Financial Times Top 1000 Schools

[Xenia]

398 of the top 1000 are independent
Of the top 100 schools 80 are private and 19 grammar. Only one is a comp but it is a partially selective comprehensive.

(England only)
My older children's schools are 5th, 24th and 35th, not too bad.
www.ft.com/schoolmap-2011
The % ho get A or A* is proper subjects is a good measure and the fact they give the position in 2009 and 2008 too so you can see if a school has just had a bizarre year.

In fact I had a huge row about this recently with the teacher who had advised a young man i know that A levels in Business Studies, Phychology and Maths would be a great idea.

He wants to be a commercial lawyer. Or at least this is one of the things he is thinking of

He will need to go to a good university but he will be most unlikely to get a place with those subjects.

I even emailed the damn woman a link to the RG list of preferred subjects that someone had posted here on MN. She still would not budge.

I got very cross

In most private schools you will do GCSE english lang, english lit, a foreign language (sometimes two), 2 or 3 sciences, probably geog and history or one of those two, as extras you might do RE or music or art. UI was absolutely astounded at the GCSEs at my locap conmp which gets 34% A- C at GCSE. I thought may be soe children woudl do tourism and childcare but it was a massive massive majority doing what I would regard as non core subjects.

What choices are those local childrne getting? Unless their parents send them out of borough or to a church or private school or a better comp they are being consigned to a path which means at 11 they will not be able to get on in most careers, What is remoptely comprehensive about that school?

That makes me so angry, wordfactory. Why is she giving advice when she doesn't know what she's on about?

The thing is doing vocational subjects is all fine and well providing pupils have been informed of the consequences.

At least the new English Bach thing will no longer allow schools to pretend it aint so.

Abr1de it makes me apoplectic.

She was adamant that this young man would not have any doors closed to him and gave a few anecdotes about other students.

But the point is, this lad has set his sights high (and why shouldn't he?) and he can't take any chances.

Going to university at all will be a big deal, and very costly to him. He needs to wring every ounce of advantage that he can out of it.

Ending up at an ex polly to study law isn't going to get him where he wants to be...yet it's going to cost him the bloody same as a degree from Oxbridge.

Someone I know whose daughter got the best results at her comp went off to read a subject at an ex poly because all her friends were going. I don't know why her family who are quite bright nor her school were bothering to tell her that career woudl be closed off with a degree from there.

Mind you if I in my mid teens at a school withouttoo much informaton provision of fmy own bat could write to universities to find out which ones had separate entrance scholarhips exams I don't see why we always have to blame only schools and parents. Bright children can go on line and check things out although schools do have an influence.

Nor am I saying it's bad for schools to provide subjects which children who aren't very bright can cope with although I would have thought GCSEs in basic sbjects like maths and english are probably what even supermarkets want for check out operatives and always have.

The teacher writing in the weekend press also mentioned a student who might have got into Oxbridge. Her own colleague was pushing for him to go to Loughborough and I think the colleague was against elitism etc. Pehraps when the Government fills state schools with ex soldiers as it seems currently to plan that sort of thing might be less likely to happen and children might get silence in class.

Xenia. A brilliant young Head of English has left our local comp to go to Eton as an "ordinary" teacher. Why? Because he was fed up with the lack of aspiration amongst his colleagues. He felt they were afraid of the top universities.

I agree that people need the right advice-I remember a thread on MN where people were adamant that a 2:1 was a 2:1 where ever they studied and they simply wouldn't listen to the fact that a 2:1 in English at Oxford opened more doors than a 2:1 in English at Hull!
I think that in a comprehensive people simply don't always take in the advice offered such as tourism isn't a subject for those wishing to go to university. The difference is that in our area parents are well clued up and expect the schools to perform, and give the right advice, and so they do-they can't get away with less.
I read the article by the teacher in the Sunday Times, but you have to understand that she was teaching in a deprived area and in a normal comprehensive the DCs are motivated and listening. You feel very sorry for the motivated ones in the article, they have a right to peace and quiet.

Yes we cannot take this too far. Plenty of good schools in the state sector don't give bad advice. However I do think both sectors should listen to each other and children be given facts without bias.

Even if a university has the most innovative interesting couse in the UK for manymany jobs the person recruiting you may have no idea and it's the institution and degree result which counts. Nor is it just exam results either of course and some people are just useless at interviews and others aren't and a host of other factors arise.

Information is power. League tables are one source of informaion as is information hopefully mos of us give to our childrne such as if you polish your shoes before the interview and have a shower it might help although hopefully by the time they are at university they do know that kind of thing.

There were 2 teenagers on I think radio 4 with David Willetts this morning talking about their plans and university fees. What struck me most about those was how if their grammar and language were different they might stand a better chance.

Their grammar and language is really up to parents and not the school.
I agree that information is power. In our area parents are very well informed and so teachers need to have done their homework before a meeting or they would be torn to shreds!

It's very sad isn't it?
The very children whose parents are keyed in anyway are the ones whose schools tend to also give the right advice.

It's the children who are not receiving good advice at home, seem to get similarly lacking advice from school.

And altough I take Xenia's point that bright kids can look stuff up, I'm not convinced that given the option and assured by my teachers that all was fine, I wouldn't have taken a slew of vocational subjects as they always sound like a lot more fun than the old academic stuff.

And I don't think my Mum would have questioned it. She wouldn't have known better and would just be immeasurably proud that I was doing ten GCSEs or whatever.

Fortunately there wasn't much choice on offer...

That said, she would have strung anyone up later if she'd discovered they'd scuppered my chances for Oxbridge

Oh, you mean in Katherine Burbalsingh's massively bigoted, fictionalised story that she wrote for a very specific political end, Xenia? I'm not sure I'll be taking that as gospel, really. Pretty much carries the same weight as if I wrote a book in which private school teachers sat the kids down every day for lessons in fishforks.

If thats the case then I look forward to reading about all the legal cases against her,havent heard of any so far.

It's a novel!

\link{http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/20/katharine-birbalsingh-tory-conservative?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487\excellent interview with KB}

'She gets wildly worked up about the left's opposition to private education, which she says is absurd: "Because what am I going to do, get a sword and go and cut off the heads of all the heads of private schools, and steal their children? I'm not going to do that!" As far as I'm aware, this is not a proposal any opponent of private education has ever made.'

Straw man, much?

I like how she invented a husband to tell us how hot she is! I read a bit of that novel in the Times on Saturday, it's really turgid.

She's not very bright, is she?

Wow, that sounds rather hostile. She looks a lot better than some teachers.

I might be wrong but I suspect the top 50 schools provide / provided a quieter environment in which to have lessons than the comprehensive which is 5 minutes away from my house. Teenagers can be naughty and noisy anywhere but if children are from homes where parents pay fees or else a selective state grammar you probably do get less disruption in class. I don't think she'd have been likely to make up that anecdote. We've all heard it elsewhere too. I doubt it's an invention of the right to suggest that to put clever engaged children together apart from those who aren't the clever ones might do rather well out of it. I don't think setting in a big mixed comp does that as well.

No-one accused her of being ugly! She's a bonny lass. But that won't make an effective teacher of basket work now, will it?

joan are you seriously trying to say that disuption isn't a problem in some schools?

I am neither saying that seriously nor saying it jokingly - I didn't say it!
KB is a bit of a prat though, in my opinion, and she doesn't do herself any favours in that interview or in her story.

KB is unbelievable. I particularly enjoyed her moaning that what she had done was "career suicide". I read that in her front page lead, 3 page spread in The Sunday Times, serialising the book she had just had published.

Hmm, wish my career would commit suicide like that.

Personally, she strikes me as opportunist fantasist.

Why would anyone feel that? The more people who express views on schools the better. There isn't much money in books. I am sure she'd rather have a job.

I found KB quite believable-schools and DCs like that exist.I just object to people thinking it is typical!