Grown up discussion about improving equality in education (hopefully)

[BeRoseBee]

I know everyone is tired of all the VAT on school fees threads - this isn’t one of them. Lots of threads on that if you want to discuss that.

Can we have a grown up conversation about how to improve equality in education for all? I’d like to keep it free from party politics if possible, genuine policy suggestions only please.

The Rest is Politics has a phrase I like - let’s disagree agreeably. Debate is good. Different opinions are good. Personal attacks or attacking a political party are not helpful.

I’ll start - personally I think buying educational privilege is rampant in the state sector. Wealthy parents buy houses at inflated prices in order to get their kids into the “best” state schools.

Wouldn’t equality be improved if we did away with this? If we could work out the logistics (mainly transport) why not have a random selection of state school within your local authority area? Buying a pricey house no longer guarantees your kids go to school with other wealthy kids, you’d get a genuine mix of kids from different backgrounds.

Anyone have any (constructive) opinions on this?

I think we should take apprenticeships more seriously. Germany does a great job of showing value for non academic disciplines. I think expecting every child to go to uni is a bad thing.

Some kids thrive going straight to the workplace, whether thats joining the big 4 on an apprenticeship or learning a trade.

extending the school day may be a good idea, kids who’s parents can’t be bothered may benefit from being there longer. That of course takes funding. Given that we seem to have looming school closures I think the schools budget should be maintained and then spread out amongst the remaining schools.

I think sure start should come back, I think some parents genuinely have no idea what school readiness looks like or what to do with small children. I know I didn’t have a clue, I had severe PND and a COVID baby but I’m also quite focused in my expectations for my child so we did as much as we could with what we had, shapes, colours, counting, alphabet, using a spoon, colouring, using whats in my cupboard for sensory play. I even used youtube for “playgroup” sing a longs. I think if you have had poor parenting yourself you have no frame of reference for how to do it.

I think schools need to be clear with incoming parents what school readiness looks like.

I think we need to set up more SEN focussed schools, it is no good bunging children into environments they just can’t cope with. It’s much better if a school can be designed around specific needs.

Children who are a danger to others need to be removed and moved to a PRU quickly. The reality is their presence doesn’t benefit them or their peers. Schools will be calmer places where children can learn instead of feeling stressed by excessive behaviour.

You can’t get rid of inequality really, people have different levels of resource and innate intelligence and motivation . It’s about maximising each child’s potential. No child with potential should fail to achieve just because of their parents socio-economic status.

In my experience, as a teacher who has worked in both sectors, the biggest impact on a child's educational outcome is parental input and the home environment.
All of the biggest possible wins for education can be achieved by spending money in just about every area BUT the education budget.

My view is we should be doing far more on parental responsibility, aspiration and behaviour. Schools reflect the communities where the kids come from.

This is the crux for me. Most children I can get to age expectations, even if they don't do much reading or whatever at home. But if they start school age 4 not able to sit and listen, with no idea of colours or numbers or shapes, no core strength and no gross motor skills because they go from high chair to push chair to the sofa then bed, it's very hard to close the gap with the children who can write their name in nursery and who are beginning to do little sums. Of course those children just get further and further ahead because their parents keep doing those things. Parents can buy into good catchments all they want but they're just buying into their children being surrounded by children of other motivated parents. It's the motivated parents that effect the outcome of the school, not that those schools have magically better teachers (NB the correlation between Outstanding rated schools and affluence. Much easier to be Outstanding from a good starting point).

”I feel so cross that the media are focusing on just VAT policy when they talk about education and the election.”

I share your sentiment, but I am also a lot more cynical. This type of divisive policy is tabled deliberately as a distraction as it is far more fun to engage pointlessly with the media than actually get any real work done on the ground. I also believe some misguided advisor has told them to have a divisive and slightly populist policy because you can’t win without one and look at the rise of the far right in France. It’s done to get some attention just like Angela Rayner is advised to wear a red buffoon dress so that Farage can say “at least she isn’t boring”. I am afraid to say I have lost all faith in believing that those standing actually want to get anything done as opposed to just be voted in. It’s “reality show” politics.
I am secretly worried they have written off the Covid generation of kids and have just accepted that social mobility there is inevitably dire.

@GeneralPeter I've been teaching 13 years and if I had to teach only using someone else's standardised materials I'd quit.

The ability to teach a subject in your own way and adapt to the students you have in front of you is the great pleasure of teaching and makes up for all the other crap!

There is certainly a case to be made for letting beginners and teachers teaching outside their subject area use good quality off the peg stuff when they are starting out. So given that UK schools increasingly ARE staffed by the young and inexperienced and people teaching outside their subject area, there's certainly a case for it.

But that's a bug not a feature.

I don't know if you are aware but in the UK there is practically no subject specific CPD any more unless the teacher organises and pays for it themselves (or at least seeks it out in their own time, usually unpaid - there are valiant non government funded organisations doing their best...).

A good education system would recognise that to inspire students, teachers need to go on learning...and not just about safeguarding and the latest fad derived from poorly understood cognitive science.

well written @Chickenuggetsticks , it's so hard to discuss the sensitive issue of how to deal with sen and behavioral needs. i honestly believe it's a massive issue and the cause of many other smaller problems.

I mean have you actually met any teachers...we will talk your ear off about Economics or Geography or Music or whatever given half a chance.... ever been moithered at a party by someone who wanted to talk about how great Oak Academy is (and wasn't a shareholder)...thought so...

State education in the U.K. is very unequal.

The difference between the outcomes of the "best" state schools and the "worst" state schools is massive.

As others have said the gap starts early. The sure start programme under the last Labour government was aimed at making sure more children starting school were actually school ready,

Personally if you were to ask me to best way to improved education I'd bring back sure start,

Actually I agree with the pp who said to fix all the other services that are not education: social services, housing, healthcare (especially mental health and paediatrics) and stop LAs routinely breaking the law on SEN; restore school funding in real terms per child to where it was 10 years ago and bring back a realistic school buildings budget - if that could be achieved the rest of it would be easy by comparison! But to get all that we need economic growth, which to be sustainable requires a well educated population.

We are a bit fucked I think frankly.

Genuine question - what does an engaged parent look like? My DC will be going to a secondary school that has just received a requires improvement grading so I feel like I need to step up at home but how? I've been quite light touch through primary - intentionally as I think primary is for sparking a love of learning but many pp's have said the difference is parental engagement so what do I need to do?

The biggest thing for me is reading. I've taught in all sorts of areas and have never had a class where even a third of parents read regularly with their child. It genuinely baffles me. Also just discussing what they have been learning at teatime - taking an interest and showing education is important.

I don't think your plan would work. In some ways I agree that parental choice creates a more unequal system. 'Everyone goes to their nearest school' isn't a bad idea. Being allocated a random school within your area would be terrible for traffic and pollution. In any case, it wouldn't solve the problem of there being whole wealthy, 'leafy' areas where wealthy people would live and have access to a wide choice of good schools within that area, where others couldn't afford houses.

Lesson planning/prep and paperwork are not the same thing. Most teachers these days have access to shared resources within their departments and a gazillion lesson plans, PowerPoints etc online. I almost never make anything entirely from scratch, but resources always need tweaking to suit the class/scheme of work.

Good lesson planning for your individual class is a part of good teaching. Teachers are overworked because they have too much contact time (I have 11 classes, mostly with 28-31 students) and too much admin, marking and hoop-jumping. That's the stuff you are doing when you'd rather be planning good lessons.

I think more apprenticeship type routes, especially in shortage areas, would be a good idea. A lot of kids would be most motivated by, say, starting to earn even a small amount while training from age 16. Many are just waiting for education to come to an end, but if they had an option to learn on the job from mid teens, when they are perfectly old enough to do so, that would be great. It would also help end the irritating infantilisation of young people - I hate that a lot of people act as though anyone under 18 or without a degree is some sort of useless liability. Young people are capable and should be given a chance to show it.

I agree with all of this. Also the burden on dc being transported up to an hour away? Whilst this does happen, a random allocation would mean more dc having to do this. It's not something all dc could sustain.
This also doesn't factor in the social damage done by reducing the huge benefit of local school -local friends. Not just the dc but the entire family social landscape which is usually moulded around nearby school friends. Don't underestimate the huge benefit of this in building community.

I don't see why having massive ability differences would benefit anyone anyway. Wouldn't high ability/high focus on education dc just be set in completely different classes to low ability? I went to school in another country and the high schools were 2-3 x the size of here. I literally had no real contact with anyone other than in my sets or similar sets as there were so many sets and so many pupils. Dc make friends with people similar to themselves on the whole and with those they share classes with.

I think what needs to happen is again, funding. More resource going in to support low achieving schools. Smaller classes, more support staff etc. more funding, not just moving funding from successful schools.

And a completely redesigned system where dc abilities are assessed in a more holistic way rather than in the basis of a set of final exams.

Final exams reflect a very specific skill and type of intelligence that is very rarely the main skill required in life.

Apart from perhaps a surgeon where knowledge needs to be retained and recalled instantly on the spot, the vast majority of jobs and life's requirements are the ability to understand concepts, know how to access information and understand it, communicating information, using knowledge in an applied manner, problem solving etc.

These skills are best assessed through a range of tasks.
Testing
Presentations
Project work
Open book assessments (no these aren't as basic as they sound. You are given problems to solve and you have access to materials to apply)
Essays
Problem sets
Homework

Similar to in the US when everything A dc does in the last 4 years at school goes into the pot and a GPA is created

Is there scope for more assisted work (cheating) being submitted? Yes. But that doesn't mean the current focus on final exams is therefore better. it's like saying 'to avoid assisted work being submitted we shall assess everyone on how fast they can read'. its just a flawed method of judging someone's overall ability. the current system in the UK prizes and rewards good exam performers rather than best overall ability

I was in the first cohort doing GCSE's, from memory the whole idea behind them was continual assessment rather than one exam but that seems to have been scrapped. There is far too much emphasis on exams now, DD will always achieve more academically than DS purely because she has better exam technique but he is just as smart.
We also need to value non academic success and stop seeing Uni as the be all and end all.

The biggest inequality in education comes from parents and their level of engagement. The government can’t change that no matter how much money they throw at the system.

Reinstating a sure start style programme would be a start. This was exactly aimed at helping those who struggled to parent, parent better because the Labour government correctly understood that if you set families on the right path in the early years it pays dividends later.

Decent funding obviously.

And removing all forms of selective education (private, religious, grammar etc) except in the case of high need SEND that cannot be catered for in mainstream (with the right funding of course).

Good comprehensive education is the best. It isn't just teaching academic skills but also social ones. Local comprehensive schools are part of a community and families will feed into and support that community. Having skin in the game (i.e. children at your local school) gives you a reason to engage. Engaged supportive parents are the single most important indicator of academic success. [see above re surestart]

How you sort out the postcode lottery that currently exists is a hard one. If all comprehensive schools had the funding and support plus weren't spending their time being social services because there is no local provision/ families can't cope then the world would be a better and much less socially divisive place.

@Phineyj Thank you, that's interesting. I would certainly not want to prevent capable, inspired teachers from going 'outside the lines'. My experience from school was that those were often the very best teachers.

What do you think about using new technologies, e.g. adaptive learning, to take on more and more of the "imparting knowledge" bit of education, marking and assessment? Freeing up time for teachers to focus on the inspiring, trouble-shooting and all the non-knowledge bits of education that are going to be increasingly important, as AI takes over the 'information processing' bits of white collar jobs (e.g. time for teamwork, leadership, compassion, resilience, outdoors stuff, charisma, speaking).

I think that most students are not motivated enough to learn from a computer without a person there nagging them.

2020 showed us that very clearly.

Highly motivated students will of course use whatever good resources they have access to, whether that be a well edited textbook or one of the neuroscience based learning tools like UpLearn. Or both!

But highly motivated students are not, and never have been, the issue.

I would be against any system that didn’t allow some choice - I don’t think it is reasonable to expect one type of school to fit all or even nearly all. My dc has SEND that would never meet the threshold for specialist provision, but which still makes a big comp a very difficult environment for her.

@BeRoseBee , I think you need to ask what prompts many parents to opt for independent education. My boys were state educated originally, it didn’t occur to me to educate them privately. In retrospect I wish I had sent them to independent schools from the get go. I live in a fairly affluent area, the state secondary my elder son initially went to is always over subscribed. He wanted to learn and that made him the subject of bullies, learning wasn’t cool it seems.
He did very well and was much happier once we sent him to our local independent school which was literally a five minute walk from his state secondary. It’s not a prestigious school, it’s facilities were not massively superior to the state school’s but there were differences namely:-
Competitiveness was encouraged and success celebrated.
Respect for each other and especially the staff was expected and achieved.
But above all discipline was consistently maintained.
There’s always going to be those with heaps of money who want the prestige of public schools but very many who educate their children independently do so with a fair amount of financial difficulty and would welcome state education they felt able to rely on. Unfortunately it is much more difficult in the state system to remove unruly students, one cannot simply ask them to leave. Too many believe that everyone must be a winner and too few parents are (from my experience of the state system) prepared to support the schools regarding discipline.
My elder son is now a GP with children of his own, tellingly they are/ will be when old enough home educated.

Can anyone please explain why children at some schools do really well, whereas children at other schools do not?

When I was ten/eleven years old I remember viewing about four secondary schools at open evenings. One in particular had bad exam results. I was shocked by the behaviour of the kids - they were just feral. Gobbing off at us new prospects and their own teachers.

Ended up choosing the school where the children were super polite. It also got the best results.

Where I live now there is a state school in an affluent area nearby that receives lots of donations from alumni who have gone on to do well. The alumni send their own kids there. It doesn’t get great results because it’s full of entitled, lazy brats whose minted parents give their kids anything they want, without putting in any work. They’re badly behaved and disruptive, so not conducive to learning. High staff turnover.

I don’t think money will solve the issue - only parental discipline will.

@Lovepeaceunderstanding “My elder son is now a GP with children of his own, tellingly they are/ will be when old enough home educated.”

Thank you for this. This is my concern. That we are being driven to home educate or pay for 2 hours of online learning ourselves and hold our own careers back as well.

You can see it in a poster above stating that all kids have to go to comprehensives and that there should be no church schools either. Comprehensive all the way itself is a massive ideology!

My DCs went to a small church state primary and a superselective grammar (various ones). They were fine and we supported them. They are very academic and musical. The local school would not have been a great fit for them. Especially DS2 who is extremely advanced in Maths. He was an outlier in primary. He is very passionate about his music and academics. Why does the normal state system not care about him? He also has special needs albeit that advanced academic needs.