Lack of aspiration in school leavers : regional impact

[Talkinpeace]

I've just been to visit friends south of the Humber.
Wandering around the small market town near their house DH, DD, DS and I were watching the scooter kids.
So i looked up the secondary school and surprise, surprise its not great on getting kids to Russell Group Universities.
Why?
Because there is NOBODY round there to give them a role model to do so.

The rich people are hereditary farmers, hereditary fishing captains, hereditary owners of amusement parks and a few incoming executives in the energy industry.
Nothing that the child of a shop worker or farm labourerer or fishing crew can even relate to.

I cannot think of how to see if those kids actually have the academic potential to escape their circumstances without moving to the South East and adding to the brain drain.

But hopefully somebody on here will be more optimistic for the area than I?

Are you sure?

South of the Humber is Lincolnshire - a county with grammar schools, many of which make the top 200 list, and have excellent leavers' destinations.

I don't know that area but I do know that we have a real issue in my part of the south east. In fact there are serious issues in many areas and children leaving school with no real aspirations. Obviously the consequences of this can be unplanned early parenthood and limited income etc.

In my area we have a local Education charity which works with vulnerable families to try and improve the prospects of the whole family. So if the Mum or Dad can't read then we do our utmost to help them access the right courses. Just this can improve the outlook for children.

There is also a push to help the bright children reach for the sky as it were. Some ARE getting into RG universities because they are now applying for them which at one time they were not doing.

There must be similar schemes in the Humber region....or I would hope there were.

meditrina
For every Grammar School there are two Secondary Moderns.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/education/school_tables/secondary/12/html/bacc_925.stm?compare=
Which is why, out of the 58 Secondaries in the County, 26 got less than 10% of their kids through the Ebacc last year.
And another 16 got less than 1/3 of their pupils through it ....

Selective education makes it even worse as the children of the underclass are even less likely to get into a Grammar school than they are to rise to the top of a Comp.

It always irks that help for youngsters is rarely offered beyond 3 miles of central London. So many schemes are set up to help deprived children there, but often the recipients are the kids of ambitious immigrants and deprived or not would have made it. Is any meaningful help ever directed at kids in, say, Great Yarmouth? I'm not saying these kids would ever have been/be "Russell Group material" [beginning to really hate the "material" word as used on MN] but I'm sure they could benefit from the odd cultural experience as much as anyone from Tower Hamlets. I think organisations can't be bothered to travel round the outposts of the British Isles when they can nip in a taxi to do some good and be back in time for lunch.

lainie
I think you might have hit on part of the problem.
The outreach people are unwilling to reach out of their own comfort zone - and the back end of Cleethorpes did not make ME feel at home ....

Oh, I know that secondary moderns go with grammars. But it means that your assertion that there is nothing for academically bright pupils is misplaced.

The question "what's best for those who aren't in grammars/top set comprehensive" is rather different. And valid in the SE as much as anywhere else.

Same thing in this part of east anglia.
Ds is in year 5 and doing ok in primary school. They were doing something at school and he tells he when asked what he wanted to be whrn he left school he said " geography professor" and his teacher said " you mean teacher". And he said " no professor working in a university" she was most sarcastic and " prople from here dont do that kind of job". In yr 5!!!!It sort of underlines the lack of ambition that starts at a ypung age here. Most people never ho far from the village. I continue to tell him he could be an astronaut or an explorer or whatever he wants if he puts his mind to it.

meditrina
The town we were walking in only has a Secondary Modern.
The nearest Grammar is in the next town along - many miles away.
Low aspiration parents will send their kids to the 'local' school.
High aspiration parents pay for tutoring and get their kids into the selective schools.
And because the kids are segregated at 11 they never mix again socially, perpetuating and exacerbating the problem.

BUT
It's not just Lincolnshire.
Cornwall and Devon and Cumbria and Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire all have problems too.

How do you get kids to aspire to what they have never encountered?

Cleethorpes/Grimsby is NE Lincs and has high social deprivation. Living on the other side of the Humber is just the same. The LEAs of Hull & East Yorkshire do not have an outstanding secondary school between them. There is no grammar system and if you want to consider Hull's position in the league tables we part company on whether grammar schools are per se a bad thing.

I think your statement that people in the area will tutor to get into selectives is wide of the mark. There is no need to tutor, only one of the independents is selective beyond ability to pay. Demand does not outstrip supply because of low parental aspiration in the unemployed and low wages for the employed. Check the figure for percentage of those employed who work in the public sector - it's high.

The children's university is probably the best thing going on in the area and it runs on a shoestring.

The Ebacc isn't everything anyway. We had a student last year who got 16 A*s including Greek and Latin. But because he didn't do History or Geography he counts as a failure to Michael Gove. Sometimes the statistics don't tell the full story. There are many children with aspirations out there we just never hear about them in the news, unfortunately.

BUT
Ebacc is a guide, not the problem.
Nor are tutoring or grammars : when people cannot afford bus fares and lunches, let alone anything posh.

How do we get kids to even conceive of doing something other than their parents?

It's not a guide to very much. The aspiration thing starts much earlier I think. Attitudes towards education are often set before secondary schools.
Your point about transport is sound when I was at grammar school (1990-97) we were entitled to free transport if you lived 3 miles away. That's no longer the case, and has probably had an impact on people's decisions.

The city where I live has areas of huge deprivation economically, socially and culturally. There is particular estate which has a very insular reputation. The DC (especially the young women) rarely leave it, and some barely visit the city centre (20 min bus ride) let alone go further afield. This is not necessarily to do with the cost, just that it is not somewhere for them

There are lots of projects going in to do 'empowerment' and to 'raise aspirations' and they inevitably fail. This is because they want individuals to change, asking them to fit the model given to them.

For example, this area is a (so-called) 'teenage pregnancy hot spot', so lots of money has gone into try and prevent the young women from having babies as this is deemed to be a barrier to achievement. But motherhood is one of the view things open to them which gives them a sense of worth.

And lots of the research shows is what these women would like is to have their children whilst young, and then go to college/develop a career when their kids start school. This is their aspiration.

However, this is not actually often not possible, because of the cuts to adult education and the lack of other opportunities. So nothing changes. They have their kids, and are prevented from doing anything different with their lives.

If we want to encourage people, then we have to allow a range of routes to get places, but that is not a message the policy makers want to hear.

Taken from the children's university website linked above. They start with primary age children.

"Many of our children lack aspirations and ambition and this module solves the problem, we have so much evidence to support this!

We introduce young people to the ?world of work? by taking them out to the work place, mostly the City?s blue chip companies. They can then be encouraged to see that there is a job out there for them whatever their ability or interest. They will then know what?s needed to get these jobs and usually it?s by working hard at school to get the necessary qualifications and skills.

This module enables the kids to see a PURPOSE to learning and actually encourages them to WANT to learn as opposed to being told they HAVE to learn.

It?s important in that some of our children are from 2 or 3 generations of unemployment and they now know there?s no need to accept that they should be a 4th! "

"*So I looked up the secondary school and surprise, surprise its not great on getting kids to Russell Group Universities.
Why?
Because there is NOBODY round there to give them a role model to do so."

And your point is? DC have friends who are coming out of Russell Group Universities with degrees and Masters but who cannot get a job. In a few years time Higher Education and tuition fees will be exposed as the next big Mis-selling Scandal.

I'm a secondary teacher in rural East Anglia. I am currently feeling really demoralised about my job, because I just never realised what a massive barrier lack of aspiration is. Some of the students I teach have never been to Cambridge, despite living only a short distance away, really. I wanted to be a teacher so I could make a difference in young people's lives, but it's like banging your head against a brick wall - who needs qualifications when you're going to work on the family farm anyway? Because it's not an area of urban deprivation or large-scale unemployment, it's not perceived as a problem area, but the parochial mentality is really entrenched. If you talk to the students about where they live, they're full of how boring it is, and how there's nothing for them to do, but somehow the idea that education could represent a way out, or that they could aspire to anything different, just won't sink in. I wish I knew what the answer is!

FFS, the MN obsession with RG Universities strikes again.

lljkk
Its not an obsession so much as one of the few chances that bright kids have to get out of the grinding poverty in which they find themselves.
What better measures/methods do you have for getting bright kids to not be stuck in deadend jobs because they do not think they can do better?

purits
Higher education is NOT a scandal and is still an investment, so long as the course and learning approaches are seen as a method into "a career" rather than a direct path into "that subject"
but there are too many people with degrees now, and not nearly enough with high level apprenticeships like plumbers and mechanics and dryliners and commercial window fitters
because idiots like bliar and Broon could not see that degrees were not the solution to all ills.

biscuit
is there scope for working with the parents to encourage their kids to 'have a go'?

Biscuit I wonder if we are in the same place.
We are less than an hour from Cambridge. There are great completely free museums and my ds is the only child in his class who has been there. Bonkers

lljkk, what are you saying.
Are you complainging about the RG part of it?

op, one of the places you talked about has having problems I know a bit about.
And that particular county has many areas where there is aspiration, but agree that some pockets dont.

I have known for a long while that lack of aspiration is a barrier.
It actually goes deeper than that.
In the pockets in the county that I am talking about, a lot of them feel very uncomfortable travelling further out than a 6 mile radius literally.
They feel scared and out of their comfort zone.
Unfortunately for them, most dangers are inside their particular zones, not outside them.
And what is inside is normal for them. And they often think that everyone in the country lives likes them, when they dont.

Why the obsession with grammar schools and RG universities? I went to a sec mod followed by a non RG uni. I'm not on the fast path to CEO of my company but I'm doing better than ok.

I see this obsession a lot in threads about grammar schools. Apparently if you are in the top set at a Sec Mod you are destined for a life of academic failure and professional missed opportunities because you don't get to mix with kids from the grammar school.

You were watching the 'scooter kids' and from that managed to condemn their potential because obviously they'll never get into an RG university & therefore their lives will be wasted?

Not only that you then decided that the only way for a child to succeed is to live in the south east? Because no one in the deprived north can provide a suitable role model?

Get over your misplaced social concern & bizarre generalisations. I went to a school in the south east with a real lack of aspiration for its pupils & now live in a northern RG university city. I know where I would have rather grown up.

cakeandcustard, so you think that everything is ok. Good.

I missed the Civilisation stops at Watford Gap undertone in first past of the OP.

..in my first pass of the OP.