Will free schools drive up standards? Read Toby Young's guest post and join the conversation

[ElenMumsnetBloggers]

Are free schools ready to fall or fly? Do they really drive up standards or are they a snobbish gimmick? And should more parents be setting up their own schools? Journalist and producer Toby Young explains why he set up the West London Free School and what makes the free school proposition an exciting one. Join the conversation that Toby's begun and have your say on free schools.

And also I would prefer a study of schools in our country alone, not over teh whole of Europe. I don't know what standards are like in every country in Europe and can't be sure that they compare with teh standards of our selective schools.

claig, there are countries that still operate selective systems as you would like to see in the UK. Germany for example.

What do you reckon to the German system?

Germany. Maybe that explains their great economy and why they are bailing out teh whole of Europe single-handedly. Maybe we should take a leaf out of their book.

Did the Germans have doubts about the evidence-based PISA OECD report? Did they not implement its proposals?

Article here about the great grammar schools of the 50s

"In 1959, grammar school pupils represented the brightest fifth of their age group, yet nearly 40 per cent failed to pass more than three O-levels. Complacency seems to have been endemic. In one Dorset grammar inspected by HMI in 1956, a third of pupils left with no O-levels, yet the report concluded that this school, which took only the brightest 17 per cent, was ?good?."

"A 1950s Ministry of Education study found that fewer than 0.3 per cent of pupils leaving with two A-levels were from the unskilled working class. Even among the top grammar school streams, a third from the poorest backgrounds left without an O-level. Many poorer children left even before taking public examinations.

Even before the 1944 Act, a child at grammar school was often a sign of an already upwardly mobile working-class family. Rhodes Boyson, a minister under Margaret Thatcher, was portrayed as the archetypal poor boy who succeeded solely as a result of his grammar school education. But what was cause and what effect? His father was a full-time union official and councillor who, unusually, owned his house before the war. He was even chairman of governors at Rhodes? school."

Interesting reading.

Interesting article about Germany

Nevertheless, the three-track system continues to have deep support within society, partly because of Germany's past education and economic success. Most prized?and staunchly defended?are Germany's academically rigorous Gymnasien.

The public want it because it is tried and tested and works. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It seems there were some Hamburgistas who wanted to change it, but there was a backlash and teh people defeated these proposals. So teh German system is safe for teh time being.

It doesn't sound like they were that good in those days, but they got a lot better.

Adrian Elliott's article about grammar schools looks at teh 1950s. Why does he stop there? Why doesn't he look into the results in later years and even their results today?

They got a lot better? They were on their way out by 1965!

Ah, Germany. The country that was exposed by PISA as having a huge gulf between the academic outcomes of native German families and the results of second and third generation Turkish Gastarbeiter families (rather like the situation in urban areas in the UK with great ethnic diversity).

The country where there is also starting to be middle class flight to independent schools.

Better, but not perfect by any means.

What an interesting thread: fivecandles is saying it all so much better than I can, but I agree with every word.

And Claig if you can't comprehend facts and evidence and you're going to make it all up as you go along... couldn't you at least spell 'the' correctly? It's as though a lolcat is trying to have a debate.

ElaineReese, I appreciate your say.
But just as every dog should have its say, so should every lolcat.

Halp, I haz got a factz. Doez not want.

As Einstein said
"If teh facts don't fit the theory, change teh facts"

Well, quite!

Quite. So who has the real facts? The chicken or the egg?

This is the "fact" that fivecandles mentioned

"In the real world if you take 2 children born with the same IQ there is a 9 month difference in their educational achievement by the age of 3 if one is born into poverty."

I think it is total rot. For a start how do you measure the IQ of a child at birth? If I could find the link to these "facts", I could have a field day with it. And that is a real fact.

I believe in questioning "facts" and "experts", not blindly following them. That's what my education taught me, I owe that to my teachers and my schools.

It's comparatively straightforward, actually.

1. You you start with a quantitative (number-based) study. To do this, you take a very large cohort of children born during the same week, say 1000 or 5000, and collect various key pieces of data, such as their parents' highest level of education, whether the parents do unskilled, skilled, or professional work, household income, any health problems, postcode, gender, ethnicity, birth order and so on. You make this sampling information comparatively broad because you don't quite know what it would be best to look for at the beginning of the study, and you need to keep an open mind about which variables are likely to be most influential. It needs to be a big sample as you are looking at population trends as a whole, and the odd exceptional case needs to be disregarded in studies of this type, otherwise your data will be skewed and tell an inaccurate story about the experiences of the many as opposed to the few (although I will come to that later).

1. You revisit the cohort at set intervals, which you have decided beforehand, asking questions or doing tests appropriate to the age group to establish things like cognitive ability (aka IQ) and academic ability, usually using tests that have been standardised in some way (i.e. used on tens of thousands of children and regularly recalibrated to ensure they are accurate).

1. An ideal study would follow the children, say, every 1-3 years until adulthood. Again, you decide the frequency beforehand.

1. You analyse the resulting statistics with a fine tooth comb to find out where the undesirable patterns are, for example if you find that in CM23 children with average levels of cognitive ability do better than expected given their home backgrounds, but in CM24 the same types of children do a lot worse, you then compare the data to information you have about local schooling and immigration patterns and try to work out what the problem might be. Or you could do it the other way around, depending on your research question. For example, you might ask which children do a lot better than expected given their home backgrounds, and follow them through the data to work out why this might be. An example of this might be CB2 and CB22. The latter has less staff turnover whereas the former has greater staff turnover. This can also result in different educational outcomes for the same types of children (and not always what you might expect, as schools where nobody ever leaves on the staff can become a bit complacent, for example).

1. The data and your analysis then gets put into the public domain for people to pick holes in, in case you have made any errors, and eventually converted into policy, which takes 5-10 years to come on stream in any useful way.

1. I referred to the experiences of the many, but the experiences of the few are also interesting to researchers as well. To find out more about them, you tend to use qualitative research methods. This means (usually) interviewing families and children to get richer, more detailed and individual data so that you get a more accurate understanding of what is going on rather than just relying on numerically-based data. We also used special surveys and focus groups, or film/record people in action. For example. it may have been that Einstein came from a bilingual household where children's speech is often delayed, or he may have been hearing impaired, or he may have been an elective mute, hence late onset of speech. Similarly we often hear about Churchill being dyslexic and a poor school pupil at Harrow, but if you look at his family situation you can see there are various compensatory factors there that enabled him to develop an acute ability in the area of oratory instead. These individual situations are then written up as case studies, or grouped with other similar ones to form smaller studies for other researchers to critique and test.

1. We know these techniques are robust because both private, commercial and public sector research and marketing organisations (including MN) use them to beneficial effect. These techniques have been around decades.

PK, so after all that are you saying you belive the "fact"

"In the real world if you take 2 children born with the same IQ there is a 9 month difference in their educational achievement by the age of 3 if one is born into poverty."

How do you measure the IQ at birth? And even if you come up with a "number", what does it really mean?

PS The most commonly used intelligence test for children these days is the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), which moves away from being reliant on speech ability, as early tests were. This test is best used with children over 6. Psychologists also use the British Ability Scale tests for children from about 2.5 years upwards. Below that children vary so dramatically at the same age it's pointless testing, IMVHO!

Claig, you wouldn't measure IQ at birth, you would probably measure it at 3 and 6 in a logitudinal study to give the results the other poster was on about, and then link it to the earlier data about household income etc. That's most likely what she means.

It's like measuring their height at birth and then saying they are behind at 3 years, when we all know that they may have a growth spurt at 8.

"We have poor immigrant children and children of asylum seekers who enter the country at teh age of 9 etc. wityhout any English skills who quickly catch up and often surpass the other pupils."

These children may be from households that were very educated in their home country. My best friend at school was an asylum seeker. Her parents spoke no English and worked as cleaners (one by day, one by night). They had however been nurses in their home country and valued education very, very highly.

You cannot contrast the achievement of migrant groups with those of home-grown underprivileged groups.

Also, I don't think they had to measure IQ at birth. I would guess they have assumed that the population has an average spread of IQ at birth and then have measured attainment later in life.

This report from the child poverty action group is an interesting read and describes it better:
www.cpag.org.uk/campaigns/education/EducationBriefing120907.pdf