Private school underperformed I think my friend should get a refund. AIBU?

[Rambler96]

Friends daughter did her A levels at a posh girls school in Shrewsbury and failed to get the grades she needed for her university place. Now all the results are published, it looks like the school has massively underperformed for some reason. I think she should get a refund on some of the fees.

Just looked up:
SHS fees per term in 6th form: £6,850 inc VAT
Shrewsbury School: £13,193 inc VAT

State obviously free. I would suspect that more will go state than double the fees for Shrewsbury School.

As for qualified teachers. Certainly in this area all the teachers in indies are as qualified as in state schools. In fact, you’re more likely to be taught by qualified subject specialists in an indie than in state school where recruitment and retention is dire. This is quite an affluent area, though, of course, housing costs are astronomical. Foreign language teachers in the schools my children have attended have been difficult to recruit and the uptake at a level is quite low but they have certainly been taught by qualified maths and science teachers which is certainly not always the case in our local state schools.

No chance. None of these schools guarantee results - there's just way too many variables.
What's that old adage? "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." There could be a million reasons why your friends DD didn't get the grades, of which an under-performing school is just one of them. I bet that school is shitting bricks now, if what you say is true. People will take their business elsewhere. They won't survive many years of falling results, especially with fees being higher than ever.

On the topic of kids at private schools, I do some holiday club work at a all-girls private school in my town. This past summer I was chatting to a girl there, who goes to the school - 13yo. She's telling me how much she hates reading, never does her homework, messes about in lessons. Me being me says, "Well, that's a massive waste of money for your parents isn't it?" She just shrugs and laughs.

It goes to show, you can throw all the money in the world at your kids education, but at the end of the day, it's on them.

So how do you suggest they fund the refund?
I know! How about asking all the teachers to return all their wages they earned last year?

How did your friend’s daughter perform in her prelims and class tests? What were her reports etc like? Were there any warning signs prior to exam results day? You can lead a horse to water…

No school guarantees results and obviously some schools are better than others whether state or private.

My niece moved to a great private school for years 10-13, her grades improved a lot and she got great GCSE and A level results. She benefitted from small class sizes and her teachers were amazing. The school also brought her out of herself so much, made her confident, improved her public speaking and the music and sporting opportunities were fantastic. My niece took advantage of the great teaching and put a lot of work in, if you don’t do that then you won’t do well no matter where you study.

I agree sadly with most of that but I would suggest that, IME, having an MA or PhD, as a PP has suggested, is just as common in state schools as private. Quickly thinking of the teachers I know who have a PhD or a masters (six among my close friends) they all teach at state schools (and I do know quite a few teachers in private schools as well). That's not to say those without the masters are not great teachers – the oens I know in private and state all are!

I'm not saying it's exclusive to independent schools but, generally, in independent schools you are more likely to see that.
However PP was adamant that many teachers in independent schools were unqualified yet didn't seem aware that that's the reality in many state schools.

Apologies btw – I took it that the student taking FM was doing 4 A levels and then divided 105 by 3 to get a cohort of 35. If the actual cohort was 36, that means that not only did the FM student only take three (fair enough) but also two candidates only sat two A levels, which is very curious.

I see that the cohort was the smallest it has been for several years (apart from Covid years which I guess are an anomaly).

I can also imagine that the best teachers will be seeing the writing on the wall - tiny cohorts, lower results - and seeking interesting, secure opportunities elsewhere. Data on teacher turnover would be interesting to see.

Those left may well be less strong, or less experienced, which can lead to a downward spiral.

I'm guessing it's that some independent schools employ teachers who aren't qualified. However, this is not as common practice as it used to be

DSs sixth form college cohort was 1200. It's one of the top state sixth forms. In 2024 it was considered a bit of a blip/unheard of that no one got an A* in German A Level. Most got As though.

It could have just been a poor intake that year. Teacher friend (in a state school) said this does happen. If one year group is moving up to the High School, they sometimes even give a heads-up to the head teacher.

A relevant question is what the individual girl’s GCSE results were, and whether their A level results were a reasonable progression from them.

If a pupil with all 9s and 8s at GCSE got Bs and Cs at A-level, then it would be reasonable to argue (in the absence of any other factors, and if the student had been diligent in both routine work and revision) that the school had not enabled them to do as well as they could have done.

However, the same A level results from a starting point of 6s at GCSE would represent good progress (extremely good progress for Maths, where lower GCSE results predicting very low A level results) with nothing to blame the school for at all.

I had a couple of 1:1 meetings with a friend's child who was at a very low performing state comp but had ambitions to study a STEM subject at Oxbridge. One of his subjects had no speciaist teacher and the teacher he had wasn't much more knowledgeable than him, and for another subject the teacher was regularly off sick with an intermittent long-term health condition. He buckled down and worked out what the gaps were between his knowledge and the syllabus and found out what he didn't know and did whatever extra work was necessary over and above any set homework. He wanted my help to prepare for interviews and I was bowlled over by his determination and drive to succeed against the odds. He got his A* grades, his Oxbridge place and eventually went on to do a PhD too. That's what hard work looks like.

Your friend got what she paid for - an environment more conducive to learning with fewer difficult challenges than state school pupils encounter, less likelihood of having to share textbooks or be in overcrowded classrooms, less likely to have to watch a video of a science experiment rather than doing it firsthand because the school has the right resources. More access to staff if there are problems. However, the hard work is still needed. The responsibility for doing the work, for engaging with the syllabus and asking for help for anything that is on there that they don't fully understand, still rests with the student no matter how well-resourced the school is. If the results are lower on average than usual that could have just been from fewer high-performing students having gone to the school in that yeargroup rather than any shortfall in the service provided.

Table 2 in this document is useful in working out what ‘reasonable results from GCSE starting points’ might look like.

https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/735630-144.-progression-from-gcse-to-a-level-2021-2023.pdf

If the progress your friend’s daughter has achieved from GCSE looks reasonable by subject within this chart, then tbh there is nothing to complain to the school about. Where each exam entry is 1% of the data , and each pupil represents nearly 3%, dramatic-seeming swings between cohorts based on natural variation are only to be expected.

OP is at least trying to support a friend. You have decided to comment with absolutely no involvement in the situation but judge OP for commenting nonetheless.

What a broad stretch!! There are no unqualified teachers at my DD's prep school. None. Most of the TA's are actually qualified teachers hoping to get in on a mat leave.

The sample size for several of the subjects there is low. But the fact that there are a number of pupils who gained Astar/A in a subject they received a five or less at GCSE shows why schools should consider pupils individually when it comes to GCSE results.

It is also - obviously - a broad stretch to say that your experience in one school is fully representative of the entire sector.

FWIW, at a sector scale, I don’t think the qualified / unqualified accusation stands up any more.

Academies employ unqualified teachers, and many, many state schools use teachers unqualified in a particular subject to teach lessons in those subjects. Equally, teacher exodus from the state sector on the basis of student behaviour and underfunding has made recruitment easier for some private schools.

Yes, some egregious examples still exist - a prep school where a qualified teacher teaches one class and plans for the whole year group, while an unqualified ‘associate teacher’ teaches the parallel class, for example - but I don’t think that on average the ‘is a teacher qualified to teach this subject in front of the class today’ data would show a systematic sector difference.

Oh, absolutely agree. I was just trying to support OP in judging whether her friend’s daughter had results that - while lower than predicted or hoped for - were outrageously lower than might have been expected from previous attainment.

What does your friend do for a living? A levels are about far more than the classroom teaching, there’s a lot of responsibility on the students to do more themselves and go to teachers when they don’t understand things. My source is my DH, who is a high school teacher before you ask.

It's strange to get this invested in the education of a child of a friend. That's the job of the parents and isn't really anyone else's business

Some schools are crap. Throwing money at it doesn't guarantee your kid will pass their exams.

Or maybe she didn't do enough work? At A level you're meant to be pretty self sufficient when it comes to learning. If she was desperate to pass and thought the school was inadequate why didn't she study independently or ask for a tutor? She's nearly an adult, not six.

Any more strange than all the posters on this thread (including you) when we haven’t even met the people in question?

Presumably because she was being misled as to how she was doing. We are not talking about a single pupil here either; it sounds like predicted grades across the whole year group were off.