Who gets the best jobs?

[fizzyfanta]

I wonder if anyone watched this programme on BBC2 last night.

Whilst I appreciate that children from poorer backgrounds are not exposed to the same resources as those who have been privately educated, I cant help think that sometimes,these children are let down by their own parents and possibly their schools for not giving them enough courage to make them believe that 'they can be who they want to be'. Surely, the whole thing is being generalised and private education is being used as a scapegoat for the failures of the state system?

Don't know what - your school sounds terrible.
You have done very well to get a place to do medicine. You will thrive at Cambridge because - being a tough place to study - it's best to have already struggled!

It must depend heavily on the area; our local state schools have high aspiring pupils, parents and teachers because there are significant numbers of professional parents in the town. The local private schools are expensive.

However, we have a problem of over-obsessed non-working mothers who - having had a 20 year professional career - can't accept that their children are doing fine and want to micro-manage the whole of their children's education.

This can't be good for children; children need to be given the opportunity to work at things themselves. I can't help thinking that over-motivated parents might result in disinterested children.

There are terrible teachers in the private sector too. I have helped out a local child at a 12k a year school who wasn't learning anything in maths because the class weren't behaving and the teacher couldn't control them.

I studied at Cambridge and the students in our first year lecture were appallingly behaved. I wonder if they'll behave better when they are being charged 9k a year.

The state sector isn't always magic and lovely. It's often shit, especially in crap rural high schools in the north of England.

Couldn't agree more, I have friends at an FE in Birkenhead, one of the most deprived areas in the country, all wanting professional careers, all being put on to Access courses from which NOBODY has ever got into medicine, dentistry or veterinary and yet these peoples time and money is being wasted. All have plan B applications in for bio medical sciences that sort of thing, no career path at the end and £18k of debt at least but hey the unemployment figure will look better as will the state school stats.

Those access courses waste everyone's time. They were meant for people who had missed out on education but not for 16 year olds as an alterative to A-levels.

If you can't get science A-levels, you shouldn't be going to university to study a science subject...you will either struggle or be doing a degree that is not worth anything.

DontKnowWhat I did a search on you because I haven't come across you before (subtext: I was checking out whether you were a troll) Sorry you had such a bad time on your first thread - AIBU is a scary place to be. Stay in the education topic - we are usually nice here except ( huge except) when we get to discussing State v. Private.

I have to second what Dontknowwhat said. Whilst I'm sure everything fivecandles has said is true, it is also true that there are some state schools out there with very bad teachers. I went to one and did teacher training in another (which has admittedly been closed down now).

No matter how bright or motivated the students at these schools were, they weren't going to do well. To give just one example, when I asked my Business Studies teacher how I could get an A at GCSE, he told me it would be impossible as he wasn't going to teach us enough of the syllabus. He said we should be content with a B. I begged him but he refused to change his mind.

I could tell you more but you probably wouldn't believe me!

DontKnowWhat, like you I didn't have a privileged background. Unlike you, I stopped studying at 16 after my A levels (I had two "double promotions" when I was in primary), went off the rails as a teenager and got into much trouble. It was only much later in life that I sorted myself out.

I have enormous respect for what you've done. It's people like you that the state system is failing. The lack of support you've had, the sub-standard teaching, the pathetic quality of career advice ...needs to change! We're losing some of our best brains because the state system is so bad at converting them into high value talent and skills. I'm glad we haven't lost you.

My admiration and kudos for what you've achieved.

fivecandles, I accept that there are many brilliant, motivated and enthusiastic teachers in state schools. But when "efficiencies" are forced on the state sector in the current financial climate they will regrettably not fall on the worst performing teachers. If you're in the bottom 3% of plumbers, interior designers or hair dressers natural selection would push you out of the market. There's no burgundy book that continues to give you salary increases till you retire. Would you favour sacking the whole sorry lot of incompetent teachers? I thought not! You suggest they don't cause much damage and "good departments and good schools can and do take measures to compensate..." A culture of protection is good news for employees. It's very deep-rooted in state schools and the BBC article I linked to covers it in more detail.

What teachers provide an education based on their parents' bank balance rather than their needs
The ones in state schools who consciously or otherwise treat intelligent children from caring homes as lower priority if they're performing above average ... because these kids "already have enough advantages".

3%

Small number.

That's, at a conservative estimate, 15,000 teachers.

Bigger number.

Now how many pupils go through those 15,000 teacher annually? 450,000?

On average every single year we're placing nearly half a million kids with an incompetent teacher for the entire year?

@fivecandles: Thanks for your detailed responses. 10 out of 11 successful applicants to Oxbridge can be viewed either as very good indeed if only 11 students had Oxbridge aspirations, or else as someone (either students or teachers) being insufficiently ambitious. Please understand that I'm used to the American system where there is no statutory limit to the number of applications a student can make. That's one of the reasons that Harvard gets 27000 applications for 1600 places; a lot of people are willing to take a little risk for what has the potential to be a huge reward.

As you pointed out, my question about time allocations is probably more relevant for primary school than sixth form. The reason I asked the question is that I understand the UK to use social promotion in primary and secondary school, i.e., you don't hold students back here. In the US social promotion has been in and out of favor, but I believe it is currently out of favor, so it is very possible and even acceptable for, say, 5% of a class to be forced to repeat a year in primary school, or repeat a specific class in secondary school. In my own experience in the US, teachers tended to spend more time calling on and reinforcing the students in the bottom quartile so that only a very few of them might be held back. The top quartile were generally left alone because they had absorbed the material more quickly. I assume that this skew in attention would be more pronounced in the UK since you aren't allowed to hold back even a few. I was hoping you could either confirm or refute this assumption.

DontKnowWhat

I really admire you for your achievements. Sadly not all bright kids will keep fighting. I?ve got experience with this kind of the so-called school. DS1 was at good school (according to OFSTED), like you he is very bright and knew what to do. The school had G&T, he used to complain and even recorded in his phone a top set science class, all I can say is I thought they were in some busy bar or market. He got fairly good GCSE with almost all the core subjects tutored. A decision we regretted, he stayed at 6th form. In the first year he lost interest to education, got really depressed and decided education was not for him. The reason was unmotivated teachers, thought the wrong syllabus, unrealistic expectation( C4 of Maths module was thought 2 weeks before exam and they were told to use you tube to revise) With a lot of encouragement, he stayed until the end of exam, failed all the AS levels, only got Maths AS level A.

With the help of relatives from abroad and charitable organisations, he was able to redo the whole AS and A level in one year in private college. Now first year studying at Russell group University and very happy.

All his friends who got level 8 and 7 SATs maths failed AS level. Some left education; some moved to other college and restarted again. I remember one of his friends who really wanted to study medicine, at the end had to change other degree at expoly.

Unless you have experience of inner city schools in London, it is hard to believe what is going on.

Look, nobody's denying that there are some rubbish teachers out there but it is silly in any discussion to focus on small details and to apply use the experience of a few individuals to make sweeping generalistions.

Dad your point about teachers who 'treat intelligent children from caring homes as lower priority if they're performing above average ... because these kids "already have enough advantages".'

is this a quotation actually from a teacher?? Because it really is a strange view which I've never come across anywhere else before.

A teacher who is ideologically opposed to helping kids (regardless of background) learn as you put it is as bizarre as a doctor who is ideologically opposed to curing patients. It is a ridiculous concept which I find very hard to believe.

If such teachers exist then absolutely they should be kicked out just as doctors against curing people should but I really, honestly have never met or heard of such a person and cannot imagine that such teachers are statistically significant. Do you have any realy EVIDENCE to suggest there really are teachers with such an ideology?

But I do think this whole debate is overly concerned with problems (real or imaginary) in the state system whilst ignoring the huge, huge achievements made by the majority of our students most of whom survive and thrive in state education.

Of course, somebody having a terrible experience in state education is terrible but lets not the terrible experiences of a minority cloud our perception of the system as a whole.

'10 out of 11 successful applicants to Oxbridge can be viewed either as very good indeed if only 11 students had Oxbridge aspirations, or else as someone (either students or teachers) being insufficiently ambitious'

I'm not sure that you've read my post very carefully or thought very carefully about your response.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: not applying to Oxford or Cambridge is not on its own evidence that you are 'insufficiently ambitious'.

And quite frankly that's a hugely insulting assumption to make.

I have outlined many reasons why a student may choose to go elsewhere. A student who decides that another RG university which offers a less traditional course or combination of courses not offered at Oxford or Cambridge or a student who has been awarded a place at a prestigious music college or a student who has decided to study at a RG university 5 miles down the road whilst living at home for financial or cultural reasons is not a student lacking in ambition.

'On average every single year we're placing nearly half a million kids with an incompetent teacher for the entire year?'

That's not an accurate picture. The vast majority of kids will never have any contact with one of these teachers at all and those that do may have a poor woodwork teacher for 50 minutes a week.

And yes admittedly incompetent plumbers and decorators may be forced out of a job (though I'm not at all sure about this I think most of us have had some pretty shoddy workmen. Have you ever seen Rogue Traders or Which?) but what about solicitors, shop nurses, MPs and bankers?

But, this 3%, (still Woodhead's estimate so not entirely reliable) is there a suggestion that these teachers are born and will remain incompetent? Because again this is very far from a picture I recognize. Certainly I've met NQTs who struggle and they either get better PDQ with support or leave the professions. Likewise I've met teachers suffering from stress or personal crises which affect their teachhing but these are transitory phases. A teacher who is genuinely, incorrigibly incompetent can be got rid of. Most other teachers get better and can be managed and supported to do their job effectively.

There is a huge problem of incompetent or below-average teachers in state schools. It?s difficult to sack them but you can just pass them along like a hot potato. A lot of new teachers I have interacted with haven?t done their PGCE out of a vocation to teach but merely as a way to get a job in a tough economic climate. So you?re stuck in top set GCSE with some idiot that recently qualified with a PGCE and has a 3rd in Theatre Studies at Liverpool Hope (my R.S teacher) because that?s the least dangerous class to put her in. The clever kids will revise and get a C anyway.

I only managed to stop being taught by my awful biology A-Level teacher by waltzing up in a suit alongside some parents of fellow classmates and going through a huge list of her terrible teaching and behaviour and threatening to go to the press about a "poor girl unable to go to Cambridge at supposedly amazing college because of awful biology teacher failed her". She hasn't been sacked when the college knows she is a dreadful teacher. But she's cheap because she's part-time.

My high school had a 60% pass rate at GCSE including English and Maths but their GCSE point score was quite low so my 5A?s were artificially risen to 8A?s during Cambridge admissions. It had a 'good' OFSTED report and is the second best state school in a town with a population of 100,000.

They were obsessed with achieving 5A's to C's at GCSE to the extent that set two/three in Year 10 Science were forced to take Science BTEC and hinder their chances of future academic success. Unless you were in set one maths, you had to take foundation at maths GCSE - that would never happen at a private school. There was absolutely no help for pupils on the A/A borderline but every scrap of help dedicated to the C/D borderline. Plus huge class sizes bordering on dangerous. 35 in set one maths and R.S and 30 in Art. I actually think the Art one was illegal since I was forced to hide away when the OFSTED inspector visited the room. 30 chavvy brats with Batik pots on full blast are bloody dangerous.

Don?t get me wrong, I have and have had some outstanding subject teachers. But they were few and in between. Luckily, they were in difficult subjects such as GCSE History and A-Level Chemistry and Maths. But to claim that only a tiny amount of teachers are bad at their job is ludicrous. How many mumsnetters complain about awful midwives, doctors, service staff and the like? They?ll always be someone crap at their job and I don?t mean in a lack of lesson starter or lack of box ticking way.

The vast majority of kids will never have any contact with one of these teachers at all and those that do may have a poor woodwork teacher for 50 minutes a week.

In an outstanding primary school my kids have already experienced incompetent teachers. Trust me, it lasts the whole year. In a secondary what if it's not the woodwork teacher but the maths teacher who's a disaster and all 200 pupils in the secondary have that maths teacher for their GCSEs? Still okay?

But, yes, staff is just one of the problems.

Sacking the worst staff would be a good first step. Then work on the others. Maybe the 17,000 figure quoted by the head of the GTC (not the Chris Woodhead whom you seem to have a problem with), maybe a lot more.

Then a better system for teacher evaluation and new pay scales to reward the best performers. Throwing out the burgundy book and restricting union influence wouldn't be bad either.

Removing incentive for teachers to average kids out would be another good move - like removing the glass ceiling of L3A at Y2, L5A at Y6 etc. A point system where every kid's progress for the year is added up and the teacher judged based on that value add. There's should no artificial limit on how far children are expected to progress. Children who are capable of a 5A in maths at Y3 aren't currently tested beyond 5A when they get to Y6. Three years of freewheeling! Ridiculous! Levels of progress children are expected to make each year shouldn't be fixed, they should vary based on the abilities of each child.

BTW, 5A should be the average at Y6, not 4B.

Stopping teachers fudging stats and teaching to the test: Right from reception this fudging goes on. The base level assessment Y0 teachers do at entry is fiddled downwards so teachers can show a vast improvement at the end of year assessment. Remove this self-assessment nonsense and have external mods do the job.

Ringfence budgets for SEN and G&T.

And - this will be controversial - find some way of penalising parents who don't play ball. The problem with "free" education is that some people think it has no value. Teach them a lesson.

I think with teaching particularly though there's an issue with perception and there are so many different aspects to the job that one person's perception can be very different from another's. The teacher that the A* student feels has let him down may be the same teacher that spends hours of her free time with a troubled teenager with learning difficulties or vice-versa.

I have never seen a subject teacher at GCSE or KS3 spend hours of their spare time teaching any pupil. Disruptive or struggling pupils tended to get dumped on support assistants in my high school. You were only allowed to interact with your teachers outside of allotted class time in school if you were handing in a homework late or you had been absent for two weeks.

My college is better at this and has timetabled 'supervisions' when you can get help from your teacher. They've been very useful for me and other students at college whatever one's academic potential is.

I understand what you are saying on how perceptions of teachers differ and I would love to attend this sixth form you keep talking about but I'm guessing it's somewhere in a leafy suburb in the South East .

Really not. Don't want to give away my whereabouts but its in a deprived area and not in the SE. And whatever people say I know my experience is not that unusual. I have lots of contact with different schools and teachers through examining and freelance writing of educational resources and with local schools for all sorts of reasons.

Expat96 - I found your last post very interesting. You are right that here in England we stick more rigidly to year group progression than most other countries - with little flexibility for repeating a year. There are also rigid rules about school start age (although there are signs that this is being relaxed slightly for prematurely born dc's and dc's with SEN's).

This rigidity to year groups may be one reason we have a significant 'relative age' problem with our 'younger in year group' pupils performing, on average, less well at every academic stage up to A'level. Our very early start to academic schooling might be another factor.

So, as a result English schools probably have a 'wider ability range' in each year group than might be found in other countries. And this may impact on the education of the brightest. It certainly makes harder work for the teacher.

NB - Scotland and Wales are less rigid about starting school ages.

"I'm not sure that you've read my post very carefully or thought very carefully about your response.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: not applying to Oxford or Cambridge is not on its own evidence that you are 'insufficiently ambitious'.

And quite frankly that's a hugely insulting assumption to make."

@fivecandles: I did indeed read your post very carefully and think very carefully about my response. I absolutely agree that Oxbridge is no more the be-all and end-all of higher education here than Harvard is in the States, and there are many reasons why students might prefer not to go to Oxbridge. But...

Quoting myself:
"10 out of 11 successful applicants to Oxbridge can be viewed either as very good indeed if only 11 students had Oxbridge aspirations, or else as someone (either students or teachers) being insufficiently ambitious"

Please tell me how this statement was insulting and to whom? I repeat, if only 11 students wanted to go to Oxbridge then this is an excellent result. The remainder of my statement was to question whether some of the students with Oxbridge potential and desire were being dissuaded from applying because either they, their parents or their teachers were mistaken about their chances of getting in. I believe this issue has been raised by several education ministers from all major parties so it's hardly a radical question or obscure issue.

If you can tell me, hand-on-heart, that, outside of the 11 who applied, no other students at your school wanted to go to Oxbridge, then the first half of my statement holds; your school did an excellent job with the 11. If, on the other hand, more marginal students, students with a 75% or 50% or 25% chance of admission were dissuaded from applying to Oxbridge because either they, their parents or their teachers underestimated the chances of getting in, or were afraid of the penalties of "wasting" an application, or of the consequences of getting a rejection, then the second half of my statement holds. Please note the followup statement in my original post about the number of US students "taking a flyer" in applying to Harvard even when the odds are long.

I'm not sure how you drew from my statement that I equated not applying to Oxbridge with a lack of ambition. I most certainly do not believe that. I do believe, however, that not applying to Oxbridge if you want to go to Oxbridge can be 'insufficiently ambitious' (it can also be the correct thing to do if your grades indicate that you have no chance whatsoever). I certainly intended no insult. However, as even after reading and re-reading my comments, I don't believe I made the assumption to which you took offense, I do not believe that I cast an insult and, therefore, offer no apology.

Perhaps this will help establish my bona fides. I live in London, near Hampstead. Two of the schools located nearby are South Hampstead High School and Henrietta Barnett. SHHS is a selective private girls school. HBS is a selective state girls grammar school. In the Sutton Trust's 2007 report, these two schools show up as ranked #17 and #53 by Oxbridge hit rate, at 21.2% and 13.6%. HBS, by the way, was in the top 10 state schools by this metric.

In evaluating schools for my DD, I could have just stopped here and said that SHHS does better than HBS, but I chose to dig a little further. On various web fora there were allegations that HBS students were preferring medicine courses disproportionately. I went on the schools' websites and found that roughly 6-8% of girls from SHHS chose medicine or dentistry courses outside of Oxbridge. Roughly 20% of HBS girls did so.

I focused on medicine and dentistry because I am under the impression that these courses in most universities are as difficult to get into as most Oxbridge courses. Clearly I have missed many other competitive course/university combinations because I do not have the knowledge of which are the most sought after.

There were also allegations that HBS girls were disproportionately from Asian families who preferred that they live at home during university, i.e., confining their choices to London schools. Whilst I cannot confirm this directly, I can say that the local authority website indicates that approximately 50% of HBS students are indeed Asian and 75% non-white.

So what did I found after all this? Beyond that the Oxbridge hit rate is a very incomplete indicator, I found that Henrietta Barnett School, a state school, puts at least 35% of its students into very competitive programs while South Hampstead High School, considered by many to be a top private school (arguably one of the top three girls schools in London), achieves only about 30%. I know my data is incomplete and, perhaps I am still focusing on the wrong things, but at least I am keeping an open mind and trying to uncover something closer to the truth.

Up to this point I've refrained from ad hominem attacks but, I must say, you seem to find an awful lot of things either patronizing or insulting. I came onto this board hoping to find more information about the educational system in this country and to engage in collaborative discussions. I'm not interested in continuing this discussion with someone who engages in such an adversarial manner.

@fivecandles: Thank you again for taking the time to address my questions in your earlier posts.

@jackstarb: Social promotion / grade retention have been debated forever and a day in the United States. I happen to think there are good arguments on both sides. In a world without limits, most people would prefer social promotion coupled with additional resources to help those who fall behind. In a world with finite educational budgets, compromises must be made. Those compromises have implications and I am interested in understanding those implications. Thanks for your input.

'Quoting myself:
"10 out of 11 successful applicants to Oxbridge can be viewed either as very good indeed if only 11 students had Oxbridge aspirations, or else as someone (either students or teachers) being insufficiently ambitious"

Please tell me how this statement was insulting and to whom?'

It is insulting because it suggests there are only those 2 explanations -either it's very good indeed or that students or teachers are 'insufficiently ambitious'. In fact, as I have been at pains to explain, there are many other explanations for why more students choose not to apply to Oxford or Cambridge and 'insufficient ambition' is unlikely to be one of them.

'whether some of the students with Oxbridge potential and desire were being dissuaded from applying because either they, their parents or their teachers were mistaken about their chances of getting in.

Again, I find this hugely patronising.
The chances of any student getting into Oxford or Cambridge is in fact very slim and although applicants from state schools went up their success rate actually went down this year.

If a student has good reasons for applying to a different university or decides that given their chances of getting in are slim they could do without the stress and would rather concentrate on getting their A Level grades this should be respected.

I might add that the fact that Oxford and Cambridge have just announced that they are going to charge the full whack for tuition fees might be another reason why students from poor backgrounds might well be put off applying.

The idea that teachers are out there dissuading students from applying is a bizarre one and rather like the idea that there are teachers with an 'ideology' that some children should not be encouraged to learn.

There really is an awful lot of conspiracy theory out there which amounts to teacher bashing based on assumptions and anecdotes rather than good, solid evidence.

'Fewer state school pupils were given places at the University of Oxford last autumn than in the previous year, even though the number of applications from these students had increased.

The breakdown of data about those who joined Oxford this academic year shows an increase of 8.5 per cent in the number of applications from the state sector, from 5,979 in 2008 to 6,485 last year. But the number of state school pupils accepted by Oxford fell by 3.9 per cent, from 1,515 in 2008 to 1,456 in 2009.'

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article7071736.ece

Of course teachers encourage students to apply to Oxbridge but these are intelligent people who when presented with all the facts should be assumed to be capable of making up their own minds about what university and course is best for them.

And, it's worth saying the obvious point that if even more students apply there will be even more rejections.