Ofsted says that access to a good education is down to luck

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www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/11/access-to-best-teaching-down-to-luck-ofsted

Ofsted has announced that accessing a good school is down to luck and very much a postcode lottery. It goes further and states that even taking into account deprivation there is no logical reason for the difference in the performance of schools.
I am now left wondering whether the differences in opinions often expressed by people with regard to the quality of state education is partly down to this postcode lottery and some people experiencing genuine low standards which isn't understood by those in areas where the schools are much better.

Yep! I would guess that is true.

I think most, if not all, people accept there is a bit of a postcode lottery when it comes to getting access to good schools - I've never seen anybody argue that all schools are excellent. The disagreements come in when people engage in discussions on how to improve the less good schools and whether all schools really would be better if they were academies, or if we had more grammar schools, or if we opened up more free schools, or if we gave more or less power to local authorities, or if we allowed in more unqualified teachers, or if we changed the way we train teachers, etc, etc.

The reason a number of schools are failing is almost always down to the quality of teaching and learning. These qualities are secured by the Head and the leadership team of the school. It is a sad fact that some schools seem to be on a never ending cycle of being judged poor, improving, and then going back to being poor again. I am sure Ofsted could draw up a map to show where the poorest schools are, hence the postcode reference. It is also highly likely that the people in these areas will have less choice of school and will probably find it difficult to move house to find a good school.

I think we do not have enough good Heads to go round. If there were, there would not be failing schools. It appears to be virtually impossible to recruit sufficient numbers of better teachers into these areas as well. Therefore the spiral of problems continues. There are also areas where there are probably larger numbers of badly behaved children. The schools who have the best lessons and the highest expectations of behaviour will be the best schools. One suspects these are in the better postcodes. Also parents in the better areas are more savvy about education and are less tolerant.

I would go even further than that.

We moved to a small rural village, small class sizes, Ofsted was outstanding in all areas and the school was new, it was a dream of a primary school. This was back in 2007.

Roll on 6 years, Ofsted still hasn't turned up and it is still outstanding, but
All new teaching staff (apart from one teacher)
New head
new TAs
massively overcrowded due to some huge estates being built all over greenbelt

means that in my current experience, the school would be at best satisfactory. I am really curious as to WHEN Ofsted will turn up. It is really a shockingly bad school now, behaviour has gone downhill, teaching is mediocre, zero extracurricular offered and the list goes on.

So even if you have the means to move to a nice area with a nice school, things can change very quickly. And it isn't that easy to sell up, uproot everybody and move again and again.

Absolutely agree with Blueberry that small primaries are incredibly dependent on the quality of Teachers/HT.

IME one DC may get a brilliant education and another a mediocre one at the same school.

With split years, maternity leaves and illness, a child may get teachers who understand them and differentiate work to their abilities or they may not.

One child's journey through primary may be very different to another's. Two years with a teacher who's class room management isn't great if you have a easily distracted child with a noisy cohort. The same teacher with a quieter cohort might be fine.

The same goes for performance at secondary. Some teachers and some subject leaders are way better than others, some classes behave appallingly. While the same teacher may get good results elsewhere.

Yes good school wide discipline and strong leadership helps, but even the very best HT can't stop some children and some teachers just not gelling. They can't stop teachers getting ill. They can't recruit brilliant MFL teachers when non apply. They can't expel trouble makers before they damage other children's learning.

In any case often the 'trouble makers' need support not sanctions, that most schools simply can't provide.

You can't make education 'perfect' for every child, you can look into support, training and teacher recruitment methods that improve each child's prospects.

But the present lets stress everyone to breaking point model certainly isn't the way to do it!

StarBall that is an excellent point, which is why Wilshaw's other points, made in the same article, alarmed me so much.

He wants to bring back full on statutory testing at ages 7 and 14, because obviously those tests did so much to improve standards. So now children will have another wasted year of SATs factory teaching to plough through in Yr9 instead of getting a thorough preparation for their GCSE course in KS4.

You couldn't make it up.

He was also going on about the wonderful systems in the Far East, with their fabulous youth suicide rates. I'm going to nudge my DDs in the direction of as many gorgeous Finnish guys (or girls) as I possibly can, in the hope that my grandchildren will escape the rat race that the politicians want education to be - because I actually don't imagine Labour will be any better.

Finland has a higher teenage suicide rate than Singapore, Hong Kong, China and the UK. None of these countries are as high as New Zealand, Ireland or Norway.

My personal take is that the only way we can find out with any degree of certainty how children are performing at school is through testing. I also tend to the view that a school that needs to engage in "SATs factory teaching" hasn't been doing its job properly or this wouldn't be necessary.

prh47bridge you don't think the fear of OFSTED might have something to do with SATs factory teaching then? Because I have lost all faith in OFSTED now. My DD2's school was given 'Requires Improvement' back in June. Fair enough.... Only the inspector is on the record as saying that if they had inspected on a different day, the school would have been classed as Good and borderline Outstanding.

How is a school supposed to function if OFSTED can't even make its own mind up? Who inspects the inspectors?

I don't want children here to end up like that South Korean girl who was on last week - the one who does a 15 hours school day and sleeps 4.5 hours a night. You may think that is what we should aspire to - I really, really don't.

Today I just read a recent Ofsted report for a primary that has labelled the teaching Requires Improvement and then takes a page to explain that it's actually good, in fact Good to Outstanding, but wasn't so good a few years ago when the contemporaneous Ofsted inspection had labelled it Good, thus despite being Good/Outstanding now it's actually Requires Improvement.

What they actually meant was their maths results dipped last year (the cohort of 30 from hell with a lot of home-life back-stories that aren't suitable for a public airing before 9pm) and thus were intent on punishing the school before they turned up for the 'inspection'.

DD's school was lucky and went the other way thanks to a remarkably good cohort at just the right time.

We spend a lot of tax-payers money on this utterly worthless, divorced from reality, nonsense.

Admission into my DD1's outstanding secondary school really is purely down to luck, as they use fair banding. Very glad we we won this particular lottery as out catchment school is pretty awful. I don't like this type of admission though as it is very stressful as you have absolutely no idea whether you will get a place of not.

Ofsted is data driven. What can't produce data is, these days, fairly irrelevant. Tests, therefore, are essential, because they produce data. Ta da! Hello serious teaching to the test and goodbye atmosphere - thus the schools that used at least to have good community spirit now have teaching just as poor as before, but have lost their community spirit and feel-good factor. HUGE improvement. Not.

I'd be interested to know what school of management advocates distrust, haranguing and instilling of fear as effective ways of ensuring improved standards. They've been giving lots of advice to Ofsted and the DfE.

you don't think the fear of OFSTED might have something to do with SATs factory teaching then

I'm sure it does. The point I'm making is that if they have been doing their job properly and teaching the curriculum there would be no need to worry about SATs results. But that is only a tentative view.

Only the inspector is on the record as saying that if they had inspected on a different day, the school would have been classed as Good and borderline Outstanding

That kind of thing should not be happening. Are you able to PM me links for this? (And the same question to PiqueABoo)

You may think that is what we should aspire to

No I don't. But we should be aspiring to give a better education to our children than is currently the case.

I wonder how formulaic national tests at 7, 11 and 14, incompetently marked, improve our children's education? Would it be by generating a thriving market in private tuition? Surely tests only drive up "standards" if: a) they persuade teachers to spend lots of time getting kids to practice exam technique; or b) the majority of teachers are lazy, no-good shites who only bother to teach well if they really have to, because Big Brother is watching their every move; or c) tests somehow teach teachers how to teach better, because they really wanted to but didn't know how to before those wonderful tests came along and showed them how to do it; or d) tests excite and inspire natural teachers to join the profession more than good teacher training, pay and conditions ever could, and persuade poor teachers to leave it and be replaced by the hordes of brilliant people just waiting excitedly in the wings to replace them.

My children did take the SATs tests at 7. The school was confident in its ability to teach and at the parents meeting we were asked to keep very low key about what the children would be doing in SATs week. The school was very "normal" too and the week passed by, and the lead up to it, with no fuss whatsoever. Not that the levels told me what I didn't already know! Reintroduction of testing is to acquire statistics. However Ofsted can see the progress children make, or do not make, through the teacher assessments and detailed record keeping about individual children's attainments.
I think therefore any comments about different judgements on different days for the things that matter, teaching and learning, do not really stack up. Poor progress, poor teaching and leadership will be apparent for more than the inspection day.

I did mean to say that Ofsted have for several years been interested in the progress of children. It has never been just about results. Schools with a very good intake can require improvement if the children do not make satisfactory progress. Good or bad years should not come into play if the school leadership can demonstrate they have taught effectively and the children have made good, or better, progress. Otherwise some schools could never be outstanding as every year has its sizeable share of chaotic families!

rabbitstew

SATs won't improve standards of themselves (at least, not much). One of the basics taught on just about every management course is that if you can't measure something you can't control it. If we rely on teacher assessments we have no way of telling how objective they are. If we have objective measurements (and that assumes the SATs are marked properly) we can tell how we are doing and whether or not measures put in place to improve outcomes are effective.

GCSE results didn't fall when KS3 SATs were scrapped, so I'm not sure how they can claim that reintroducing them would improve standards.

prh47bridge - what those who run management courses don't seem to understand is that the only thing you gain control over when you measure things are the things you are measuring... if you really want a whole nation to gain control over the results of SATs tests, then go ahead. It doesn't appear to significantly and genuinely improve the school experience, quality of teaching or quality of school graduates and loses a hell of a lot of valuable, unmeasurable experiences in the process.

But I agree with you, it is very controlling...

It has always been obvious on MN that it is a post code lottery. People talk disparagingly about comprehensive schools and yet they are nothing like the comprehensive schools in my area, that are very good.

Measuring in the NHS doesn't appear to have made people any more caring, either, it just means the powers that be have to keep swinging from controlling one thing to controlling another, in total blissful ignorance of what they are messing up at one end of the NHS when they fiddle with another.

I have conflicting views on the matter of testing.

However, I have noticed this. Since the introduction of Phonics testing in Y1, our school's approach to phonics has been massively different. Whilst before it was all "let's just get the children playing with some phonics thrown in, it doesn't matter if they don't get it until KS2", to a massive focus on everyone knowing their phonics inside out by the time they pass the test.

You could argue that they should have had a similar focus before that, but as a parent I was wrongly led to believe that my child not knowing their phonics was the norm until KS2. After the test there was phonics practice every day and we got a letter to say that the school was very proud that almost every child passed the test with flying colours. The first year that it was introduced only 30% of children passed it.

I think if a school is truly excellent, with fantastic teachers and leadership it doesn't need testing. But in the case of poorer performing school it can be a godsend.

This constant pig-weighing interferes with teachers getting on with the job of actually teaching. They scrapped modular GCSEs partly because the constant preparing for exams took too much time away from teaching, and yet they want to then introduce more tests? Complete with mocks, past papers, revision sessions and so on, just so that they can have one more number to flog schools with?

What a waste of everyone's time.