Private schools use unqualified teachers - but are they really any good?

[Talkinpeace]

One of the justifications for Free Schools etc being allowed to use non qualified teachers is that Private schools do so and get great results.

However, are the great results because those non qualified people are really better?
or is it because they are handed heavily selected cohorts to teach?

This can be tested.

Take two schools of similar size and age range, one that is fee paying and the other that is fully comprehensive
say Eton and Wallingford school in Oxfordshire (fast search for 11-18 leafy)
and swap the whole of the teaching staff for a fortnight - to run a whole timetable cycle.
TAs and support staff would stay put so the places kept going
but the whole staff from each school would teach the other's timetable.

How would they cope?

My hypothesis
The state school teachers would be pleasantly surprised that a lot of the private school kids were pretty normal.
The state school teachers would get some good ideas about how to make extension work more useful
Some of the private school teachers would rise to the challenge and come up with new ideas
most would be eaten alive by lower ability kids.

So, could a TV company make it happen?
What are your hypotheses?

Talkinginpeace I don't think that was what Straggle meant by 'selective'. Her comments were about ability not parents' money.

But ... if you want to argue the toss on that, then the same applies to many state schools. In my location, houses in the catchment area for the best schools are unaffordable for lots of families.

We have selection by post code.

Is that any more fair????

It's also a misnomer that parents who send their kids to private schools are very wealthy. In my experience, they were often doing without many of the things that other families regarded as a right or a necessity- such as holidays overseas every year, new cars, larger houses, lots of clothes, money spend on entertainment etc. Parents who choose private education often scrimp and scrape to afford it with both parents working full time to afford 'modest' day school fees.

Furthermore, a huge proportion of children are funded in private education by bursaries and scholarships- some up to 100% of the fees if the children are talented or gifted in an area like music, art, sport.

The median income in the UK is £18,000 per year
Private school fees start at around £12,000 per year
7% of kids go to private schools - even with bursaries etc

Yet Gove seems to have a rosy glow about his private school childhood and thinks that his recollections will work for all kids.
All the current evidence shows he is wrong, but as he believes, the evidence is not good enough.
Hence my thought experiment in the opening post.

Please do not try to divert it into pretending that private schools are inclusive. They are not. That is fine.
But state schools must be for that very reason.

You are wrong. Median income in UK is around £27K.

I know exactly how many children go to private schools.

I also know- from working in them ( as well as bog comps) which I assume you never have- that often it's parents in medium-paid work- ie two teachers- who send their kids to private schools.

We still have selection- but it's by post code. You can't deny that.

I am not pretending anything. I am telling you how it is- not how you as an outsider who has not worked in education think it is.

I tried to make the selection by postcode point earlier but the op was having none of it.

Talkinpeace. Is right.. The median wage is different from the average wage because the 27k PA average is boosted by people earning 10 million
PA. If you were to take the country has a whole and took out the richest
500,000 people or 0.8% of the population you would see that the average wage would come down to about 22K PA . The real average salary in the uk
based on numbers of actually people earning is about 18k

I know my grade E GCSE maths would come in useful one day.....

Actually Talkinpeace explained this to me ages ago in a different post.

I knew my grade E maths would come in handy one day...

Regardless of the median or even average wage the fact is that many families on what would be considered low-middle incomes x 2 ( both working) do scrimp and scrape to sent children to private schools. There are more private schools which have lower fees than the £35K a year fees at Eton.

I am not denying some private schools are out of reach of some families- just like some houses, cars and holidays are out of reach of some people- but equally there are families who could afford them but who choose not to and prefer to spend their income on other things.

But you still need to address the post code lottery and post code selection issue with non fee paying schools.

Where I live we have selection by post code. Houses are 15-20% more expensive to buy within the catchment area of two state schools. You end up with selection anyway- which parents can afford to live in that area and the schools' results reflect this.

"The median income in the UK is £18,000 per year"

The median net family income for families with dependent children in the UK was estimated at £27,006 per year.
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/239103/foi-4145-2013.pdf

"Private school fees start at around £12,000 per year"

Maybe in the south.

Not in the north.

www.gsal.org.uk/for-parents/fees-bursaries/

"7% of kids go to private schools - even with bursaries etc"

This is very much area-dependent. Also somewhat age-dependent.

In the North East, under 3%. In London and the South East 11%.

In Surrey, 21%, in Kent under 8% (grammar schools here).

Parents do not want inclusiveness. They either want an exclusive school just inclusive enough to admit their child, or they don't give a fuck.

Either way inclusiveness is further away than ever. Apart from a few posturing Guardian journalists (and even they, when it comes down to it, frequently back down at the moment of truth, age 11), people could care less about anything beyond their own child getting into a 'good' school.

Inclusiveness will NOT happen. Never.

By the way note that is NET family income. I.e. after tax.

Millionaires are completely irrelevant to that. This is the middle family.

Missbopeep
My statistics are absolutely rock solid.
THe mean salary is £26,000
The median is £18,000
and the median household income is £24,000
some private schools are out of reach of some families
try most and then you are near the truth.

And frankly the post code lottery of schools is better addressed by clustering and support, not converting schools into Private Limited Companies - which is what Academies and free schools are.

No country in the world has ever dealt with the geographic issue other than by helping ALL schools, rather than Gove's divide and destroy approach.

Patpig
Parents do not want inclusiveness. They either want an exclusive school just inclusive enough to admit their child, or they don't give a fuck
Are you insinuating that all of the parents who send their kids to Hampshire comps (because we happen to live in Hampshire) don't give a fuck about our kids education?

PLEASE STOP MAKING THIS A PRIVATE VERSUS STATE THREAD
ITS MEANT TO BE AN ANTI GOVE THREAD

Your statistics are simply WRONG.

The median, not mean, FULL-TIME salary is £26,000.

The median salary for all workers, including part-time, is £21,000.

These are gross figures, but don't tell you how much money families are earning, they refer to workers, and one income, not the whole family.

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_286243.pdf

Patpig
Please answer my questions as this is not an ONS thread .... (and your link is provisional results)

Are you saying that parents at comps don't give a shit?
Are you also saying that every member of the faculty at Eton has a teaching qualification?

LOL- you are joking surely?

You start a thread about free schools and unqualified teachers, and whether the results are better or worse in certain schools for various reasons ( intake and teachers' qualifications) then you say you don't want a discussion about state V private .

What exactly do you want?

The coalition voted for free schools. Darling Clegg was all for them.

I've come back to you on several points which you choose to ignore because they don't fit your politics it appears.

If you want to base your opinions on bigotry or prejudice then there is no pint discussing this. I've addressed several of your misconceptions about intake, ability, fees, earnings and more- and you simply ignore the facts.

This is not an ONS thread- oh come on FGS!

Another example of you wanting to avoid facts which conflict with your fantasy.

"Are you insinuating that all of the parents who send their kids to Hampshire comps (because we happen to live in Hampshire) don't give a fuck about our kids education?"

What is a 'Hampshire comp'?

According to Hampshire County Council:

documents.hants.gov.uk/education/qrySecondaryDatasept13.pdf

The New Forest Academy received only 119 preferences for 195 places and made only 61 offers. Very few people want to go there.

Other 'Hampshire comps' were massively oversubscribed and had catchments of under half a mile.

There is no such thing as a 'Hampshire comp'. Even in a couple of miles you can go from a poor area with loan shops and low-cost housing to million pond mansions. The intake will vary hugely as a result.

If you can afford a million pound mansion you can ensure that your child is in catchment for a school with an intake of other rich kids.

If you are in social housing then you might have no choice about where they go.

Comprehensive education is nonsensical for this reason.

missobeep. like my parents who drove Bentley's and expensive Merecedes
but sent me to the supposed leafy comprehensive, that i had to leave at
15 because they would not let me go on to any Gcse courses(First year).

I was sent to one of those private schools that took anybody, however
most of the kids there had been thrown out of other private schools.
For such a "SHIT" school it had a remarkable number of Multi Millionaires
kids there. It was probably the most selective school ever....

million pound even. Probably just a couple of ponds. Hopefully at least one duck house there. Ducks need housing too.

Actually there is a really good blog to illustrate this thread here better than I can.

Parents don't want unqualified teachers. They like subject specialists too.
Not all private schools are good.

(I'd also add that subject specialists without full training may be valued in private schools where they can supervise them but it doesn't justify having unqualified inexperienced non-specialists in free schools like Al-Madinah.)

Haven't RTFT but one important difference between state and private schools is that no-one is sent to a private school against their will. People are allocated to a state school that they hadn't even put in their preference list however.

This means that private schools which aren't at least as good as state schools generally won't be around for very long whereas a state school in an oversubscribed area will continue even if its rather rubbish because the LEA will keep sending it more pupils.

Can I remind people about Jamie Oliver's failed TV programme, where he got the top people in each field to teach and they all bombed? Think it shocked a few of them who thought it would be easy, just because they knew their subject.

I would say that at least, ITT (initial teacher training) lets people know if teaching is right for them and they are right for teaching (most of the time) before doing too much potential damage to pupils. In all honesty, I would rather have a teaching qualification to go on (doesn't have to be a PGCE, we do have other routes) to go on, when employing someone, rather than hoping for the best and saving a few bob on someone who had never entered a classroom. As with any statistics, there are always exceptions on both sides. Wouldn't take the risk though...children are too important.

Wow, selective use of Stats.

There is no mention of catchment sizes on that table.
The "distance" measure is the number of kids given places based on distance outside the catchment.
So Kings gave a place to a kid 7.31 miles outside the catchment : and the catchment www3.hants.gov.uk/schooldetails?dfes=4310#catchment is a decent size.

More than half of those schools are academies by the way. No idea what the New Forest one is. Don't care. Its not ex LEA.
And three applicants per place (Kings) is nothing compared with, say, Tiffin.

Gove says that unqualified teachers will be as good as qualified ones.
Is he right?

whereas a state school in an oversubscribed area will continue even if its rather rubbish

Schools are oversubscribed - areas are not. Oversubscribed schools tend to be the ones with good Ofsted ratings and results.

Sorry you're right, they do have catchments, which in the case of Kings looks lovely and leafy, and majority of pupils do come from that catchment (which excludes unlovely Eastleigh itself).

I'm not clear about the minutiae of the admissions policies in Hampshire, but clearly a school that takes in Winchester and Chandler's Ford is going to have a better intake than one in a grotty part of Southampton.

I have no idea whether Gove is right. I'm sure that young enthusiastic teachers can be better than miserable, hardened old ones, but in general, I do not know. But I don't see what the relevance of Eton's staff is to anywhere else.

www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/22/al-madinah-headteacher-admits-whistleblower-cutts-mckayckay