The other thread will no longer accept messages but I wanted to make some more points

[fivecandles]

Lequeen, I do find it utterly bizarre that, as a parent, you or anybody else, would accept that if your child missed getting into a grammar school by a couple of marks you would be perfectly happy to accept that meant your child was not academic and therefore should pursue a more vocational route whatever that means.

One of my dc would almost certainly fail to get into a GS. This does not mean I think she should take up a hairdressing course and stop learning GCSEs. I see no good reason why she shouldn't get a good academic education with as much support as possible and go on to university. She has suggested she might enjoy primary teaching and I think she'd make an excellent teacher. The idea that she shouldn't be able to go to university or learn languages and should settle with her lot just because she's not ever going to be a nuclear physicist is absolutely staggering.

I also find your idea that it would be better to segregate underperforming students into an entirely different school for their self-esteem staggering.

Why can't you just be honest about it lequeen. There are no advantages whatsoever for the majority of pupils who do not get into the GS. All the advantages go to the kids who DO get in and these are the pupils who are already doing well (and the research indicates most likely to be well off).

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that privileged and clever kids don't deserve the very best education and I absolutely agree that they should be challenged and supported but this can and should and is being done in the same school as students who are struggling academically and are likely to be from very different social backgrounds are also supported to achieve.

It seems to me that there is no easy answer to the ideal education system. Everyone's views stem from personal experience and circumstance which will vary massively or as I found your opinion can change with different DC.

My DD (now at Uni) sailed through primary into a good catchment area comp, streamed into mostly top sets, had a nice hardworking group of friends who are all now at Uni including one at Oxford.

It never at any point occured to me to send her private or to the neighbouring grammar. Like most people who have an able child and a good catchment school I thought our education system was perfectly good enough.

Fast forward a few years and my DS is due to go to secondary next year. After a long battle to get his dyslexia diagnosed (end of yr5) he is now 2yrs behind his peers in some areas despite having a good IQ. We moved house a few years back just outside the catchment area for the very good but oversubscribed school my DD went to. I naively thought that all comps would be as good so it wouldn't matter.

Our current comp is massive (1800 places) and has just had a poor ofsted. I have visited it twice and have no confidence that it would help my DS to catch up, I think if he goes there he will stay behind for the next 5 years or worse. The two schools I think would be better for him he has very little chance of getting into.

We are now looking at some independent schools as we are desperate to give him the best chance possible. I have been shocked as to how the state system has failed him (and others) none of which occured to me when my more able DD was going through the system.

I agree with a poster who said that people who are happy with the state system are those whose DC are thriving in it. When you have a child that isn't or your don't have a decent nearby comp it is a whole different ball game.

I agree with Milly R about the chasing C's for league tables. Two of the local comps are doing this now, making the DC take GCSEs in years 7, 8 and 9. My dyslexic DS will probably go into year 7 with the literacy level of a 9 year old child. It will not be in his best interests to take any GCSEs at this stage. I really hate this new system.

Taking GCSEs in year 7?????

How on earth do they do this??

I have never heard of a school doing this, how on earth do they get DCs up to GCSEs in one year when they have just started secondary?

They do one per year from year 7. Only in soft subjects I think- Astronomy, Horticulture etc...possibly RE or a language in yr 9. The idea is supposedly that they get used to exams and get a raft of qualifications before yr 10 therefore inspiring them.

In reality as Milly R said it is just the schools way of boosting league tables with C grades. It's how a particular failing comp in our area got its A-C level up from 30% to 82% in the space of four years. When you did deeper there are very few A's.

Smoke and mirrors!

*dig

That's rubbish, ithought, no way should an 11 year old be taking exams designed for a 16 year old! They have no chance of getting the best grades that they should be capable of. I would be really angry if my DD was forced to do that.

A raft of C grades when they would have got A* if they had taken them at the correct time could ruin a bright DCs chances of getting into a top university. Retaking them to get higher grades will not help as most top unis specify that the grades must be earned at the first attempt.

I am really shocked to hear some schools are doing this. I would complain very loudly to the school and to the LA about this - even involve local papers if you need to. This is seriously compromising the education of your DCs.

I was concerned when the Ebacc came in that grammar schools would also start pushing children down a narrow route in order to increase their EBacc numbers, as many comps do with GCSE results. Luckily this hasn't happened at the school DS goes to. They have said that if a child particularly wants to go down a languages or Sciences route, the school will not force them to do a humanity subject.

If DD does go to the comp, I am going to contact my MP about the GCSE in a year situation. I don't think the LEA can do anything about it unless the Government changes the law to stop schools doing this. I also feel sorry for the teachers who have to try and get younger children through GCSE History etc in a year. Subjects like history require a social understanding that is partially based on maturity; it must be really difficult for the teachers. There are certainly teachers complaining about it on the TES forum.

ithoughtthiswasoriginal I agree but also wanted to add that it can even vary massively within a school according to the cohort.

My DD1 is very unfortunate in that is in a class that is very low achieving - large number of very disruptive and disengaged children and even the top group is not high flying at all, I would say is standard national average, so she has very little chances to be stretched and appears very disengaged.

She also has had some problems which could have been helped much more if she had been in a normal class with not so many problem children and a teacher that wasn't uber stretched.

My DS1 in the same school only one year behind and is in a cohort with some extremely bright children. He is also in the top set but they are way above the national average, and getting progressed very well (by the same teacher that my DD had last year and totally failed her!).

I agree Carrot. This is why we are looking at independent for our DS if he can't get into the neighbouring comp my DD attended.

The comp that has gone down this route has a largely deprived intake (obviously we are not deprived or we couldn't consider indies) and it still has an on site police officer. Four years ago very few of the kids actually sat all gcses, so I suppose for a lot of the children a handful of C grades is better than what they might of had before.

However just by attending that school I imagine you are severely narrowing or ruling out having the opportunity to read certain subjects at Oxbridge or a RG considering that these Uni's look back as far as GCSE now.

My DS may never do either of these things but I can't bear to think I might have wrote off his chances age 11 based on the school I chose for him.

LovetheHArp what a shame for your DD. It is incredible how DC can have such differing experiences in the same school even.

Milly R this is how I feel about the system. At the open days everyone was all 'isn't this wonderful, gcses at such a young age' and I'm a bit no, not really.
My DS who already struggles with written expression will need all the maturity a 16 year old can muster to tackle certain subjects. To put him through this earlier seems like an act of cruelty and sabotage.

Quite apart from the impact it has on results, I also don't like the pressure of it. At the comp, the teacher told me that doing 3 GCSEs in year 9 was a better use of year 9, because the kids has settled into the school by then and so could do with the focus of an exam.

DS is currently in year 9 and I really like it that he doesn't have any external exams this year. It gives him a chance to broaden his academic interests and relax a bit before getting in to a 4 year exam stress.

Year seven would have been even worse. He needed time to improve his English.

MillyR How can you call the EBacc a "narrow route"?
To get the EBacc you have to cover the (academic) bases so you have English, Maths, Science, MFL and a Humanity. It is a measure of breadth of study; that's the whole point of it. It includes MFL because we had got to the situation where less than half of pupils were taking a MFL GCSE. It stops the smoke'n'mirrors of schools pretending that one GCSE + a BTec-that-is-worth-4GCSE (yeah, right) ticks the '5 or more GCSE' box.

If your DC doesn't want to take up the subjects then that is their prerogative but at least schools are ensuring that these subjects are available now (loads of schools stopped doing MFL in KS4) and encouraging the pupils to take them.

I'm not disagreeing with the existence of the Ebacc. I think if all schools are required to offer students the opportunity of taking the Ebacc subjects that is an excellent thing. I certainly don't think the Ebacc itself is narrow, but making all pupils take the Ebacc would narrow the range of pathways available to pupils.

But in a school where the overwhelming majority of pupils already take Ebacc subjects, I think it is a good thing that there may be a few individual cases where pupils would be allowed to choose a different range of subjects.

A pupil may, for example, want to do French, German, Latin, Art, 2xEnglish, 3xScience, Maths and IT (often compulsory). Another student may want to do 5xScience, Resistant Materials, French, 2xEnglish, Maths and IT. I don't think there is a good reason to insist they do Geography or History. I think my DS will choose options that would cover the requirements of the EBacc, but I am glad that it will be his choice to do Geography, rather than being made to do it.

My point was that parents and teachers pay lip service to comprehensive education but they don't actually want to teach highly disruptive children or have their children in a classroom with highly disruptive children. People on this thread who claim to support comprehensive education have clearly stated this.

Of course they don't want to have DCs in a classroom where they are disrupted and they don't want to teach disruptive DCs. It is possible to teach in a comprehensive and send your DCs to one and not be disrupted!

I was a supply teacher. It had the huge advantage that if schools were not doing anything about disruptive DCs I only went once. There were plenty of schools where I could get work.
I was quite happy with difficult DCs if the Head and staff were giving back up to deal with them and there were clear sanctions that were followed. The ones that I didn't return to were the ones where you were left to manage on your own and the DCs were free to disrupt.

I can't see any point in sitting GCSEs early.

It is all very well going to a comprehensive open day when they are showing off their best BUT you also need to visit on a normal working day and watch classes , DCs as they change lessons, break time, the litter etc and all the little things that add up to an overall picture

I know grammar school pupils who go to tutors.

By MillyR "You are clearly unprepared to listen to anybody else's perspective. It has nothing to do with the existence of a grammar school that my local comprehensive forces children to take GCSEs at 13. It has nothing to do with the grammar school that the comprehensive school forces children to take vocational BTECs at GCSE. I went to a much smaller comp in a grammar school area and we could do a full range of academic, creative or practical subjects. Comprehensive schools are now forcing children down particular paths now because they are chasing Cs in easy subjects at GCSE for league table reasons.

Our comprehensive school isn't that far behind the grammar in the league tables, but if you take a closer look at what 5 GCSEs kids are getting, the difference becomes obvious."

Spot on.

It doesn't at ours SkiLift-all comprehensives are different. There seems to be a view that there is such a thing as THE comprehensive.
I know it goes on in some schools, but it doesn't everywhere-they are all very different.

Very interesting thread.

A couple of points that I might have missed don't think have been made

1. There are 'secondary modern' schools in areas with no grammar schools, where socail selection has replaced academic selection. These schools end up with an unequal share of FSM, EAL and lower ability pupils. This has nothing to do with 'academic selection'. Rather a rejection of the school by more affluent parents. Because these schools also tend not to offer MFL or three sciences at GCSE - even the brightest pupils have little chance of progressing to a RG University.

1. Why the assumption that one school can adequately meet the needs of all pupils? That there is such a thing as 'the perfect comprehensive'? Some children need structure and discipline (particularly those from chaotic backgrounds), some respond better to a more 'child-centred' education, some love academic challenge, and some prefer 'learning by doing'. How can we expect one school to achieve all this at once?

In common with several other posters - I also went to comprehensive that had recently converted from a secondary modern. Ah - the joy of the secondary modern teachers who were so ill-suited for 'grammar calibre' pupils. Most of mine took early retirement (a real lesson in be careful what you wish for - I bet they spent their early careers moaning that the Grammar got all the 'easy' pupils).

Anyway, in my day - the school had seriously excellent woodwork and metal work departments. With several lovely and truly inspirational teachers (who were unburdened with formal teaching qualifications). We also had a full time gardening teacher and amazing cookery facilities.

The school apparently retains some of that (though not the gardening teacher) but the focus on league tables and academic subjects means it's up keep hasn't been an investment priority. A real loss to later generations of the more practically minded pupils.

some respond better to a more 'child-centred' education, some love academic challenge, and some prefer 'learning by doing'. How can we expect one school to achieve all this at once?

I seem to be missing the point here. Surely everyone looks for the school to suit their DC? Every comprehensive isn't the same.My friend has one DS at a very traditional, very strict comprehensive, but she felt that the younger DS wouldn't fit in and he goes to a more relaxed, child centred comprehensive. They are both good schools and they both get good results. I find it very weird that there seems to be something called 'THE' comprehensive as if they are all the same.

Exoticfruits, you're still not responding to the point I'm making. What happens to those disruptive kids, the ones who do not respond to in school interventions? If you want a genuinely comprehensive education, they have to be in the classroom with other pupils. They can't sit in isolation forever - that isn't meeting their educational needs.

There is something called THE comprehensive, exotic. It is our catchment school. I too looked for "the school to suit my DC" but the LEA admissions rules had other plans.
We don't all have the luxury of choice like your friend did.