Areas where state schools are better than private?

[Narrie]

Does anyone live in an area where the state schools are really better than the private ones? I picked this up elsewhere but am afraid to comment there.

I have lived and worked in the Midlands where there are few private schools to choose but the state schools are not very good. I have lived in Nottingham, where again I felt the state schools were poor.

Even in London there were some awful schools and private was best.

I currently live in Cornwall having got here working in Exeter, Plymouth and Barnstaple. None of the state schools were good there.

Just wondered where the good state provision is. Is it just odd schools within a mass of poor provision or are there really whole areas where state schools are better?

Thanks.

(PS I have my own DC in a boarding school partly because of the state schooling and partly because we move around so much)

I agree. If you have girls or boys who are keen to be the best at everything they tend also to be good at their sport and music. Millfield is different because it takes those who don't do well in exams and is then very good at sport.

Solihull and Knowledge are very good. No need to go private here for academic or music.

Sorry Knowle not knowledge - predictive text. People move to the area to avoid private school kids. In most schools in the area they pretty much guarantee your child will get the minimum five and have plenty of competition to up their game with parents who are keen to get results. No grammars and whilst their are two private schools that get good results often it is for the siblings who need more encouragement.

It is not right to compare a grammar with private schools unless you only pick super selective privates. I could say king Edwards in Birmingham but that really is super super selective and not representative of the general education in the area which the op had asked. Of course it will beat many privates as it does not have any of those annoying underachievers.

The fact remains that a truly comprehensive school will never get as impressive exam results as an academically selective school, be that state grammar or private. It is however, entirely probable that in some of our outstanding comprehensives, that the top 10% do just as well as the top 10% in a grammar school. Having taught in 2 very high achieving comps, I would suggest this is very likely. It is also possible that the bottom 10% do better in a company than in a secondary modern. Grammar schools do not necessarily mean better exam results for each individual child, just that the most able go there.

That is the fascinating issue. Do moderately bright children get pulled up in a selective school in either sector where everyone is bright and 100% will go to good universities and would just coast and become hairdressers in comps or private schools where girls learn to cook and sew and marry well? I think they do and they do better there.

Many children are fairly weak and go with the herd. If the herd is a typical comp lowish standard they will laze away with their peers and leave school at 16. If everyone is working very hard they are less likely to drift towards a low mean. Thus segregation by brain and IQ tends to work for the bright or moderately bright and is worth paying or moving or tutoring for.

Do all children at all selective schools go to "good" universities? I cannot believe that.

Nobody is supposed to leave education at 16, any more.

Yes, just about all. It depends how selective but my children in top 20 schools I don't think I know any who have not. In fact it's a great thing as a prospective parent to check "destination of leavers". Schools won't tell you that if they aren't up to much so it's a good thing to probe.

Habs Girls Herts www.habsgirls.org.uk/sub_page.php?agegroup=sixth_form&area=results_destinations&page_id=2&section_id=5

Merchant Taylors www.mtsn.org.uk/fileadmin/content/_Admissions/Leavers_Destinations_2011.pdf

There is a good chart on page 29 of the Sutton Trust report www.suttontrust.com/research/university-admissions-by-individual-schools/ with lists of schools and numbers of places at good universities.

But you implied ALL selective schools have all moderately bright children who Will all go to "good universities", not just pupils from the "top 20 schools". Which is it?

And how do YOU define a "good university", anyway?

On the list of Haberdasher's destinations are Loughborough, *Plymouth & Bradford. None of those are Russell Group or even Sutton Trust.

Loughborough, Lincoln, Leeds College of Art, Nottingham Trent on the Merchant Taylor list.

*ex-polys

I'm betting those lists leave out the people who didn't go to Uni at all, too.

... Sussex, Aston, Hull. And my favourite "Reapplying."

'typical comp, lowish standard'.... Gaah!

I don't think they miss out failures because if you are that selective people dont' fail and my daughter was at Habs so I know where 100% of her year went.They are excellent results. Many schools choose not to publish because their children don't do well.

Top 20 are the schools our children went to.

In essence little does your child better than having a mother who picked a career which enables her to pay fees at a school like this if you have a child bright enough to get in.

Obviously if parents are different and happy with their own state schools that's great too. Let me see if I can find a few others perhaps in the state sector too.

Henrietta Barnet, very good selective state school
www.hbschool.org.uk/stylesheet.asp?file=1310201114225641

Then sutton trust found that 5 schools (selective) send more children than 2000 others to Oxbridge.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14069516

Low expectations is the problem and peer pressure to be hair dressers and "do beauty". If your friends are heading for the ex poly you will.

I think the destinations of leavers I have posted are very good. Yes sometimes one person will reapply - perhaps they will only consider Oxford and it rejected them so they want a second go or perhaps they did no work and got useless grades but very very few compared to most comps so if you want that influence of excellence then selective education achieves what comps don't.

Parents who don't agree have lots of comps to choose from many of which do fine too.

Damn, the sixth form we visited last night had a full destination list for every leaver last year... left it in the car.

For the love of god - my child in a state school with average results knows no-one who wants to be a hair dresser or 'do beauty', and certainly no-one who's being 'pressured into' it. And the sixth form we visited last night was very clued up about Russell Group, Oxbridge, facilitating subjects etc - clearly an expectation that that is something many will want to try for.

Talk about islands and Habs and money, Xenia, and shut up about things about which you know nothing.

The bottom line if comp parents are happy that's great. If they think private school pupils in these few top 20 schools have lulled themselves into a false picture that their chidlren do better there that's fine too - you can just laugh quietly at us.

However I know my local comp 34% a A- C including English and maths which is 3 mniutes from here. I know whta GCSEs it does - travel and tourism childcare and all the rest. I know it is absolutely dire. I also know London is different though and indeed its inner London comps now out do Hull comps by 3 grades because inner London if full of hard working immigrants and has a lot of high level degree Teach First graduates who want to work in London not Hull. (Sorry Hull)

I don't want to laugh quietly at you. I want you to stop saying things which are ignorant and ill-informed.

Is loughborough in the russle group of universities

'travel and tourism childcare and all the rest'.

Do 'the rest' include, say, English and Maths? Or just hairdressing?

You 'know' your local comp as I 'know' my local private schools - pretty meaningless in the larger scheme of things.

ooooops Didn't intend to post that! Sort of thinking out loud!

What is the point being made? Children in state and private selective schools get better exam results. My view is that there is also added value of pulling up slackers too.

Others think a comprehensive ensures chidlren get better exam results.

So what is the problem? All of England has comps so we're all happy.

50% of chidlren at Oxbridge went to state schools although te 8% at private schools get 50% of the places and of that 50% many are posh comps in leafy suburbs and also state grammars.

That list of 5 schools that get more Oxbridge places than 2000 other schools includes a stat comp I think - Hills Road.

Xenia that five school thing omits to say how absolutely vast Hills Rd is. Eton is huge too. The other three are phenomenal in terms of percentage of their Y13 in, but it's really that figure which should be looked at for all schools, not the raw number.

Results and leavers destinations for one of my nearish comprehensives are published on line here. They look rather good to me, obviously not quite as good as xenia's egs, but it's a school with a mixed intake and clearly the top ones are performing well.

I do think it's nice to be able to see where people go, although I think publishing results/destinations by name online is rather disrespectful of students privacy. I suppose they get the students' permission first (they didn't print their lower A level results this year due to objections - they always have in the past), but I imagine it would have to be a collective vote rather than universal agreement.

Thanks. The private schools don't publish the names. Unless you have the child's consent it breaches data protection law. However the state school here may have obtained their consent in which case it's okay.

I certainly thnkk it helps for parents to see where people go.

Hills Road Sixth Form is very selective.

Not sure where I stand on this debate.

On the one hand, I regret that none of mine will have the driven, high achieving geeky stresshead cohort that DH and I got for free at the local grammars. On the other hand, at a good comp, the child who arrives at 11 with low expectations, and wouldn't have got into a grammar or selective, can rise gently to the top just by moving sets each year. That would be DS1, then, who has SEN and was barely 'accessing' school (how I hate that term) at 11 but now has a decent crop of A* to B GCSEs, largely through going to a school very much set up to meet his needs.

DS2 is an oddity who will do very well in the few subjects he's keen on (music, drama, maths), but will never get that shiny set of many A*. At his current school, though, that's seen as just fine, and possibly having encouragement and confidence in his preferred career path is more valuable to him than feeling a failure at a pushier school.

DD (steady, bright, hard-working, sniffily disapproving of messers-around) would I think be better at a good girls' grammar or private school. But as I've slightly missed the boat on earning enough for that, and we don't have grammars, she'll have to see what she can make of DS2's school.