If you could re-imagine the secondary school system, what would it look like?

[EveSix]

If you could rip up the way secondary schools are structured, and start again, with a view to create truly inclusive learning communities in which all could thrive and fulfil their unique potential, what would it look like?

How large would schools be?
How might catchments work?
Where would resources be allocated and funding spent?
What about the curriculum?

You can plot changes commensurate with the level of taxation you feel comfortable with / the percentage allocated to schools; if you feel education is worth a greater bite of the cherry of taxation, you can suggest more comprehensive reform.

I'm not feeling brilliantly imaginative at the moment, but I'll kick off: as a parent of a DC with SEN who finds school an utter sensory overwhelm, I would like to see secondary schools shrink to the size of medium sized primary schools. I think young people often do well in smaller settings where they are known to all staff.

A 'stages not ages' approach to learning in some areas of the curriculum, such as Maths and English, especially in areas with a high level of language need, ensuring the needs of EAL learners are met.

I think each school should have a sufficiently staffed resource base where learners who require learning support are able to work in an environment which supports their learning needs.

I'd love to see a new take on qualifications to complement traditional GCSEs, with a much easier availability of academically suitable alternatives, preventing pupils from essentially being set up to fail.

Increased options for PE: so many young people properly hate PE, and never really recover any sense of joy or pleasure in exercise after secondary school. It's a massive missed opportunity for public health. I'd like to see competitive sports for those who are that way inclined, as well as gentler options for those who loathe coerced exercise or team sports: yoga, pilates, walking orienteering, gym, aerobics, zumba, archery or darts, pool, fitness theory, Nordic walking or just a regular walk in the neighbourhood.

Anyone else?

Oh, and I'd scrap formal uniform in favour of a school tracksuit and comfortable footwear, such as trainers.

Oh, and I'd scrap formal uniform in favour of a school tracksuit and comfortable footwear, such as trainers.

I would get rid of, or massively scale back exams - both gcse and a-levels. The idea that your entire educational attainment can be accurately measured based on performance on a timed test on a single day is ludicrous. Education shouldn’t revolve around test prep - I think it has a negative effect on how education is delivered and consumed. Also horrible from a mental health perspective for many students.

also in favour of scrapping uniforms 😛

I would assign every address a catchment school and that’s the one you go to so ultimately eliminating postcode lottery. To do this you’d need to ensure all schools are equal thought - surely an impossible task.

They would have a grammar stream based on ongoing assessment throughout primary, not a single test (so can’t be tutored).

They would also have proper SEN centres within the school, that particularly meet the needs of those who fall between needing mainstream and a special needs school. They should be integrated into the rest of the school as much as possible.

Creative subjects would be given as much emphasis as EBACC. Specialist quality teachers that don’t just teach the subject but offer choirs, orchestras, bands, several school plays a year etc. Sport every day in some form. Lots of training in team sports and opportunities to play matches against other local schools.

A much longer school day with the option to stay for breakfast and evening meal. Teachers should be available at the start and end of the school day for drop in sessions and support. To allow for this I would like all the bonkers admin they have to do removed from their workload.

Ties and integration with the local community should be enforced. Local businesses supporting the school through volunteering and mentoring. Children volunteering in the community and giving back.

Definitely the moon on a stick but if you could get all that then I think a lot of people paying for private would seriously reconsider state.

You're right, Lab, how did I not think of that?
When I was at secondary school (northern European country), all grades were based on course work as well as participation and engagement during lessons, where teachers were able to note whether a student had expressed a clear understanding of a key-objective during a class discussion, for instance, or made points indicative of such an understanding in an essay, for instance. All teacher assessment. No exams. No stress. Definitely a greater sense that one was able to impact grades through active engagement with learning in a broader context.
Good point.

Agree re small classes - 20 max. Parents to receive regular updates- maybe a couple of sentences each week rather than 5 mins per term.
Life skills eg. Politics, interest rates, light psychology and development studies eg covering personality types/disorders, enough to support understanding of different personalities/parenting struggles, we'd look at taxation and poverty and links to crime, social ills like drugs and alcoholism.
It would be compulsory to take 1 musical instrument (orchestra or electric/pop type/piano) plus GCSE maths, functional maths, English lang or lit, citizenship, 1 science,1 MFL, music and 1 creative subject (art/drama/dance/D&T/food) and the other subjects would be free choice.
A levels would be the same style but smaller so everyone would take 5 plus the extended project.

Dibble, that's such a great vision, I love the community angle. A very ambitious take.

When you refer to the grammar stream, do you mean 'in house' to support the needs of very able pupils? This would possibly be where my 'tiny school' vision flounders.

Streaming is interesting though. DC hated that they were always the one needing special support at primary, but was amazed to find setting for Maths and English in Y7 -totally liberating as everyone in their bottom set were at a similar level. Sadly only streamed for Y7, everyone expected to have caught up after that.

And yes to integrated SEN hubs. DC1 is currently looking at having to move out of mainstream for lack of SEN provision: excelling in creative subjects, humanities and performing arts, but tanking Eng and Maths due to SEN, which has led to huge issues with anxiety. DC will lose out on so much by moving to AP (not because there's anything wrong with AP, but because they've worked so hard to build a lovely friendship group and relationships with staff at current school).

Festiv, really great points.
The early specialisation in the UK is odd. I think it's pretty unique. I'm definitely in favour of a much broader, more generalised curriculum. My grades, for GCSE and A level equivalents from my home country, show grades for 15 and 8 subjects respectively.
A clear focus on life skills would be great.

Tiny schools don’t work for secondary. You need at least 500 11-16 for it to work without offering a very limited curriculum. Also you can stream by ability without at least 100 per year group. Emphasising arty subjects doesn’t help the geeks who see it as pointless and would much rather be solving maths problems and mixing chemicals! Catchment schools are great but then massively affect the prices of the surrounding houses so you end up with crappy schools and good schools depending on the area. Which doesn’t help the poor but keen to learn kids.

In my ideal world where money is no object, schools would be open 8am-6pm, but only part of that (let's say 9-3 for example) would be compulsory and education focused.

The rest of the time it would be staffed by mental health workers, youth workers, sports coaches, life skills teachers, arts teachers etc that would offer a wide choice in extra curricular activities and support that students could dip into as they liked. I know that in an ideal world, much of that would be covered by parents, but sadly we don't live in an ideal world.

I wouldn't necessarily scrap uniform, but I would absolutely enforce limits on what uniform can entail. Only one logoed item. Plain coloured shorts and tshirts for PE. Shorts allowed. And no bloody ties. It's 2023, no one wears a tie anymore.

parents and kids required to sign a contract. And if you act like you or your child don’t want to be there, you’re rude to staff, encourage your child to be rude… you crack on and find a different school - rather than absorbing everyone’s time disciplining / supporting/ parenting your child because you cba.

I'd also have smaller schools and smaller class sizes.

I'd have English, Maths and Citizenship/life skills as the only compulsory subjects. These would be taught in the morning, every day. The afternoon would then be free choice with academic, creative and vocational subjects on offer.

Every child would have a locker to keep their stuff in. There would be adequate time to eat proper lunch in a civilised manner. Food would be healthy and high quality. There would be extended 'form' time each day and it would be the form teachers responsibility to take care of the children's pastoral needs.

Children would be given a greater amount of freedom and responsibility.

I love your ideas on uniform and PE OP. I'd keep those too.

I'd make it more acceptable to only do five GCSEs and only offer a few subjects in addition so schools could be smaller.

I work in a big secondary and I feel so sorry for the year sevens coming in after being in a little village primary for example. So daunting. And then they get told off and given detentions instead of a big squishy cuddle when they're having a bad day (I used to work as a Y6 TA and saw this a lot - I'd already done secondary and thought how hard those kids were going to find the transition to secondary).

How would you all cost these things?
Most of what you describe ie broad curriculum, small class sizes, increased range of extra curricular activities, 1-2-1 tutor time + sports already exist within the private sector at a cost of approx £18-20K+ per year. So considering state budget is significantly lower (I believe under 6K per child) how would you fund that massive increase per child?
Raise taxes or ring fence a tax rise for education?

I would have a changing catchment each year so that there was a similar distribution of household incomes in all schools.
Teachers would really reduce their teaching allocation so they had a decent amount of time to plan.
External organisations would provide education on drugs and extra curricular activities etc and all schools would have a counsellor.
Scrap school league tables.
Obviously this would take a huge amount of investment but kids are the future. How much would we save as a result of properly supporting young people.

I'd scrap the "year by year" system and change to a system where kids move "up" according to ability rather than age. At the same time, scrap the current range of subjects (and GCSEs) and bring in a modular system for secondary school, similar to Unis, where you can choose from a range of modules, and progress through different levels of difficulty only when you've passed the earlier/easier modules. Marks from each module count towards some kind of "school leaving certificate" rather than GCSEs. Some modules would be compulsory, such as basic literacy, numeracy, etc to "life skills" level, where you'd have to retake the module if you didn't meet the required standard. Science/language modules would be dependant upon passing the earlier literacy/numeracy modules so you avoid kids with poor literacy and/or numeracy from wasting their time (and teacher's time) trying to study things that were beyond them at that time! Each module would last a term and current "year's worth" of studying would be broken down into termly modules allowing pupils to choose to do all modules within a small number of subjects or lots of different modules in a broader range of subjects. Modules would then be done by a mix of pupils of different ages, based on ability rather than age. At the end of Secondary school, points/marks would be totted up and a certificate issued showing the overall level achieved.

@twistyizzy The OP didn’t say how we had to fund it 😂😂😂. It’s all pie in the sky because it could never happen because of the funding.

Twisty, I sort of suggested in my OP that people suggest changes based on their own feelings about how much of an increase to the tax-burden (or tax-privilege, as I like to think of it, despite being a poorly remunerated public sector worker) they feel comfortable with. Personally, I would be extremely happy with paying a much greater amount of tax if it meant that education, social care and health care were better funded.

@DibbleDooDah I know but would be genuinely interested in how much people actually feel they would be prepared to fund these ideas. I agree with a lot of what has been suggested

The theory is good about bigger schools, but in reality, my experience is that rather than a broader curriculum, they just do more of the same, i.e. more identical science labs, more identical music rooms, more identical art rooms, etc., etc. That's certainly how it was at my school. It had doubled in size over the years, but all that had happened was all the rooms were duplicated, i.e. two almost identical workshops for woodwork (same equipment etc), two identical rooms for metalwork, etc etc.

@EveSix I agree and I would have no issue paying higher ring fenced taxes for education and health but I bet a lot of people would want this on the current budget levels. This wouldn't be pie in the sky if the budget per child matched that of private schools. What people are suggesting is actually attainable, if they are prepared to pay higher taxes.

Caramellised, the league tables!! How did I forget those? Yep, scrap them.

Bad, your modular system makes so much sense. Progress at a rate that makes sense for each child. Anything else is a massive waste of everyone's time, you're right.

A curriculum that focuses of fostering a sense of curiosity about the world. Focusing on joy and wonder. One that boosts self-esteem by including children as co-learners. More project work. No worksheets. No stupid GCSEs.

Maybe the middle years international bacc would be a good direction to go in…

@Badbadbunny for Secretary of State for Education.