Do your strict British schools get good academic results?

[Briwi]

I'm a Brit who left UK for New Zealand 20 years ago (still hanging around Mumsnet like a restless spirit!)

I'm often quite shocked by some of the threads about schools and how strict they are. Detentions for doodling?! Detentions for 13 yr olds in the first week of high school because they have the wrong shoes?!! That would never happen here.

I realise this is a massive, big picture question, but just to focus in on the strictness and detentions - do they help? Are they a good thing? Do they make students more successful academically?

Like any education system, NZ has it's pros and cons. I like the positive, respectful nature of education here - but it's also not terribly academically rigorous, imo.

A lot of kids at private have sat SATs, as they come from state primaries although I understand maybe not enough not to skew figures, although presumably a fair few in super selective State have been to prep schools?

The issue is they conflate Value Added and say it is Progress 8. Undoubtedly the statisticians would have a field day with these but I'm just pointing out that it isn't exactly a fair playing field if the whole country isn't involved - you'll have plenty moving between the two for various reasons and no mention of tutoring at all.

@Croakymccroakyvoice Got the pens for later then! What’s wrong with providing the odd pen? Schools have highly paid assistant heads. A few pens pales into insignificance to keep the peace.

Are the schools you've heard about just saying they are the top 5 in the county, or local authority, rather thank the country? Without local, knowledge, it would be very hard to work out where most of these schools are! I have only managed to work out that at least 10 out of the top 20 are in greater London.

Yes but at what cost. Exam results are not the only thing that children should be getting from school.

While I know that there certainly are poor people in Brent, as with any London borough, and Brent is very ethnically diverse, the majority are not poor. Once you get out of the commercial centre of Wembley where the school is located, the surrounding area is pretty much Metroland. Interestingly, the number 12 school for value added on the table helpfully linked above, is also in Wembley. However, if the children at Michaela are poor, given their ability on arrival, their primary schools are doing a pretty good job.

That’s about disruption which is a totally different thing. You could have a very relaxed school which doesn’t have much disruption.
Things like detention for wearing the uniform slightly incorrectly aren’t really related to lost learning time either.

Bigotry of low expectations is real, but it's too easy to conflate things when you don't have the ability to control all the variables. Do you think a child from a chaotic home where no-one has the ability to keep track of school progress is going to just flourish in Michaela or similar? 7 hours a day, 190 days a year is only so much. One of the most important elements isn't merely school strictness. It's coordination between home and school. It's more than a bit troubling to read these suggestions that children from naice middle class suburban families just don't need such strict expectations.

Sure, but trust me, if you have a relaxed school where kids don't have to be silent in the corridors and march to their next lesson and aren't drilled to within an inch of their lives to follow the teacher's instructions in lessons then you will be losing learning time.

And clearly they think that being strict on uniform feeds into that whole ethos.

No, the top 5 in the county are from the half of the County with very good grammar schools and even those aren't on the first page! It's why I don't feel I can trust schools that go on about Progress 8 or Value Added as even that table doesn't include all schools or a filter for County, so unless you know those and go home specifically to look it up it seems they are using it to mislead that their teachers are out performing and they can prove it using some statistical voodoo. I've actually just re-watched the "Deputy Head of Academics" of one of the Indie schools saying how he can PROVE the value added makes them one of the top schools in the country repeatedly in a video on the school website! I won't post it but I'm not going mad!

Why should a progress measure for state schools include private schools?

Is it meant to be a national measure or not? Do they not include kids who went to prep schools? If you are really looking to see if teaching is good and this is the measure why would state schools be worried to include private or vice versa? I thought the idea was to show how pupils can thrive in State schools and we need to be shunning the private sector? I hope so as we are looking to switch for 6th form and it seems Progress 8 is the only reputable way to gauge teaching.

Why should the government be spending any money on measuring how good private schools are? It's not that state schools are worried about private schools being included, it's just literally not their job.

I'm fairly sure AI could do it...hardly a great expense to put an extra column in for those who have SATs results who went private or those who didn't to be taken out of the State cohort Progress 8 results.

But a lot of them will have sat IGCEs anyway which don't count.

So your private school sample of kids who both sat SATs and didn't sit IGCSEs is probably worthless statistically.

OK. If my dd gets a 6 in IGCSE and wants to take a subject at a state school that needs a 6 at GCSE, are they not counted as the same?

By the school, yes. But they do not count in government league table measures which is what Progress 8 is.

So the government doesn't see them as equivalent?
I am not sure I fully understand your point. Why would they not be equivalent - Universities seem to think they are as they don't distinguish?

I can't see what the issue is. Exam boards used to have very different styles back in the 90s with some notoriously harder than others, but that wasn't shown on league tables at all?

Because when GCSEs were reformed by Gove to the new 9-1 GCSEs to be more rigorous, it was felt that some schools would try to avoid the upheaval of switching to the new system by going over to IGCSEs instead and keeping the coursework and the A*-G system.

So the Gove said 'no, I want you to be taking the more rigorous exams, so if you switch to IGCSEs, they won't count in the league tables, your headline measures will be 0% and you'll be at the bottom'.

Incidentally, I know one state school which was outstanding so outside the Ofsted cycle went with IGCSEs anyway. They got the 0% headline measures but with their reputation it didn't matter. Then there was a massive racist scandal at the school, they were emergency Ofsteded. Ofsted took a very dim view of the IGCSE thing as well as the racism thing and they went from Outstanding to Inadequate and got taken over by an academy trust.

@noblegiraffe wow. That's insane! We were in State Primary when Gove was in so must have missed what he was doing with GCSE's at the time. I know he buggered about enough with learning pre-frontal adverbials and the rest which really didn't seem to add much to dd's dyslexia. It's hard to get a good view on education in this country without a full league table. Not having private schools on them does seem to enable a sales pitch of Value Added being the same as Progress 8 which would be misleading but I guess we will never know.

I feel the issue being discussed (strictness = performance) is harder if you take private education out of the equation as many seem to have a high % of SEN than grammars, for example, so the way they deal with misbehaviour would be more variable. I think personally, SEN is a key reason behind a lot of what these schools would call "poor behaviour". However if you factor that in and then add parental aspirations you might need a different approach and strictness might be more fitting. Plenty of both poor and rich kids who grow up thinking education is pointless and need a bit of enlightening or stronger enforcement of rules.

I think the SEN issue is significant and it's not helped by the difficulties in getting help through either the health or education systems. I feel for teachers and staff, but a solution can't be magicked out of discipline.

Behaviour is worse since Covid, it's not just the UK experiencing this.

I've been in the same school for a long time so similar SEN intake over the years. We've had various behaviour policies. In my experience stricter behaviour policies improve behaviour and the amount of learning going on in the classroom. More relaxed policies = kids taking advantage of the slack in the system to do less work and more disruption in lessons.

We've never had Michaela-type strictness but we have had Paul-Dix style slackness and that was just awful. The kids were feral. When we tightened up the policy, the same kids were not feral.

That is interesting. Dd is being assessed for SEN and without doubt prefers a stricter teacher to a slack one, but perhaps conversely, really needs to understand why the rule is in place. If it is a rule just for the sake of it she finds them irritating - an example of this in primary was when the boys would act out and the whole class would be punished by not having break time. Her dyslexia means her spelling is all over the place but she has a very high vocabulary and was above average in the CAT4 but had been bullied relentlessly by other children with barely any intervention and teachers called her sensitive for being upset by it. She now feels injustice quite strongly and I therefore don't think the Michaela type school would suit her and would cause anxiety. However there is a teacher who is very good at his topic but can't control the more wayward person in her lesson. It causes her distress as she now can't hear the teacher over the child talking and isn't sure how to stop the child "bullying" the teacher. She doesn't want to get the teacher into trouble as he is so good and has very similar specific interests to dd but this is making her dread his lessons.

In dd's case I took a long time deciding between a poorly performing local grammar with her bullies where she would get barely any dyslexia support and have to fight to keep her place, or a nurturing private where they had a high intake of SEN and ample dyslexia support. Her current school has over double the intake of SEN but is in the top 100 schools compared to the grammar which is somewhere around the late 300's with a 10 student number difference in the year on average even after taking the top 5% of girls locally. So I do feel parents should be factoring in whether their child will fit the level of structure offered rather than assume strictness alone would ensure better grades.

I think if your 'poorly performing local grammar' is in the top 400 secondaries in the country then you might be surprised just how things bad can get a bit further down the league tables and why some schools have introduced such strict behaviour policies.

I think they are good if they serve areas with kids that may not have grown up with boundaries at home and who may not have that self control. Many schools getting good results in leafier areas simply don’t need it. I doubt any school with awful behaviour gets good results.

I have no doubt - everyone around here thinks they've got a great set of options having grammars, whereas I personally think it's pushed the state non-selective options down far further than they needed to be by taking the top 5% of a rich area and doing very poorly by them. You can imagine what the other state schools look like without the top performers. It creates a huge social divide all through Primary too as kids know fairly quickly from Y4 who is likely to pass 11+ because those who can all get tutored together. If anything gets kids, boys in particular IME, riled up it's feeling like they are failing by age 9.