would be true for most broad measures.

Most people may need jobs, but with the new global economy, there are far fewer low level jobs than there used to be. It's a problem.

Just an aside but I found it odd that despite the Michaela website saying they teach MFLs, have an MFL department and have a brilliant and unusual way of teaching those languages they actually only offer French .

And no GCSE Geography either.

Weird.

You can’t offer loads of choice in a tiny school though. What is it, 600 kids when full?

A rather narrow curriculum then. Perhaps that helps with the exam results. Their 6th form opens this September so I wonder how the lack of key subjects will affect recruitment, mind you the kids already at the school and their parents must have already accepted this narrower than average offering in exchange for results.

Yes, 600 excluding sixth form.

I don't really see the extent and reach of the curriculum as "narrow", to be honest. A quote from their book:

How, then, are we to decide which knowledge to teach? At Michaela, we decide based on challenge and coherence. We prioritise the core academic and artistic subjects that help pupils understand the world and live fulfilling lives: Maths, English, Science, History, Geography, Religion, French, Art and Music. The subject knowledge we choose to teach our pupils to master is the most vital and the most challenging content. The pupils we teach often arrive at school far behind, unable to read fluently or multiply. Many have a vocabulary of fewer than 6,000 words, while wealthier pupils often have one of over 12,000 words. The opportunity cost of teaching anything other than the most challenging subject content is high. Only the most challenging topics with the most stretching vocabulary, combined with high support so all pupils understand and use it accurately, will allow them to compete academically with the 96% of private school pupils who reach university. We dedicate extended teaching time for the mastery of grammar, spelling and vocabulary; these are the hidden bodies of knowledge that make for accurate writing. Our pupils already have vivid memories of reading some of the most complex and beautiful texts ever written: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Orwell’s 1984, Malcolm X’s autobiography, Maya Angelou’s autobiography, Duffy’s The World’s Wife and Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom, to name just a handful of examples. Our aim is to help pupils remember everything they are learning, and master the most important content.

To this end, subject content knowledge is best organised into the most memorable schemata. So we organise History and English Literature chronologically. We start in year 7 with classical antiquity: in History we study Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Roman Britain; in Religion, we study polytheism, The Old and New Testament, Judaism and Christianity; in English, we study Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Antigone, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Euripides’ Medea, Cicero’s rhetoric, Seneca’s stoicism and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; in Art, we study Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, sculpture and architecture. Chronological, cumulative schemata help pupils remember subject knowledge in the long term, not for ten weeks or ten months, but for ten years and beyond. ... At Michaela, our pupils remember year 7 as the year they learnt about Classical Civilisation. Across subjects, they are making exciting connections. Sacrifice, for instance, recurs in the stories of Abraham and Isaac in religion, with Agamemnon and Iphigenia, and Minos and Theseus in Greek mythology. Across English and Science, the planet Mercury is named after the Greco-Roman messenger god, as it is the fastest-moving planet that takes 88 days to orbit the sun. A dovetailed knowledge curriculum allows pupils to make limitless fascinating connections for themselves, and understand the ideas of democracy, dictatorship, tragedy, monotheism, sculpture, geometry and algebra from their early origins. In short, we select challenging, sequenced, coherent schemata within and across subjects, so that our pupils remember what they’ve learned for years to come.

And no, they don't teach geography GCSE, but geography is taught in Years 7-9 as part of History.

It’s not limited, is it?

Yes, I think very few people here have any idea how broad and ambitious the year 7-9 curiculum is. It's something that, IMO, will have had a big impact on their humanities GCSE results.

It’s not limited, is it

The new economy requires thinkers, creativity - knowledge is not very useful in a world where AI is taking over many jobs.

Geography is taught as part of history...by Geographers?

I'd guess recruitment problems may be the underlying issue there. Geography is one subject with a high training bursary.

And we can read what they say and it all sounds high brow and marvellous. But they really do not prioritise geography or the arts.

Yes, I think very few people here have any idea how broad and ambitious the year 7-9 curiculum is

It sounds like an extended version of primary school topic work, to be honest.

I’m slightly amused that the best they could do for science was ‘Mercury is the fastest planet’.

It reminds me of the time we had to amend our maths SOW to show how we promote British values.

The new economy requires thinkers, creativity - knowledge is not very useful in a world where AI is taking over many jobs.

Knowledge will always be useful, but whether it is useful or not, it is valuable.

Knowledge will always be useful, but whether it is useful or not, it is valuable

And so is creativity......

I do like the idea of connecting subjects. So often in schools we don't realise that what we teach complements, supplements, or occasionally overly replicates another subject. However, that is far easier in a small school, set up from scratch with a very intelligent and involved leader.

Flude If you are dyslexic then a school that emphasises rote learning is the last sort of school that would have benefited you. It is very common for people with Specific Learning Difficulties to have been failed by traditional pedagogy because of their memory and processing issues, and the difficulty of showing what they are capable of in timed exams but then go on to achieve increasingly well in A levels and when ideas, and holistic thinking become more important to success. I could name you any number of prominent academics and scientists who did not do as well at school as they went on to achieve. I say that as a dyslexic who went to an old fashioned girls' grammar school where the educational approach was very similar to that at Michaela, I have 4 O levels, 2 at grade 3, 1at grade 4 and 1 at grade 5, BBD at A level, a 2.1 in History from a Russell Group uni in the top ten for the subject (one of only 2 2.1s in my year), a distinction in my MBA from a top Business School and a merit in a Masters in Area Studies.

As a dyslexic and one who has raised two dyslexic daughters with a high degree of personal intervention and support to enable them to achieve their potential even in schools that were supportive and had good SN provision this document fills me with horror. mcsbrent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SEN-Information-Document.pdf It has been nowhere near an Educational Psychologist and is old fashioned and full of prejudice, like current DofE and OFQUAL it betrays the prejudice that learning difficulties equal low ability. Modern pedagogy would not set targets for knowledge acquisition. It acknowledges that non memory based teaching methods that work best for pupils with Learning Difficulties actually work for all pupils and the best teaching uses a variety of approaches. Does Westminster School apply these approaches for its pupils with learning Difficulties? (10% - because Learning Difficulties affect 10% of the population at all ability levels and they select on ability not attainment). No they pride themselves on valuing those with Learning Difficulties as "Westminster School aims for a whole-School approach where ‘high quality teaching, differentiated
for individual pupils, is the first step in responding to pupils who have or may have SEN.
“Making higher quality teaching normally available to the whole class is likely to mean that fewer
pupils will require such support.” www.westminster.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Special-Educational-Needs-Policy-June-2018.pdf They don't shove them all in the bottom stream and set them knowledge acquisition targets, ugh!

Someone on here pointed out that despite giving details about how great their maths, MFL and RE results were, no mention was made of their history results. Good but not great, then.