Academies- anyone know much about them?

[EnglishRose1320]

Just have a load of questions about academies basically, how much do they change schools? I know they vary a fair amount but feel a bit in the dark about them and seeing as by 2020 in at least the county I am in we will no longer have an LEA and only have academies I feel I ought to wise up on them. What experiences have people had of them so far both as staff and as parents, I'm looking at it from both view points. Do people think they are a good idea or Not? Sorry bit rambly but basically any info and thoughts appreciated.

Fair banding - as used by HACP - brings league tables into disrepute by unfairly skewing intake, thereby making information about outcomes irrelevant for the purposes of broad comparisons.

By the way PR - I'm on this thread making a case that HACP has used underhand admissions practices to manipulate intake and therefore their place in the Croydon league tables. I come at this from the POV not of a disappointed parent (I don't want my dc's to go to a Harris) but as someone who is angry at the unfairness of it. My dc's school is within the 2 mile 'catchment' (yes I know there is no actual catchment) and I've seen how children are socially and academically 'sorted' into secondaries at the end of primary. It makes me incredibly sad to see how this government's (and Labour's) choice agenda with schools has panned out for the most disadvantaged children in my dc's classes, year after year. Every year I silently make predictions about which schools my dc's classmates will end up at according to their levels of achievement and family background and I am almost always right. And that's in an area where schools aren't supposed to be selecting on grounds of income or prior attainment. In particular I'm pretty good at working out which children will end up at the 3 or 4 really unpopular schools, the ones languishing for years at the bottom of the borough league tables. It'll always be the children from the really, really poor families. The children with mild learning difficulties but no EHCP, the ones with emotional and behavioural difficulties. The ones who are in bottom sets for everything. These children put HACP high up on their application forms like everyone else, but they NEVER get in. The clever ones get in, EVERY BLOODY YEAR. It's just so damn wrong. It's heart breaking.

I feel angry enough about it to write about it at length here when I have other things I should be doing.

What's your motivation for spending so much time here selling the government's education agenda?

I wasn't talking about fair banding when I asked about exams and league tables...

So, what fair banding shows, then, is that a lot of really low ability children are nevertheless high achievers at primary school? And that very few level 3 children are of lower intelligence or have specific learning disabilities? If not, then how on earth did Harris ever achieve an intake of 70% high achieving children and an intake with very low number of lower achievement and low SEN? There must be something badly wrong with the tests!

So, do all children have to take the test to get in and is this done in the school itself, not their primary school

Yes to both questions.

Do other secondaries in the area also have an entrance test

Some other secondaries in the area use fair banding but not all of them.

Is it really possible to establish fair entry criteria if different schools have different methods for deciding what they think is fair

All have to comply with the Admissions Code and must consult with, amongst others, the LA. I believe the answer to your question is yes.

And who is the final arbiter of whether an admissions process is fair or not

The Schools Adjudicator.

And who checks up on it and how often

Every time admission arrangements are changed the school must consult with a range of people then submit their proposed arrangements to the Adjudicator for approval. The Adjudicator does not conduct detailed checks of all proposed arrangements but will investigate if they receive any objections. In terms of whether or not a school is complying with its arrangements, this is policed by the EFA (for academies) but is reactive rather than proactive, only getting involved when parents complain. If a school is found to be seriously in breach it can lose its funding.

And if house price premiums are the reason for the 10%, then why only 10%

I thought you wanted the school to serve its local area. That is why 90% of places go to pupils living within 2 miles of the school. That is a pretty big area - 12.5 square miles.

Is the system chosen not a little bit confused as to what it is trying to achieve

No. It is designed to ensure that the ability profile of the pupils admitted broadly matches the profile of pupils applying in terms, that pupils living locally (i.e. within 2 miles of the school) are prioritised and that parents cannot gain an advantage by buying a house in the streets around the school.

minifingerz

I note that the blogger ignored the fact that other Harris academies in the area using the same admission arrangements had high proportions of SEN, EAL, FSM, low achieving pupils, etc. I would love to know how the blogger thinks the school was managing to filter out non-statemented SEN pupils, EAL pupils and FSM pupils without knowing who they were - schools are not provided with that information prior to admitting the pupil.

Fair banding ensures the profile of the pupils you admit matches the profile of pupils applying in terms of their potential. It does not mean the profile will match in other respects. You may get more or less FSM pupils than the average for the area, for example. It may be spectacularly more or spectacularly less. If you have 100 pupils of whom 40 receive FSM and you randomly select 10 pupils repeatedly you will end up with 2 or fewer FSM pupils roughly one in six times. Every so often you will end up with no FSM pupils at all. That doesn't mean anyone is fiddling anything. It is what happens when you conduct a random draw.

Unless you fiddle the random draw there is no way a school can use fair banding as a covert means of selection. That is why the draw must be independently supervised.

What's your motivation for spending so much time here selling the government's education agenda

I am not selling the government's education agenda. Disagreeing with you about fair banding (which is not part of the government's agenda) does not mean I agree with the government.

I'm on this thread making a case that HACP has used underhand admissions practices to manipulate intake and therefore their place in the Croydon league tables

I understand that and I am not here to defend HACP. I am defending fair banding. The point I am making is that fair banding in and of itself does not manipulate the intake in the way you describe. The only way you can manipulate the intake to end up with high proportions of high attainers, low proportions of FSM students, etc. is to get hold of information that you are not allowed to have and use it to rig the (independently supervised) random draw. Maybe HACP are doing that. If they are it needs to be stopped. But fair banding is the wrong target. If they are manipulating their intake it is the random draw that is rigged, not the banding.

It seems to me there is plenty of scope for fiddling and collusion in a system like that. It's like catching out City Traders though, isn't it? We know a proportion of them get up to all sorts, but it's hugely complex and expensive catching them out.

It still seems to me the current system does not help with the house price lottery issue by letting 10% of children in from further afield... 1 child per band?! And expected to travel into the school to sit the test? I doubt many seriously impoverished children do that, tbh, but would be interested to see what sort of demographic the 10% come from.

And yes, I want local schools to serve local,areas, but what has what I want got to do with Harris admission criteria??

I'm with minifingerz 100%.

Haven't got time to reply further at the moment, but she has provided the a highly detailed, in-depth analysis of HACP, which I can't argue with.

Are you defending fair banding absolutely prh? You said earlier that it increases disadvantage in areas where not all schools use it.

You are defending the admissions policies of the flagship school of one of the Governments flagship academy chains. In media terms it's the biggest success story of the Government's Academy programme.

I have made a case that the admissions policies at this school have been used to skew its intake, the net result of which has been to leave it sitting at or near the top of the borough league tables for years now.

You have tried to explain this away with arguments which draw on information you have gleaned from contact with admission staff at Croydon council, and from your knowledge of how fair banding works.

Why?

"I would love to know how the blogger thinks the school was managing to filter out non-statemented SEN pupils, EAL pupils and FSM pupils without knowing who they were - schools are not provided with that information prior to admitting the pupil"

Well, duh, it's a happy (for HACP) side effect of taking very few children in the bottom bands of the 'fair banding' test.

All that said, one issue I haven't aired is the way that HACP conduct their open days, and how this might impact on admissions.

They hold one open evening, which draws an attendance of approximately 3000 parents and children and lasts for about 3 hours. This results in the following:
Parents with children with ASD and other spectrum disorders and significant physical avoiding attending as it's such a horribly stressful and crowded event that it would result in many vulnerable children being unable to cope.
It also means that unless you are powerfully pushy you have almost no hope of having a sensible discussion with any of the staff. That's fine for many m/c parents. They appreciate the popularity of the school and can get information from the DFE website and from their social contacts who already have children at the school. However, it's profoundly off-putting for those who are less able to access and interpret detailed data and whose insider information on the school doesn't exist. It's pretty much unbearable for parents with EAL or those who have jobs/younger children they can't offload onto other people.

I have no doubt that the open evenings are designed to be off putting to the sort of parents of children the head would rather not have st the school anyway. It's like a sort of horrible endurance test.

As for the impact of the random draw sometimes selecting hardly any or no SEN, what, 5 years running?

"but it's hugely complex and expensive catching them out"

Everything this government has done in terms of change in local government, education and the NHS - the slow and thorough selling off and privatisation of public services, has involved incredibly complex new arrangements that almost no one single person or body seems to be able to get their heads around and unpick. The net result always seems to result in a small number of people making fuck loads of money from the public purse, lots of ordinary public sector workers being shafted, and the most disadvantaged people in society being further disadvantaged and shut out.

tge complexity and opaqueness is an essential and deliberate part of all government change because it's a way of closing down protest by ordinary people.

"I am defending fair banding. The point I am making is that fair banding in and of itself does not manipulate the intake in the way you describe"

I don't give a crap what it's called or the way it's supposed to work.

The way it has worked in the most high profile academy in the most high profile academy chain in the UK, has been to massively cherry-pick the brightest and least disadvantaged students in its catchment year after year, thereby ensuring its place at the top of the league tables, and thereby ending up looking like a massive success story.

I would give my right arm for a decent investigative journalist to take this story on and really start digging.

The biggest lesson I ever learned in life was that people who claim to understand a complex and confusing system are more likely to be lying than telling the truth. Just look at derivatives. I do not for one moment believe that the current varying admissions procedures in schools in some areas are either fair, nor that their effects are fully understood. The people overseeing it all are sadly not the impartial geniuses we would all like them to be and they are attempting to oversee a mess.

Warwick Mansell who writes for the Education section in the Guardian is pretty much the only journalist who will touch this stuff, minifingerz.

I remember a 'face the facts' episode on Radio 4 a few years back which was discussing the massive involvement of Capita in the delivery of public services.

The programme made the point that the deals which had been made with local authorities were of such complexity that literally nobody in the local authority actually had a firm understanding of how the system was working.

It's really very disturbing.

I agree. Also with your analysis that all the (politicised) tinkering in education, health care, care provision etc etc is consistently ensuring that companies like Capita get richer, anyone working for them or a commissioning organisation gets shafted and the poorest, most disenfranchised and marginalised become even more so.

And yes, I want local schools to serve local,areas, but what has what I want got to do with Harris admission criteria

You were asking why they didn't give more than 10% to children more than 2 miles away. The point re house prices is that there is no advantage in moving to be within 100 yards of the school gate. That is what distorts house prices. There is much less distortion if it doesn't make any difference where you live as long as you are within 2 miles of the school.

she has provided the a highly detailed, in-depth analysis of HACP, which I can't argue with

I am not arguing with the data but it does not prove that HACP manipulated their intake in the year in question any more than tossing a coin 10 times and getting heads every time proves that the coin is rigged. I am not ruling out the possibility that they did manipulate their intake. They may have done so. But these figures do not prove it.

Are you defending fair banding absolutely prh

Definitely not. I am defending it against accusations that it provides an easy way to fiddle admissions. I am not saying it is the best system available. It has faults as do all the alternatives. If it were me making the decision I probably wouldn't go with fair banding just because many parents don't understand how it works and think it is a covert means of selection (as we've seen on this thread).

Why?

Because I prefer to deal with facts. If you say that HACP are using fair banding to manipulate their intake I cannot accept that because it simply isn't possible. If you say they are rigging the random draw to manipulate their intake I would accept that may be possible if the independent supervisor is not doing their job properly (indeed, it would probably need collusion by the independent supervisor).

Well, duh, it's a happy (for HACP) side effect of taking very few children in the bottom bands of the 'fair banding' test

But they don't. They take the same number of pupils from each band.

When they do the random draw the independent supervisor observe the draw to ensure that the draw from each band was truly random and that all the pupils are placed into order by the random draw. They don't just draw the pupils they are going to admit and stop. They must place all the pupils in each band in order.

HACP then provide Croydon with the list of children in each band and the order in which they were drawn. Croydon will check that there are the same number of children in each band and that all children who applied are included. If any applicants have been missed or there are serious discrepancies in the sizes of the bands HACP will be told to conduct the draw again and provide new lists. The LA will then allocate places to the children at the head of the list for each band allocating the same number of places to each band. If someone allocated a place at HACP also gets a place at another school which they have named as a higher preference Croydon will allocate their place to the next pupil on the list for the appropriate band.

So to make sure that very few children from the bottom bands are admitted they have to distribute those children through all the bands and rig the draw to ensure they come out last in each band without the independent supervisor noticing.

All that said, one issue I haven't aired is the way that HACP conduct their open days, and how this might impact on admissions

Given the number of applications they get I agree that a single open evening is grossly inadequate. And yes, it may have an impact on admissions.

"I am not arguing with the data but it does not prove that HACP manipulated their intake in the year in question any more than tossing a coin 10 times and getting heads every time proves that the coin is rigged"

really?

Low attainers – 1% Middle attainers – 29% High attainers – 70%

So, with 180 students in year 7 in 2012, are you saying prh that the dice was rolled 126 times and got "high attainer" each time? And another 52 times and got "middle attainer" and only twice out of 180 rolls of the dice did "low attainer" come up?

What a lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky series of rolls of the dice was that? Almost unbelievable.

It's so far beyond rigged that it leaves rigged as a tiny dot on the horizon. It's actually insulting that anyone (including the 1% mentioned above) would be expected to believe it.

Well as the only 'proof' we could have of HACP's tinkering would be if they published a statement confirming it (and this is unlikely), the facts that we have are the figures minifingerz has posted above, and the fact that these admission outcomes are extremely unlikely to happen if the admissions process is properly applied once, let alone year after year.

And these extraordinarily factual situations just happened to occur in Harris' flagship secondary school.

It's interesting prh that I remember being on not dissimilar threads with you 4 or 5 years ago and remember saying that your posts sounded like a mouthpiece for the DfE. And minifingerz has expressed the same opinion on this thread.

Not saying that that's 'proof' of course, but the fact is that this is how your posts come across to some posters.

?? Sorry, but how can there be so little correlation between attainment and intelligence that a school can have a fair number of people of low intelligence yet only 1% low attainers and 29% middle attainers? Do they only have three bands or something?! There must surely be a colossal spread of ability within each band for it to be remotely possible.

Is it true that some schools using "fair" banding have only 3 bands and others as many as 9?...

I still don't understand why 10% of children can come from more than 2 miles away if the 2 mile radius largely resolves the house price problem??? You seem to be changing your stance on the logic of this, prh?

In answer to the question about how some places can go to children at greater distances, as an example of the fair banding school I mention up thread the distances vary depending on what band you fall in so it is totally feasible for this to happen. For some bands at my example school all were offered in some bands and distance didn't come imto it, in other bands the distance was 1.7 miles, others 2.5 miles. There are 8 bands in total. It therefore depends how many who sat the banding test fell into that band and it isn't always going to be an even spread. A parent who wants the school may see a child go to the school who lives further away than they do but their child doesn't get in and they then become convinced the system is corrupt when in reality it is just how fair banding works.

For my DC's school Academy group - most students who are permanently excluded, in the first instance move to another school in the group. This could mean going to a "better" or "worse" school, and probably means an inconvenient journey.
Of course the really "bad" things lead to the PRU or young offenders or similar.

really?

Really.

At the heart of fair banding is a lottery to select the pupils admitted from each band. The pupils selected are only a small sample. If you have a sample of 220 pupils 40% of whom receive free school meals and randomly select 18 of them the proportion of pupils receiving FSM will could be anywhere between 18% and 62% (and will occasionally fall outside this range). You would need to select 140 pupils to be reasonably confident of getting 35%-45% FSM. Fair banding ensures a spread of abilities. It does not ensure a spread of any other characteristic - attainment, SEN, EAL, FSM or whatever. So the figures being quoted do not, on their own, prove anything.

(I am of course assuming that your "really" was aimed at my comment about the data rather than my comment about tossing a coin)

The quick way to prove whether or not HACP are fiddling admissions would be to get the test scores for one year, check which band each pupil went into, check that the right number of pupils were admitted from each band and check that they weren't choosing the highest scoring pupils from within each band. Might be an interesting subject for an FoI request if someone really wants to get at the truth.

It is possible that HACP are manipulating their admissions to consistently admit a high proportion of high attainers. I accept that (yet again). But I have not seen anything that constitutes proof nor has anyone come up with a credible method by which HACP are getting around all the checks that are in place. So HACP may be fiddling their intake, they may not. On balance, given the information available to me and given the checks that exist within the process, I don't think they are. But I may be wrong.

remember saying that your posts sounded like a mouthpiece for the DfE

I get accused of that from time to time. I regard it as mildly amusing given the work I have done advising a couple of campaigns against forced academisation. The DfE would not have made any of the negative comments I have made on this thread. I doubt the DfE would accept the possibility that HACP are fiddling their admissions as I have done repeatedly.

You seem to be changing your stance on the logic of this, prh

Not at all.

Admitting pupils from within 2 miles of the school does indeed largely resolve the house price problem. However, as I explained earlier, as the school is using a lottery to allocate places it cannot, by law, admit 100% of the pupils from within this radius. It must reserve at least 1 place in each band for pupils living further away. Each band gets 18 places. Some of those places will go to pupils qualifying as LAC or having siblings at the school. So reserving 10% of places for pupils living further away means that there should be at least 1 place in each band. As things stand if they go any lower than 10% they would probably be breaking the law.

So, why is that the law? Is that a result of political policy on "choice" (or should I say chance, as it's an over subscribed lottery)?