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.

And if there are only 18 children in each band and therefore considerably more than 3 bands, how on earth did they manage to end up with so few low and middle attainers? That would need to be a huge boycott by children of lower ability, as I simply do not believe such a high proportion of genuinely low ability children could actually be high attainers.

Although for a very low ability child, I can see that any kind of written test, particularly one for which you have to travel and which you don't have to take anyway, is going to be a turn off, particularly as it's only a lottery anyway, so all the effort is more likely than not going to result in no offer. It is actually a pretty good way to screen out those prone to anxiety, those with unsupportive parents, those already feeling like life never gives them the luck, those who find the bus fare to get there expensive, etc. You don't have to think it's a pass/fail test to find it off putting. But for that to be on the scale of 70% of children being high attainers is phenomenally stark!!

Although for a very low ability child, I can see that any kind of written test, particularly one for which you have to travel and which you don't have to take anyway, is going to be a turn off, particularly as it's only a lottery anyway, so all the effort is more likely than not going to result in no offer. It is actually a pretty good way to screen out those prone to anxiety, those with unsupportive parents, those already feeling like life never gives them the luck, those who find the bus fare to get there expensive, etc. You don't have to think it's a pass/fail test to find it off putting. But for that to be on the scale of 70% of children being high attainers is phenomenally stark!!

Personally I think this could be the heart of it. Where I live (Hants) I perceive I see people self-selecting in a similar way. A certain school has a reputation for being pushy, and another as not good with SEN, and lo and behold the less academic or SEN choose to apply elsewhere. I have even heard anecdotally of people being told during open days that maybe this wouldn't be the best fit for their child.

I agree with you about how 'fair banding' can seem anything but when your child hasn't been offered a place at the school you want, and others have Pettswood. It's not necessarily a very intuitive system and different to the clearer criteria used for most primary admissions.

However, minifingerz's comments about HACP and how uncomfortable it is to witness a admissions procedure that seem to repeatedly admit middle class children whilst repeatedly not admitting children from more disadvantaged backgrounds resonate with me as someone who lives near Mossbourne (another flagship academy in Hackney).

It is very well known amongst local families and schools in these parts that if you have a bright child and go and have a chat with the head, your child may suddenly and unexpectedly be offered a place. Less so during the initial application for Y7, but definitely more so once initial allocations have been made.

Mossborne recently got into trouble for writing to all the families who had named it as one of their 6 preferences on their application and saying that they had places in some year groups for children who had an aptitude for rowing. The child may never had rowed before, they simply had to have an 'aptitude'. This was a blatant attempt to not admit from the waiting list, but to cherry pick children that they wanted at the school (ie that would be good for their league tables).

They got caught out with this one and, of course, this may be the first time that they ever tried tinkering. But it may simply have been the first time that they got caught.

Why do fair banding? Why not just a lottery system where all who applied have an equal, random chance of getting in? Why complicate it and make it a lottery that is more appealing to those who don't mind tests and whose family can make sure they get to them? Why is a "fair banding" lottery more fair than a lottery?

So, why is that the law

The courts decided the law regarding catchment zones in two cases that are well known in admissions circles - the Greenwich judgement of 1989 and the Rotherham judgement of 1997. Neither of these specifically mentions lotteries. However, most legal experts believe that these judgements mean that a school operating a lottery giving priority to local pupils must reserve a proportion of places for pupils from further away and that if it does not it may face legal challenge.

therefore considerably more than 3 bands

There are 9 bands.

how on earth did they manage to end up with so few low and middle attainers

The performance of local primary schools has a major effect. A high attainer is defined as a pupil scoring 30 points or more at KS2. If we look at the SATS results for the 7 primary schools nearest HACP we find that 3 of them (accounting for around half the pupils at these schools) have an average points score of over 30 points per pupil so they clearly have a very high proportion of high attainers - the average pupil at these schools is a high attainer. Two more schools have average points scores that are better than the average for the borough as a whole (28.8 and 29) whilst the remaining two schools (accounting for substantially less than half the pupils involved) are only just below the average for the borough. The borough has around 31% high attainers and 15% low attainers. Given the information available about the local primary schools I would not be surprised to find that they are turning out more than 50% high attainers and less than 5% low attainers.

But that's only half the attendees and only 50% high attainers. How on earth did that convert to 70% high attainers? Were people flooding in from even more well heeled areas? Or were local primary schools themselves quietly discouraging low attainers from applying, but encouraging high attainers? Or were those with particular educational needs just too nervous to apply to an as yet unknown entity? Tbh, it seems seriously wrong to me for politicians to hold a school up as a beacon of success on the back of such skewed statistics.

Also, only 4% of pupils were getting the EBacc 3 years ago at Harris S Norwood. If that had been a community school, the DfE would have been holding it up as an example of a school that lets down its high attainers and plays about with the league tables.

"But that's only half the attendees and only 50% high attainers. How on earth did that convert to 70% high attainers?"

Quite.

It is very well known amongst local families and schools in these parts that if you have a bright child and go and have a chat with the head, your child may suddenly and unexpectedly be offered a place

If schools in Hackney make offers direct to parents they are breaking the rules. All offers should be made by Hackney Learning Trust (which is part of Hackney Council). But yes, it is known for heads at all types of school to make offers direct to parents without going through the proper process. This does, of course, open the school up to the possibility of successful appeals. If the head admits someone who doesn't qualify for a place and the person at the head of the waiting list finds out they have a cast iron appeal case.

If the offer comes through HLT getting an offer to someone preferred by the head would involve collusion between the head, the governors, the independent supervisor of the random draw and HLT. I'm not saying it can't happen but it is unlikely.

I certainly know of a school near me about which there is a persistent rumour that if you don't get a place during initial allocations you should go and have a chat with the head and he can make sure your child is offered a place before the start of the autumn term. And, of course, every time someone does go and have a chat with the head and subsequently gets a place it is seen as confirming this belief. It is, in fact, complete nonsense. In this particular case the school's involvement with admissions stops before initial offers are sent out. All offers from then until the start of term in September are handled entirely by the LA. If you have a meeting with the head he will smile nicely and tell you that he will see what he can do. But he won't actually do anything. He knows that if he contacts the council and asks them to make sure your child is admitted the answer will be short and to the point.

How on earth did that convert to 70% high attainers

My apologies. I should have dealt with this properly earlier.

The 70% high attainers happened in 2011. Since the data refers to Y11 those pupils entered the school in 2006. At that time HACP was a CTC, not an academy. As a CTC it was not subject to the Admissions Code. I don't know what its admission arrangements were but I'm pretty certain they didn't involve fair banding.

The following year (2007) the school became an academy which meant they had to comply with the Admissions Code. The proportion of high attainers immediately dropped to a level which looks like it is broadly consistent with the output of the local primary schools. So if you really want to look at HACP's performance as an academy you should start with 2012 and ignore everything before that.

I'm not going to get into detail on South Norwood. But as a general point, some academies are better than others. Some have indeed artificially boosted their league table positions by pushing students towards easier GCSEs. Some are not as good as community schools. And yes, the DfE has an agenda to push.

Yes, the person at the head of the waiting list does have a cast iron appeal, but to exercise that right, they'd need to know that it has happened and indeed that they have that right.

Which would mean phoning the LA every day to ascertain your place on the list as list placings will change very quickly if families move into or out of the area, someone's admissions priority changes (eg sibling now in the school).

And when you're told that you're now number 3 rather than number 1 on the list, finding enough reason to ask the LA to initiate an investigation into how the list has been managed and places allocated, then waiting weeks/months for e-mails to get lost to finally receive an e-mail saying that the internal investigation has shown no malpractice, so escalating it to an external investigation, waiting weeks/months etc etc etc

Easy peasy.

Mossborne have been caught breaking the rules a couple of times. Of course, they may have got caught out every time, but I doubt it.

Thank you, prh - yes, it would have been helpful had you addressed that sooner! I'm still wondering why making people sit a test before you apply a lottery system to applications is considered more fair than putting all applications into a lottery. If it's to avoid complaints when the random lottery ends up choosing more candidates from one level of attainment than another, it clearly hasn't worked! It still seems to me that the whole testing process is deliberately designed to screen out the less academically well motivated/more anxious/less clued up and dump them on other unsuspecting schools!

It still seems to me that the whole testing process is deliberately designed to screen out the less academically well motivated/more anxious/less clued up and dump them on other unsuspecting schools

I agree that can be the effect but that is definitely not what it was designed to do.

In August 2010 Barnardo's recommended that schools should adopt fair banding to ensure that pupils from deprived backgrounds could get into the best schools. The proposal received wide support. The only opposition came from those who regarded it as an attack on the middle class and described it as social engineering.

The first suggestions that fair banding may cause disadvantaged children to lose out emerged in mid-2014. Prior to that all the articles I can find about fair banding talk about how wonderful it is for the deprived or how awful and unfair it is for the middle class.

I can only presume Barnados thought fair banding would be marginally less unpalatable to the middle classes than a pure lottery, then, as it is entirely predictable that some groups will be more put off taking an entrance test than others! Fair banding is certainly more likely to exclude the group that nobody wants to go to school with - those who are totally disaffected and don't want to be in school in the first place, as there is no way they would bother sitting a test!

That's one of the reasons some schools have an "aptitude for music" allocation. It's to attract middle class Millie whose parents pay for her clarinet lessons. It's definitely not for a ten year old boy from a dodgy estate who is great at rapping or beat boxing, that's for sure. Appeal to a middle class hobby and attract those kids whose parents have more money.

But isn't the PP meant to even out schools chasing comfortably off parents' money (encouraging 'voluntary contributions') with schools chasing money that they get for children in care or from disadvantaged situations? So as far as the school is concerned there shouldn't be an incentive to chase one category over the other? Grammars are now trying to even the balance too and lower the bar for those on PP recognizong they may not have had the same opportunities to prove themselves to date and so in some grammars those who are on PP don't have to score as highly or they reserve a fixed percentage of places for PP. This is of course controversial - some will argue that this devalues the PP child, some say this prejudices other children. I see a common theme that whilst we can be understanding we also often have differing view points and interests that will affect how we see one type of admission policy.

I can heartily say having had DD do three lots of grammar tests, deal with every type of admission policy under the sun I do know that if you can't be bothered, don't have the health to be bothered or don't know you perhaps should be bothered about admissons that is the main barrier. No policy whatever form it comes in will ever solve that challenge which why I advocate mentoring as a way of sharing this knowledge . But then the next person will come along and tell me I am interfering in their lives and now chancing they will be discontented. You just can't win sometimes.

"It's definitely not for a ten year old boy from a dodgy estate who is great at rapping or beat boxing, that's for sure."

Oh I don't know. My dc's school have partial selection for music aptitude. There are lots of kids who are selected who have never had any formal music teaching.

"No policy whatever form it comes in will ever solve that challenge which why I advocate mentoring as a way of sharing this knowledge"

Yes! I absolutely agree!

If you're in a school where the culture is anti-education then aptitude for music etc is in my opinion a sneaky way to up the middle class contingent and change the ethos. A little core of pro-education kids can make all the difference. When you think about the kids who really love musical instruments and hang out together, they are barely ever trouble makers. It's practically always the "lovely kids".

If you're in an already stable grammar (for example) then yes upping pupil premium kids is a good idea, not just because grammars tend to have very little funding, but largely because morally they should represent the community in which they belong. Yes they should be actively looking at their admissions policies and reaching out in other ways to improve this.

No method is great when there aren't even enough schools or school places to cater for the burgeoning population. Things get nasty when there has to be so much competition, and people get stressed and suspicious when they are expected to read through different criteria for umpteen different schools and then end up having tortuous, long journeys to schools they never actually wanted. It clogs up the roads, pollutes the environment and wastes a lot of time to travel long distances to school, particularly if you didn't even want to be at that school...

And actually, I think it's a shame if you want to have the chance to play a musical instrument in an orchestra and end up in a school that only gives you the opportunity to beat box because that's cheap. That just means the middle classes have to find music groups outside of school time and nobody else gets a go at it.

No easy solutions, really. It's a bit concerning, though, that government pressure has been so intolerable that far from people flocking to become teachers and headteachers, which should be very appealing careers in times of recession, they have persuaded lots of people to leave altogether. There is a national shortage of headteachers and big problems with teacher recruitment in some areas. Technically, it's never been easier to become a teacher, with various new routes into the profession, but in reality, it's a long time since the career has seemed less appealing.

Now they are working their magic on the medical profession. And they expect to be able to encourage more graduates to flock into social work!

Yes, my children are at primary and I'm seriously concerned that their secondary education willl involve having no teachers for some classes, streams of disinterested and incompetent supply teachers and very few enrichment opportunities as morale and staffing levels are so low, as mine did in the 80s.

^disclaimer°. I"m not saying all supply teachers are Luke this, but I definitely met more than a few at secondary.

On Governance there is a crucial difference, as has been observed up thread between a stand alone academy and a Multi Academy Trust (MAT)

Have a look at this :

schoolsweek.co.uk/e-act-academy-chain-abolishes-local-governing-bodies/

Hi All,
Does any one know the difference between an academy sponsor and academy trust. Some academies seem to be sponsored by an organisation but not part of the same trust as all the other academies sponsored by that organisation. Really confused...