To think at a private school, it’s not the teachers that are better...

[Caitlin555]

....it’s just you are less likely to get the bad behaviour, and more likely to have smaller class sizes?

It drives me mad that there’s this perception that the teachers at private schools are so much better than at state. They are not. In fact, you don’t even need a teaching qualification to teach at a private school.

It is obviously easier to get good results and control a class when you’ve got a smaller class of (probably) better behaved, more affluent kids whose parents want them to be there and to not have the social problems that some schools contend with.

I wish parents would just be honest about why they are sending their kids to x private school - it might be the small class sizes, it might be the facilities, it might be that it is super selective - but don’t make it about the teachers as that’s an insult to those amazing teachers who work hard every day to make a difference at state schools.

And no, I’m not a teacher.

Private schools have a more ambitious ethos and will actively push pupils towards competitive degrees if they are able e.g. medicine oxbridge. Good for the pupils and good for school marketing

Private schools allow competition I.e. by ranking pupils in subject group which I dont think happens in state.

I was a governor in an inner city school and there was an 'everybody is a winner' attitude with praise given to children for relatively minor achievements. Teachers pressured to get D grades into Cs and not concentrate on high attainers.

Mine are at private schools. I’ve never once heard a parents say the teachers are better. Never. I don’t know where you’ve heard that.

It’s all about class sizes, behaviour and freedom from national curriculum.

I clicked YABU for that reason. Although yanbu in the gist of your post.

My dds state primary was dire during lockdown with a few exceptions the staff all simply vanished. Dd1 Secondary was great.

For high achievers private is worth it as the school will unashamedly support them. In state as long as you are not failing utterly then there is no motivation to get more out of students.

Teachers in private schools don't have to have a teaching qualification

Perhaps not legally, but they all do. This is an absurd comment. There was one Classics teacher at my private school 30 years ago without a pgce. He was famous for it. It was much talked about, that’s how rare it was.

Mine are at three different private schools now and every single teacher is fully qualified.

In state as long as you are not failing utterly then there is no motivation to get more out of students.

The Progress 8 performance measure means that literally the opposite is true.

This thread is fast filling with BS about state schools now!

I've had parents claim their school did nothing over lockdown. On further investigation there were lessons provided daily via teams. Live/pre recorded to suit, but the parents ignored all email contact from the school.

I have a few friends that teach in private schools that I knew from when they were qualifying. I would say they are generally good teachers especially with high ability/achieving students. They seemed less able to manage behaviour when they were in secondary state schools and struggled with students that were low ability or SENs (but this was when they were still training).

Their roles in the private school seem different. They seem to treat the students more as equals. One talks about how she feels she is actually teaching in a class rather than managing behaviour all day long.

I think when parents are more invested financially in their children then they expect teachers to be getting results. There does seem to be more pressure on them to get the students doing their best.

I am smiling at the number of pp citing their children's Oxbridge-educated teachers.

I went to Cambridge. Five years after graduation almost none of my contemporaries were teaching. Twenty years on, lots are. They spent their twenties attempting to break into various creative industries or collecting further degrees including PhDs, before realising in the thirties that they needed to support families and couldn't do so on runner / freelance / postdoc salaries. They all found private schools delighted to employ them and their Cantabrigian letters and some even hit the jackpot with accommodation at boarding schools.

I'm sure that they are great teachers. They are certainly clever people. But I'm afraid they aren't teaching your children out of a vocational drive to shape young minds.

Emily

The focus at the time I was a governor was to ensure the pass rate for 5 a-c gcses was acceptable . Teachers were instructed to get ds into cs to maximise this measure.

I guess this would show up in progress measures but there was limited focus on getting bs into as for instance.

A great amount of adulation was forthcoming for a student getting into a local ex poly......at a private school the number of successful oxbridge applicants is of more relevance

May not be fair but ime it's how the world works

Your experience is out of date, @mids2019. Pass rates at 5+ and 4+ are published but the main performance measure is now Progress 8, which incentivises schools to maximise progress against KS2 achievement for all pupils, regardless of whether they are targeting grade 3s or grade 9s.

Plumsintheicebox

Interesting. I know private schools are keen to promote their teachers with oxbridge degrees. Oxbridge teachers often roped in to do oxbridge applicant tutorials....logic being you had to go there to be able to mentor adequately ?!

Emily some time ago I admit

But you can get good progress 8 measures from taking a child from low to medium attainment. Is the much mileage in progress by taking an already aceiving child that small step further to get a strong of As at A level for example?

Unfortunately universities dont set tariffs based on an individual progress 8 score.
...absolute results count.

A C is C for instance no matter how much progress you made to achieve that result .

Private schools just concentrate on final grades and not on relative measures.

@mids2019 progress 8 isn't an A level performance measure. It measures progress from ks2 to gcse.

The "best" progress 8 is to get a very low ks2 scoring child a grade 1 at GCSE. After that, a students progress counts equally, eg going from low ks2 to mid gcse is the same as going from high ks2 to excellent gcse. Obviously the more progress the better, but the stepping stone performance measures like A*-C have gone. The replacement 5+/4+ measure isn't given as much weight as the progress 8 score in ofsted eyes.

Yes I was surprised when I first found out that teachers in private schools don't need to have teaching qualifications.

A great amount of adulation was forthcoming for a student getting into a local ex poly......at a private school the number of successful oxbridge applicants is of more relevance

This isn't reflective of teacher quality. Can you not see there are so many other issues at play here? Huge structural inequality, state funding, parental buy in etc.

Yes I was surprised when I first found out that teachers in private schools don't need to have teaching qualifications.

Nor do teachers in state academies.

I've met plenty of Oxbridge-educated teachers who went straight into teaching as a first choice career (DH among them), just as I've met plenty of non-Oxbridge teachers who pursued other careers first.

Hercwasonaroll

That makes sense and I am sorry for the old school terminology !

I suppose the point is that progress 8 will be more of a relevant measure for state schools as progress is the metric used for governance.

You would be hard pushed to find this measure on Etons website for example as parents are interested in final grades and leavers destinations.

It is a state school only measure yes.

But Eton isn't a level playing field. Their progress 8 could be terrible, no one would ever know.

Don't kid yourself the people who went to Eton get to their leavers destinations purely on merit.

Hercwasonaroll

Quite correct. The state teaching was excellent at the school I was a governor at but the student intake was from a disadvantaged area with all the incumbent challenges.

The educational philosophy was to nurture these children to get qualifications to aid in basic employment and life chances.

In the private sector the emphasis is stretching high achievers to aid in ultimately gaining high status careers through competitive uni courses.

The private sector may not be very supportive of low achievers though.

These differing philosophies are reflected by the teaching styles/emphasis.

Would parents fork out huge fees for Eton if a third of their sixth form didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge?

Parents are paying for the increase in chance of gaining the entry requirements for competitive courses for their children.

Teaching emphasis in the private sector us towards these goals.

It's definitely not about the teachers. I work in a state school and the desks in my classroom are too big for the children. They have to strain to reach. The smart board is approximately 20 years old and stopped being "smart" a good few years ago. There aren't enough reading books to go around. The teachers buy books for their own reading areas. We also buy any art supplies for projects we want to do and don't even get me started on supplying our own coloured card.

It's about small class sizes and better facilities.

That's it, really. I went to independent schools but my DC go to state schools and those are what I notice as the major differences.