First post: what is wrong with considering private schools?

[dietcokeisgreat]

Dear all,

I just starting looking at mumsnet last week and joined today. Some of my work colleagues talk about it and i am thinking about options for education for my son, who is just 3 and thought i would take a look. Well, i just starting the thinking, so it is early days.
We could pay for school, or maybe not, we don't know yet. He is our first child, we are having problems getting pregnant again, so unsure if there will be more yet.

I was surprised at some really negative comments on lots of threads towards people posting for advice/ whatever about private schools. Why are they doing that? What is wrong with people thinking about different options? Or asking about a school they know that is private? Twice i read something 'well i can't pay for school' as a response. For me, its no different to whether or not people have cash for other stuff. I can't afford to live in the smarter part of town, or pay for a boarding school but that doesn't mean no one should be allowed too!

Just wondering...don't want to post something that will enrage others or be and be upset by responses ....

Thank you.

Ok. So I guess there are a lot of people here who would happily send their DCs to schools they (a) do not fit in, and (b) that are failing.

We're moving soon to a new development. Unfortunately, as we don't have DCs in school at the moment, we didn't really look at catchment areas. The place we're moving to is "naice" and IN GENERAL, state schools seem OK. Only later did we realise that the new development would fall into the catchment area of a primary school that's further away than others (!!!), and where OFSTED actually reported they fail to challenge more able children. Looking deeper into the details, you sort of realise why because the majority of kids that come in have a lower than average level of attainment, and I guess teachers focus on them... almost forgetting the kids at the top.

All the other schools are oversubscribed - particularly the faith schools. Not being in the catchment area is a no-go. My DH and I don't think we have any other choice but to go private.

Is it morally better to acquire religion and move to a certain catchment area than pay for education???

Ooh, are we talking moral relativity? There is no moral and immoral, it's just more or less moral (if the glass is half full), or more or less immoral (if the glass is half empty).

When we talk about acquiring religion, are we talking about REALLY acquiring one, or purchasing one?

rabbitstew

The times I saw "acquire" being used in conjunction with a religion, it was used when people don't actually believe in any of it, but say they do for purely pragmatic reasons.

www.economist.com/news/international/21623712-how-education-makes-people-less-religiousand-less-superstitious-too-falling-away

Yes, TalkinPeace... Not surprising, but obviously doesn't take into account the UK phenomenon of going to church to get your DC into a faith school. It doesn't make you believe any more, but as said, people do it for pragmatic reasons.

Its mostly a London thing rather than UK
but yes, the crass hypocrisy of pay or pray is astounding

out here in the sticks Catholic Schools do not even require one to be Christian
and CofE schools operate on catchment not Christenings

the London problem is due to stupid education policies that stopped LEAS opening school places as the population bounced back after the 80's and 90's

Southampton is a diddy example, but the lack of a Secondary school (of any hue) in the centre of the city will bite next September.

In the Church of England, some people go to church because they think there is value in going somewhere once a week where they are asked to think beyond their own daily lives as otherwise they tend to forget to make time for this, in involving themselves in a community, in keeping an attractive local church going rather than let it decay and fall down, in pondering whether the CoE really does require you to believe in certain things, or whether it's OK just to think that Jesus was a really good human bloke who said some things worth listening to. Is it immoral to go to a place of worship if you don't believe absolutely everything they tell you that you are required to believe in order to be properly "religious"? Or is it only immoral if the only point you see in it is getting your child into a good school? Or is it only immoral if other people perceive it to be immoral?

Rabbit
In areas without a mad school crush, those attending Sunday church service are there because they want to be.
The churches are thus extremely empty because the CofE has not managed to appeal to most people.

At a church in London, the fact that suggested annual donations for salary bands were printed in the order of service made my hackles rise.
I therefore did NOT put anything into the collection.

However when DCs junior school had events in the churches I always did as it was done in a "community" way.

Keeper don't forget that by the time you have children the primary failing to challenge more able children may have improved, or possibly even your children may not be more able and the school that does well by low attainers may be just what you need.

Many of the people that I have known who went to grammar schools were working class kids who ended up in middle class jobs and professions and some were effectively estranged from their origins as a result. People have always moved up and down the social scale: my grandfather left school at 14, went into the drawing office of an aero-engineering company (while we still built aircraft here) and ended up head of engineering standards at British Aerospace while it built Concorde. I don't think his career path would be possible nowadays!

"In areas without a mad school crush, those attending Sunday church service are there because they want to be.
The churches are thus extremely empty because the CofE has not managed to appeal to most people."

This is not true. Some churches are extremely busy without any school connection.

Aga
Some churches are indeed very busy, but not many of those are good old CofE
go out to a rural parish in a non selective part of the country and the normal congregation may routinely be in single digits

One of the most interesting bits of Mumsnet demographics is the number who live in the catchment of failing schools. I honestly don't understand how this works, considering that 80% are "good". There must be little clusters of mumsnetters round each of the other 20%.....................

Hakluyt

Don't believe the "scores" for a second. You have to read the entire report to see what's going on. The school I mention was recently re-graded "good"/"2"(previously was in special measures) and yet it performs at a low level at various key stages. This is presumably due to the majority of children coming in have "skills and understanding well below the levels expected for their age".

If that's the intake, any sort of improvement will be deemed "good", I guess, despite this being much lower than average. And as said, more able kids are being left unchallenged.

That's simply not good enough.

"If that's the intake, any sort of improvement will be deemed "good", I guess, despite this being much lower than average"

Nope- that's not how it works. "Any improvement" wouldn't be good enough. You need to look at the league tables and look at the specific progress of low, middle and high attainers.

The Economist on academies and standards www.economist.com/news/britain/21623766-academies-programme-has-transformed-englands-educational-landscape-new-school-rules

"Some churches are indeed very busy, but not many of those are good old CofE"

Depends what you mean by good old CofE I suppose.

"go out to a rural parish in a non selective part of the country and the normal congregation may routinely be in single digits"

Yes, because it's rural. Urban ones are busier.

Also the selective religious schools tend to be in urban areas anyway. And lots of those are Catholic, rather than CofE.

yup, its a pretty nuanced article without a shred of evidence to support anything it says
Economist subscriber

So how can you be good and achieve results that are lower than average???

By definition, "outstanding" and "good" should get above average results.

That depends on the average you choose.

An outstanding school for children with learning difficulties should not be benchmarked against the average child WITHOUT learning difficulties. And a comp serving a very deprived area cannot be benchmarked against one where you need £2 million to buy a house in catchment.

So how can you be good and achieve results that are lower than average???
WOW, you really do not know how to read statistics.

If the intake of a school is in the bottom 5% but by the time the kids leave school they are in the bottom 25% then the school has increased their expected results by a factor of five which is miraculous and implies incredible teaching

the kids are still well below average
but the school is well above average in what it achieves with the kids it gets

If the intake of a school is in the top 5%
and by the time the kids leave they are in the top 10%
then the school has allowed half of its pupils to slide back significantly
so is failing them and clearly not helping them reach their capacity

the kids are above average
but the school should be graded below average for teaching

Because it's all about how schools deal with their intake. If they have, like my ds's school, a disproportionate number of low and middle ability children, the results are not going, by definition, to be as good as a school with a disproportionate number of high ability children.

OK, Hakluyt / Talkinpeace and anyone else... would you send your DC to a school of which the following is said:

• the disruptive behaviour of a significant minority unsettles others, limits learning in some lessons, consumes the energies of staff or diverts them from other important tasks

• pupils' attainment is low; for too many pupils, progress is inadequate

• significantly below average in English, Mathematics and Science; improvement in prior year was not sustained

• many pupils have been unsettled due to staff changes or inadequate teaching and have not reached the levels they are capable of achieving

• many pupils and parents express concern about the poor behaviour of a minority of pupils and the detrimental effect it has on learning

• pupils whose behaviour is problematic leave lessons without permission and attendance is very low

"If the intake of a school is in the bottom 5% but by the time the kids leave school they are in the bottom 25% then the school has increased their expected results by a factor of five which is miraculous and implies incredible teaching"

But again that depends on the stats you use. What does bottom 5% mean, for example? And bottom 25% again? And 5th percentile to 25th percentile is not a factor five, that's meaningless. It might be that such a change puts the school in the top 0.1% (just for random example), which means that the school is more effective BY THAT MEASURE than 999 out of 1000 schools.

And it's unlikely that the teaching is miraculous/incredible. Good results come from good management. And in particular, when you have known stats to target then an effective management can work directly on those stats. The school's management doesn't have to say 'Hmm, Joe wants to be a car mechanic, he should do X, Y, Z', it can instead say 'If we put Joe in lunchtime GCSE English crammer classes, then that should boost him a grade and add 1 point to our value-added bottom line'. That doesn't mean the school is doing a good job by Joe, necessarily.

Of course in reality the schools that do a good job on stats are usually teaching well as well, and on top of that good results will attract a better intake.

"If the intake of a school is in the top 5%
and by the time the kids leave they are in the top 10%
then the school has allowed half of its pupils to slide back significantly
so is failing them and clearly not helping them reach their capacity

the kids are above average
but the school should be graded below average for teaching"

Or it might be that the school doesn't bother to target the stats directly, because it's complacent, because of it's intake. The second school likely has very good teaching and teachers.

If your child is of low ability, then the first school is almost certainly better. But if he is of high ability, then the second school is more likely to be appropriate, because the curriculum is more likely to be appropriate for a high ability child.

It's all very well to say 'this school is doing fabulously for value-added' in respect of a school with low GCSE pass rates, but the problem is that the parents posting on Mumsnet (or similar) are disproportionately of high ability, because parental interest is a good predictor of academic success.

You have to look EXTREMELY carefully at a school in the first category if you child has high ability, because if most of the intake is of average + below ability, then it might not cater for high abilities. It might do, but it's not essential, in order to show up as doing well by value-added - they can achieve that by catering for the 90% of average + below pupils, and let the high ability coast.