Richmond Borough Schools Chat 8

[muminlondon2]

This thread follows on from Richmond Borough Schools Chat 7.

News and opinions on all the changes to schools in Richmond borough.

is very hard to make a decision on where to put Turing on a preference list if we don't know where our children might be taught next year. we obviously would need to know by the end of this month which is the deadline for applying.

From all comms I have seen from Turing they do have it sorted out re the temp accommodation, I'm guessing they can't say due to commercial reasons - they were burned before. I suspect announcement tonight at the open evening, and feasibly today for current parents. I'm going to the open evening tonight so will update if no one else gets there first. I will say that if you put site to one side it is a brilliant school, but agree that we really do need that info before deciding to choose it!

an update would be great thank you. we would love to put Turing on the top of our list but we and a lot of other potential parents are getting put off by the lack of information on the new temporary site.

Looks like the new temporary site will be Clarendon school. I'm at the open evening and it's on a leaflet.

Ps. Forgot to say - temp site will be split between current location and Clarendon.

and where will next year's year 7 go? clarendon or current site?

The new intake to the new site. There will be some teachers who will primarily be based at the old site and some will be based at the new site. Some specialist teachers (e.g. music etc) will travel between sites.

Likely the catchment will stick at 100 for next two years, but that not 100% confirmed yet.

Looks like 2017 secondary results were posted today. Looks like overall perfmormance is measured using grade 5+ english and maths (before, it was grade 4+?)

I don't understand the discrepancy between progress 8 and attainment 8 in the case of Teddington school, anybody care to explain?

www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/find-a-school-in-england

imgur.com/a/Xroga

I'm responding to my own question, does that mean that Teddington is not pushing kids and they're relying on demographics (as attainment is quite good but progress 8 is average?

Tw11 – I think it does read like that but I’m sure it’s not the whole story. Progress 8 is a horrid measure for schools and should be taken with an enormous pinch of salt. It’s a very crude average and fundamentally flawed as cleaver people than me have been shouting about for a while.
www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2016/10/more-problems-with-progress-8
teacherhead.com/2017/02/24/more-issues-with-progress-8/
www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/gcse-results-day-how-does-progress-8-work

Interesting to see how many students are taking the ebacc exams, only 16% at Twickenham and 50% at Teddington. Students may be succeeding in other exams that are simply not taken into account, worse than that, actually contribute a score of 0 so drag the A8 and P8 average down. I guess this isn’t necessarily the school failing the students – the school might be encouraging students to take qualifications that suit the student rather than the exam the suits the schools P8 score.

There’s an issue with the letter to number grade conversion between 2016 and 2017 where an A is worth more in 2017 and the other grades worth less. This means that if you have lots of grades between B and F then your P8 score will be dragged down (Teddington?) and if you have a high number of A’s (Waldegrave?) then you score will be disproportionately higher.

Thanks. What I don't understand is this: Teddington is categorised as average on progress 8.. but 66% of students got 5+ grades (and 84% got 4+ grades) - so higher than both Grey Court and Orleans Park. To me, those results are excellent, better than last year and places Tedd as 2nd in the borough.

But, progress 8 score of Tedd is low (average - 0.03), lower than GC and OP's.

Does it mean that Waldegrave and Grey Court and OP students progressed much more - from the point of entry/baseline? And what's the baseline? Is it SATs? Or just yr 7 internal assesments?

Wow that second article you posted is excellent and might explain my dilemma. Thank you.

I taught at Teddington three years ago. Behaviour was terrible and loads of teachers left. Maybe has changed since but then they were definitely coasting with middle-class intake.

Mr Wilkinson - then head, now CEO, made it very clear that Teddington was a community comprehensive, no longer coasting on cohort and reputation, and there for pupils of all abilities. I remember him saying something about Progress 8 ( which I didn't fully understand then and probably still don't!), and that the courses they offer to help all students, and to support children with low attendance etc, would have an impact on Progress 8. I got the feeling he was putting the kids ahead of stats.

Do you know what he meant by "no longer coasting on cohort"? I wouldn't have thought that the intake can have changed demographically by that much. I think they do put the DC under less pressure to do EBAC subjects (anecdotally) but they should still be doing well enough in the other subjects to have a decent progress 8. Not that I agreed with the concept of progress 8, but...

From experience, Teddington is most definitely coasting on its cohort. They do not push their most able students - so if they are not that self motivated then it's up to the parents.Although their A-C pass rate is high,they get substantially lower A/A than Waldegrave, Grey Court etc for no good reason, especially considering the demographic of the students they take in.

Hi, this is quite confusing but I think the articles are saying that Progress 8 is reliant on children doing the full range of EBAC subjects and a couple more academic type GCSEs? My dd was in the year at Teddington that these results were for and I would say that the school made it clear that there was a free choice of GCSEs and BTECs for all and noone was made to do anything. I think the % doing a language was possibly quite low which is why only 50% did EBAC. Also religious studies was compulsory and I don't think that counts as an EBAC subject and many pupils would have not done geography and history as a result as no space? Many of her clever friends did things like music BTEC and/or a couple of art subjects as that's what they were interested in. Her year was also a year in which the drop out rate from the three main feeder primaries - St John's, Collis and SMSP was very low which could mean that there were more "high achieving" middle class kids coming in with all Level 5s (and the first batch of 6s) so pretty hard to show progress as it would mean they all had to get a clutch of A and As in the right subjects. To be frank getting a Level 5 in Year 6 was a walk in the park compared to getting all As and As in GCSEs especially with the disfunctional introduction of the new Maths and English exams and the tinkering with all the other GCSEs that went on.

inchy, even if the cohort hasn't changed, the phrase "no longer coasting on cohort" could mean they are now aiming to differentiate better.

For a school to get an outstanding grade these days, the bar is much higher than it used to be (so do check dates on Ofsted reports) - the majority of children need to be making outstanding progress no matter what their starting point, and all identifiable groups (e.g. high attainers, low attainers, SEN, FSM, boys, girls) need to be making outstanding progress too.

In the meantime, the national system for measuring progress has been stripped away, and schools/trusts have to put their own systems in place. Some will be further down the road with that than others. It's not an easy time for schools!

I took it to mean that the school's cohort traditionally comes largely from a well-educated background - perhaps using private tutors or those centres you see in supermarkets, so they were more likely to do well even if teaching isn't outstanding. But that's my interpretation. It would be interesting to see how progress 8 would have looked a few years ago had it been around, under the previous administration. Obviously now there's nothing yet to compare it too, although their actual results have improved YOY.

LottieProsser I thought the Progress 8 subjects allow pupils who have done two Ebacc qualifying subjects in the same category (i.e. two languages, two humanities or triple science + computer science) plus a third in another Ebacc category? That wouldn’t qualify them for the Ebacc but is a bit more flexible. And it would explain why schools are more relaxed about Ebacc entry.

Today’s print RTT has School set to move after outgrowing current home (p 8).

That article is very misleading, as Turing are not moving, they are just taking on another temporary site for the next two years of intake. Very frustrating how they can report quite so inaccurately!

Both Teddington and OP should be able to do at least as well as Greycourt so although they have both improved their a-c rate neither school really stretches pupils. I haven’t looked at recent stats but the grades for high aceivers being b,s isn’t very good when you consider these children’s friends who were in the same group at primary are getting a and a*. Waldegrave is getting c out of low aceivers where as the other schools aren’t.
Whilst you can argue school is about more than grades both Teddington and OP offer lots of extra curricular but there is many pupils who don’t participate in anything. Not a lot is done to encourage the reluctant into doing things so they feel part of the school community
Certainly at OP homework is inconsistent.
Both schools have quite a lot of poor behaviour in the classroom which they struggle to address.
They do rely on their largely middle class cohort with interested involved parents.
Hopefully the new schools will keep these two schools on their toes.