Despite having the right grades, my child is not applying to Oxbridge because ....

[TalkinPeace]

• she wants to live in self catered accommodation
• she does not like the small sizes of the colleges / social units
• having to go back to college for lunch while doing a lab based degree does not make sense
• the whole gown and formal dinner stuff smacks of coat tails rather than standing on own feet
• she does not fancy fighting through hordes of tourists while moving between buildings
• having a tutor picked by which college they are based in rather than their research specialism seems very odd to her

Also, for what she wants to do, the course at Oxford is not that well balanced
and Cambridge, despite having a fab course was not a place that felt like home when she visited for 2 days.

So she will be putting other Universities on her form and taking a great deal of stress out of this house.

For what its worth, those of her friends I've chatted to are also ruling out Oxbridge in favour of other Unis because of the first four points.

What are other people's reasons for ruling out Oxbridge, despite having the grades?

What do you make of this, then - I recently met an exceptionally bright young woman with a good humanities degree. She joined Teach First straight from one of the best universities in the UK. She is not teaching a subject related to her degree. She is teaching.....

wait for it, wait for it.........................

Maths. I believe she might have Maths A level, but she certainly doesn't have any further qualifications in Maths. Can this ever be acceptable? I would imagine she's a very good teacher but surely her subject knowledge must be quite limited.

Depends on the level of maths. A good A level maths person can teach maths to age 11 year olds if they are also good at teaching.

Teaching in secondary, I presume? Fine for primary, for all the reasons I gave...

Not too surprised.
From the school's POV: Maths teacher are hard to come by
From the teacher's POV: they get a nice golden hello.
I should imagine that they will start her on KS3 and maybe KS4 but don't let her near KS5 until she's proved herself.
Brave girl!

Also does it not make a difference which set? If she is a great teacher and only teaching bottom set or maybe the one above, it's unlikely her Maths ability will be stretched (assuming she is bright enough to have remembered all the content she once learned, that is) - even right up to year 11.

I always wonder in these debates where all these specialist teachers are going to come from. Fine if you're in certain places, but what about in the sticks? Where is the native or at least 1st class hons degree French speaker? I know someone who this past year has been teaching Spanish. She has never learnt Spanish herself. She was just mugging it up one lesson ahead of the class.

It always makes me cross, too, when I see Sutton Trust-type endeavours and their reach only extends to pupils within the sound of Bow Bells. Michelle Obama did a talk for girls who already had opportunities right on their doorstep. I didn't notice her schlepping out to Great Yarmouth.

I don't know how it works with Teach First. I didn't ask about the school, but it's definitely a secondary school. It might not have a sixth form, and I don't believe that the LEA where she works has grammar schools, but even so the best in my school at aged 14 needed a Maths specialist teaching them - I'm thinking of my best friend, who went on to be an astrophysicist, and the 25+ other girls who went on to do degrees in Maths, Physics, Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, Biology or Biochemistry.

The lower ability sets, I agree, just needed a very good teacher with a firm grasp of the basics. Certainly that's what I needed. I was put in the top set for Maths and bumped along at the bottom of it all the way to O level. I'd have done a lot better as one of the more able girls in the middle set. The top set teacher felt she should explain things from first principles, which was way over my head!

Rhoda - there will be good teachers if they are recruited, trained, paid and treated well.

DDs school dropped Latin because the teacher retired and they could not find another with anywhere near that level of knowledge.

MFL teachers are thin on the ground : and because of bloody Gove and his Ebacc are being forced to teach MFL to kids who struggle with English : so are leaving the profession.

Funding is a MASSIVE issue.
Academy schools save money by hiring NQTs
they have no interest in experienced teachers who cost lots
and when they are operating on a shoestring
while being forced to put kids in for every exam under the sun to comply with Ofsted
its going to make it rather tricky to give the upper sets the renaissance education that top Unis seem to expect their intake to have acquired.

Symonds do not get the tax breaks that schools - state and private get :
if the VAT field were levelled, that would instantly add £250,000 to their budget
They have dropped General studies to allow higher grades in fewer subjects
BUT
They also provide BTEC courses for those who are having to retake their core GCSEs

• something private schools can conveniently disregard.

Quite, TalkinPeace.

Where on earth are most schools going to get a Latin teacher, fgs?

Bobochic - you could pay teachers £100K and I still think you'd struggle to find tip-top inspirational people to teach in certain areas and schools.

Laughing - I live and work in the kind of place where when the teacher who taught Latin (state primary) retired, one of the TAs took over because it transpired that she had a classics degree from a good university...

I think that may be the definition of 'living in a naice area'!

Bobo, I think there are some very rural, coastal and ex-industrial areas where finding well-qualified teachers for e.g, MFL would be a struggle whatever the pay...

At KS1 primary, kids need to be learning skills not subjects even at naice little prep schools like the one I attended.
My Year 1 teacher taught us how to listen, how to look, how to observe others, how to observe ourselves.

Relevant degrees do not make good teachers.
Passion, interest and communication skills make a good teacher.

DH did not do Biology to O level : yet he can enthuse 900 A level students about Biology better than their teachers and lecturers (according to said Lecturers and teachers)
because he's good at opening their ears and eyes and minds

THAT is the skill that highly selective schools look for in their teachers - not necessarily the qualifications - it helps but its not essential.

One of my physics teachers not the fuckwit I had at school regularly pops up on TV talking about History : because he's brilliant at it.

State schools have to put up with the applicants they get : hence why thousands and thousands of teaching posts are empty in poor areas

Why on earth do most schools need a Latin teacher?!

Honestly.

Symonds do not get the tax breaks that schools - state and private get :
if the VAT field were levelled, that would instantly add £250,000 to their budget

Hang on - so, are you saying that because they are a 6th form college and not a school PS are treated differently for tax which affects their budget? What justification is there for this?

(I do realise you will probably be laughing uproariously and hollowly in equal measure at my naivety here but I genuinely don't know about this stuff. )

Sorry that was to Talkin

Latin is an inflected language and its complexity provides a good workout for the brain. The exercise can prove useful as a background to programming. As a MFL, Irish would be similarly useful.

Quite.

So why not Irish, or any of the other inflected languages that are rather more commonly available, and which tend to be preferred by admissions tutors?

The primary I teach in offers it to the most able pupils in the final couple of years, as a good workout for the brain as math suggests. As it happens, we have had teachers able to teach Latin (or indeed ancient Greek), but not Irish; all pupils in KS2 get taught French anyway by a specialist.

I did Latin O-level, back in the day. I found it a useful adjunct to French, and an absolutely invaluable injection of formal grammar that i rely on heavily in my teaching today - as I was at primary mainly during the 70s, formal grammar was NOT taught in English in my day, so the complexities of SPaG would otherwise pass me by!

darklingjane
Yup.
Symonds, Barton, and every other FE college in the country are treated as adult education so do not get to reclaim VAT in the same way as schools.

Its also why the government has been able to trash FE college budgets while claiming to protect education.
But with the school leaving age now at 18, its all a bit of a sick joke.

Latin and Ancient Greek A level tend to appeal to very small numbers. If the logistics could be worked out, there is no reason why teaching couldn't be organised by area. It's perfectly possible to start a language at university and get to a really high standard by the end of the three or four years, but I don't see why that rules out offering it to those who are interested at school.

GaspoOde
DDs school looked at sharing Latin teachers with two other schools (one private, one state) but could not find one.
They had 6 lessons a week to fill, the other state school ditto, the private school 10, but there were no suitable people.

And remember that almost all state secondaries are Academies now, so no LEA coordination any more.

Even somewhere the size of Symonds (1700 kids per year) only had 6 A2 Latin students

So sad. Interesting from a personal perspective, though. My daughter now has a Classics degree and is going to look for tutoring work. Here in London there appear to be a lot of Classics graduates doing this.No idea yet how easy it is to get, but of course that's a different ball game from teaching in a school/college, even though the group sizes are tiny in both cases.

even though the group sizes are tiny in both cases
Nope, 35 per year did it at DDs school : big group of hand picked nut jobs bright kids
Get her to move out of London and sign up for Teach First

It frustrates me that the vast majority of children are unable to apply for courses such as Classics because they don't have access to a Latin teacher.