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Original poster

For anyone who still thinks that access to selective state education is a level playing field.....

903 replies

curlew · 29/11/2013 12:18

I have just read the latest OfSTED for my dd's grammar school.

There are no children in Year 7 who are eligible for FSM. None. Not one.

OP posts:
FastLoris · 02/12/2013 22:25

FWIW I'm sure it's perfectly possible for grammar schools to be crap just as some comprehensives are crap. (Not saying Dover Grammar is crap - I know nothing about it. But IF people are right about these criticisms...)

But then I didn't see anybody here claiming that the grammar system was some kind of magic bullet that absolved schools of the need for good teaching, facilities and all the other things that make a school good. So I'm not sure what the point is.

straggle · 02/12/2013 22:26

Don't tell me -
They don't go to the theatre.
They don't bother with bilingual pleasantries in restaurants or the port.
If that's the grammar what are the moderns like?

teacherwith2kids · 02/12/2013 22:27

OK: more general question:

How many grammars countrywide have value add of less than 1000? (ie add zero or negative value to their intake)

How many of these are supersuperselectives (ie take top 1-2% of ability), which are the ones where the statistics are tricky? We could reasonably exclude them from the figures.

If grammars are a model of a 'good school', then by definition the children in them should make more progress than at other schools. Is Dover really such an outlier?

rabbitstew · 02/12/2013 22:27

straggle - have you compared the results at Dover Grammar for Boys with the results of other schools in the same area? There is a difference between complacency and opting for what you might think to be the best of a bad bunch. Unless you suggest that the people of Dover insist on access to London comprehensive schools?

Talkinpeace · 02/12/2013 22:27

straggle
The train goes from Folkestone and you won't see many French people on it : they do not come over here.
The announcements were prerecorded by an old Uni friend of mine anyway.
Seriously, if you are going to the continent do you stop and have a pub lunch in Folkestone or Dover or do you rattle onto the boat / train ?

Ports see lots of people go past without any interaction
they are therefore notorious for having pockets of poor indigenous people all over the country - look at the school results right round the coast ...

teacherwith2kids · 02/12/2013 22:31

Fast,

It seems to me that the only possible justification for the existence of grammars is if they provide an education that is better than could be made available in any other type of school in that locality if the grammar school did not exist - ie if their social divisiveness etc was outweighed by hugely better progress for the children who attended them.

If grammars do not enable pupils in them to make even average progress given their start levels, then the justification for them becomes even thinner - children in grammars are only achieving the results they would be expoected to get given their start point, and thus that they could reasonably be epected to get in an alternative school (comprehensive)

BluePeterAdventCrown · 02/12/2013 22:33

There are no language schools in Dover. French visitors might go the castle, but you hardly get hundreds of them in the High Street to converse with. If you go to Calais or Boulogne and try to speak French they answer you in English. And no - they don't bother with bilingual pleasantries in the port or the street.

Original poster
curlew · 02/12/2013 22:34

"I meant in reply to teacher - Dover Grammar is one school, so hardly something to base such generalisations on."

Oh, I don't know- people seem perfectly happy to generalize about comprehensive schools based on significantly shakier ground.......

OP posts:
teacherwith2kids · 02/12/2013 22:40

We have yet, for example, to identify even one RL modern comprehensive where top sets are in any way teased or abused for their ability, though this was claimed upthread to be a well-known general phenomenon....

Talkinpeace · 02/12/2013 22:42

teacher
indeed, and DH goes to lots and lots of schools and does not see it as a problem
league tables have made staff value bright kids so they will not tolerate them being picked on.

rabbitstew · 02/12/2013 22:44

How does the Value Added score of a school work? Surely it is of little use unless the same school has a different VA score for different groups of children within it? Otherwise, how can you tell which children are really benefiting from the "value added"? It could actually be quite skewed, surely?

soul2000 · 02/12/2013 22:45

I bet in a way the Dover/Folkestone Grammars are more accessible than for hard working working class kids who maybe on FSM.

They have there own "DOVER" test which is apparently 20% easier than the KENT Test to pass according to 11+ Exams...

soul2000 · 02/12/2013 22:46

Then for hard working kids.....

summerends · 02/12/2013 22:46

Teacher, are all the comprehensives in your region as good as each other, if not why not? Is it intake or management or both?

Original poster
curlew · 02/12/2013 22:47

There is, however, a thread on here at the moment about a girl at a selective school being teased because she is only predicted a B in maths, not an A*. Last time I looked, the general tenor of the responses seemed to be that she needs to grown up, take the teasing and accept that she's an underachiever.......

OP posts:
Talkinpeace · 02/12/2013 22:50

rabbitstew
how does VA work ....
a hypothetical secondary school takes in 100 kids who are at SATs 4a (all of them)
which should result in them getting straight Bs at GCSE (all of them)
if they get lots of As then the Value added is high - because they have done better than expected
if they get lots of Cs the value added is low
and each child subject is around 0.01 of difference in the score
so it is actually a measure of teaching effectiveness rather than the progress in any one child
as a slower child can be helped by good teaching and a stronger child hindered by bad

rabbitstew · 02/12/2013 22:51

Also, what does "high attaining" really mean? Is this anything above a L4B? Or is it anything from a low level 5? If so, how can you compare a school which has lots of L6 high attaining children joining it in year 7 with a school which has lots of L4A/5 "high attaining" children? The levels of attainment are actually a long way apart.

soul2000 · 02/12/2013 22:51

Curlew. Yes its very unfair to label a B a failure , especially as the poster has said the girl has no desire to take A level Maths.

teacherwith2kids · 02/12/2013 22:52

Rabbit, at a first approximation, it measures FOR EACH CHILD, the difference between their starting point and their final levels.

I know that, internally (primary) we track this by groups of children, and this is something that Ofsted is very focused on. The 'published' VA scores I have seen are composite ones for the whole intake, though they are also more complex in calculation than a simple 'x - y' calculation, with (at least historically - probably not going forward) factors added in to reflect the context of the scool.

rabbitstew · 02/12/2013 22:54

teacherwith2kids - that still doesn't tell anyone from the final school VA score which children in particular got best value out of the school - ie whether there was a pattern in which particular groups of children got better value added than others.

Original poster
curlew · 02/12/2013 22:56

The league tables do differentiate between low, middle and high attainers' progress.

OP posts:
MoreThanChristmasCrackers · 02/12/2013 22:56

My experience was the reverse and a school of extremely disengaged children.
My ds1 went to the worst school imaginable, it soon improved and the only way was the HT celebrated every child's talent.
Because they all had their moment of glory and were treated as individuals the whole (quite small school) were almost a family and supported each other and encouraged better for more awards.
These were dc who attended very sporadically, carried knives, were pregnant, v. high percentage fsm.
It became cool to be good at stuff.

rabbitstew · 02/12/2013 22:58

So, how can you therefore make a fair comparison between the VA score of a grammar school and the VA score of a comprehensive? Surely you can only make a fair comparison if you are only comparing the higher ability children (or in the case of Dover Grammar, the higher and middle ability...)? And that's assuming you are being fair in your definition of what counts as "higher ability" because obviously that is going to be a completely different picture in a superselective grammar school to the picture in a top-25% grammar school.

straggle · 02/12/2013 22:59

If you gained 5c in SATs you'd only be predicted a B. As Dover Boys or 3-4 other Kent grammars seems to be making below national average progress, they must be a lot at that level with 30% from 4B/4A getting Cs. Maybe they tease the A* pupils in that school. Anyone who expressed an interest in French surrealist drama would get a particularly hard time, I suspect.

teacherwith2kids · 02/12/2013 22:59

Summerends, both .. and neither.

Both: I have just sorted the county table in 2 ways - by absolute results, and by Value added. The difference between the two positions tells me something about the balance between intake and the school itself. A school in the same position in both tables has the two factors in balance, a school in very different positions leans one way or the other.

Neither: the overall figures disguise the strengths and weaknesses of individual schoools - and I am sure that a ranking by Ofsted gradings would give me yet a 3rd different ranking. They also disguise their suitability for different children - my DS's comp is ideal for him. If he had significant SEN, I would send him elsewhere.