How important is primary school - good or outstanding school?

[dollydoll50]

Hi,
We face a bit of a dilemma. We love our area, but the schools are good at best OFSTED rated, many are 'improving' which can be good or not so good.

I visited an 'outstanding' school the other day, just out of our catchment and now I really want our DD to go there. It is as good as a private school I think. I went private from 4 years, so I feel i am comparing everything to this. We would have to move, which is ok as we are moving anyway, but we were going to stay in our area. This would mean a slight shift.

So my question, how vital a foundation is a primary? Is good good enough? Everyone wants to give their child the best but is good to oustanding going to make a huge difference in setting them up for secondary?

Love opinions from people who have been through the primary system or going through it....

You need to go with your gut feeling on visiting rather than ofsted ratings. Some outstanding schools are, indead outstanding but not always. Likewise, some schools graded under the old 'satisfactory' grading are truly outstanding when it comes to all round teaching and care for the children.

I have taught in schools across the ofsted range. I certainly wouldn't always choose what ofsted have determined as outstanding dolt on their day so.

Also, don't assume that private is always better. In some cases it will be, in others the state school will be better. Again, you need to visit and see. And I say that as a fee paying parent myself.

IMO, primary school is hugely important. Not in a purely academic way but in fostering a love of learning and laying down foundations for who they become as s person. Don't underestimate home though as influence and nurture at home has been shown to be more important in a child's formative years.

When it comes down to it you should choose the school that feels right gig your child and you as a family. Sometimes that will be one graded outstanding, other times it will be an outstanding school graded 'good' or 'needing to improve' .

Visit the schools and go with how you feel, would it be the best school for your individual child. ofsted is very unpredictable and ratings change all the time. EG my childs schools has gone from special measures to good within 2 years and is seen as one of the best in the area. It has changed that quickly and a school can drop from outstanding to special measures within one ofsted report.

Worried - totally agree with you. I went private all through and I must say when I was twelve, other girls joined from a local primary and they were teaching us long division - ie they were ahead! If I was back in Oz where I grew up, I know I wouldn't send my DD to my school for primary. I dont think it was necessarily better. It had better facilities perhaps, but you could compare it to a good govt school and it was a leading private school

I am not swayed by OFSTED - but this outstanding school was outstanding in every way. I love it. You could just tell it was a cut above and more from the improving school I had seen a few days earlier. That is where my question comes in - is a good school good enough? Or should we purely be aiming for the top?

This love of learning you mention was very much emphasied in the outstanding school, more than the good school. I want to give my daughter the very best and don't necessarily rate the private schools in my area.

As I said, it would mean moving out of beloved area to a more expensive area. All doable.

I would look at the Ofsted history of all the schools. Has the outstanding one always been on top of its game? Have the improving ones got a history of being poor/satisfactory and never good? A lot of this is down to leadership and expectations of the teachers. Years ago a lot of schools coasted and did not raise the attainment of the children sufficiently.

If you discover that the outstanding one has always been so, I would move. I would absolutely make sure though that by moving your DC would actually get a place. You do not say if it is C of E which can deny local people a place. If a school has been consistently good, I would look seriously at that too. I would only really avoid yo yo schools as these tend to get great Heads one minute and slip back into mediocrity the next.

If you are going to move anyway then yes I would buy or rent based on the school I wanted.

It sounds like a fab school and if your gut says it is the right choice then go with it. If you want more info see if there are any PTA events you could slip along to like a cake sale. Or visit the nearest park/playground after school and have a chat with parents whose kids are in the school's uniform. I did that!

My kids all went to a Good primary school. There is an outstanding school nearby, but I don't like it at all. It simply does not feel right, all a bit too well organised and planned, parents all drive clean 4x4s etc. The school we chose might be merely good, but it is much better than the outstanding one in my view.

I think that always trying to do the very best for your child is not the best thing to do for your child.

There can be a huge difference between individual primary schools.

Even more importantly, there can be a huge difference in how good a fit individual primary schools can be for your child. I sent both my children to an Ofsted 'Good' school even though an 'Outstanding' one was available - because the school was a better fit for them (the Outstanding one did its very best to encourage us until they found out that DS was a school-induced selective mute... in the 'Good' one, the head waited patiently for 5 minutes to help DS to speak to him, the first time he had spoken to an adult outside the family for months). As it happens, the Good school has just been rated Outstanding. It hasn't changed, although its rating has - and its fundamental fit for my children hasn't changed either.

However, the alignment between that difference and the Ofsted ratings of the schools in question is far from perfect.

If you loved the Outstanding school, it is 'consistently good or better' over the last couple of inspections, it has low staff turnover and its strengths (read the detail of the report) match your child's profile, then you could move to enable you to go to it. Basically, if you would still love the school and want to move to it if it was rated Good or below at its next Ofsted, then it is worth moving. Many schools are being downgraded, so its rating may not survive the next inspection. You have to be clear that you want the school 'for itself' and not 'for its Outstanding grade' IYSWIM?

HOWEVER, it depends on when your child is due to start primary. If it is next September, a move at this point may well trigger investigation as possibly fraudulent, and as a reult would have to be scrupulously 'above board' - current house sold if owned, move completed by application day, new place to live a permanant family home not a short-term rented 1 bed flat, paperwork trail available for scrutiny etc etc.

If your child is not due to start until 2015, then the above won't apply - but even so, worth moving sooner rather than later.

The evidence is that primary education is more important for life chances than secondary education.

Home, I would agree that primary education is hugely important.

I'm just making the point that the quality of an individual child's primary experience is not tightly causally linked to the Ofsted grade.

Should OP move for a school that she loves and she thinks would be a great fit for her children? If she can do so honestly and non-fraudulently, then if she perceives the benefit to her children to be great enough, then yes.

Should OP move just because the other school is Outstanding according to Ofsted? No.

Would her children's primary education suffer hugely if they attended a 'good but improving' school rather than an 'oustanding' one? Probably not, especially as the quality of an individual child's education can be as much down to cohort and to specific teachers [illness or departure of a key teacher, or simply a personality clash] as it is down to the school overall.

Mine have been at outstanding that then dropped to good. No obvious difference

teacher, I was responding to the first part of the original post "How important is primary school?", not the rest. I agree that Ofsted is in effect nothing more than a "weather forecast" of a child's likely future experience in a school. Not least because children are at schools long enough that many will see material improvement or deterioration in quality during their time there.

Hi OP. Have been through this, and my DCs are now at secondary. Fwiw, I would totally agree with others who suggest that you go with gut feeling. Please take Ofsted reports (both good and bad) with a pinch of salt, and simply think about what feels right for your child. Having said that, I did this and still got it wrong (twice!!) This is far from being an exact science. Glad to report that my two seem to have survived primary school and are doing OK

I am also new to the British system with OFSTED reports. I spent last autumn and this one going methodically for open mornings in each school in the vicinity and I have to say outstanding schools here are a head above others. Good schools tend to be more varied. I would go to quite a few schools to check the competition.

Most schools are pretty good nowadays. And please remember that innate ability and parental support are the main determinants of final academic achievement, not schools.

Being able to walk or cycle to school with friends brings huge benefits.

I never considered anything but the nearest primary and mixed comprehensive wherever we lived, and my dd and ds both went to one of England's two best unis (despite my son's dyslexia which he inherited from my husband).

I agree with masha's second sentence except for the part about innate ability (for reasons posted elsewhere.)

Mashabell, you clearly should have chosen a better husband (and DH a better wife, since he has one dyslexic and one short sighted DD - inherited from his DW)

However, back to the OP.

Honestly I don't think outstanding, good or RI makes a jot of difference to 90% of the DCs who parents post on MN.

Home environment and genetic intelligence will come to the fore regardless.

Where it does matter is for those DCs who come from less academic households, the DCs who can leave primary with sound literacy and numeracy skills and a love of learning, or who can slip under the radar if there are discipline problems and lots of staff changes.

For them a Good school, with good lesson s and time for good pastoral care and lots of extracurricular stuff may be better than a school focusing on outstanding SATs.

What matters at secondary school is wanting to learn and having the confidence to believe you can.

Due to a twat of a head of science, DD1 is doing double science. She spends her life trying to explain to her class mates that they can read and follow the experimental instructions, they aren't that complicated. That the unit they are doing now follows straight on from the one before they just don't have the confidence to make the connections.

My DS went to Outstanding Primary then one of the best Prep schools around and is now
at an excellent Free School for secondary. The education he has received has been excellent HOWEVER...He has an average IQ and really bless him he is a lovely boy but he is not really academically bright. Education can make the best of what you have but it cannot make a child brighter than they are. We all have different attributes. DS is a fantastic pianist Grade 8 at 10 years old! I don't expect him to be an academic genius as well. Find what they are good at and celebrate and nurture it.

I would have to say "innate ability" does not have much to do with achievement/outcome. It has been discovered in Japan that two men now aged 60, were swapped by mistake at birth. One from a wealthy family and the other is a struggling single mother. One grew to run a company with a degree, the other left education at 15, now working as a driver. There is not as much difference between the brains we are born with as some people seem to think.

A point that needs to be made is that OfSted criteria have changed. So a school that would have been "outstanding" a few years ago, would now be rated "good"

Parents really need to use the OfSted report as one bit -an important bit - of evidence. Visiting the school always essential. An "improving school" is often an excellent choice.

Forget the ratings; choose the school you like best regardless of Ofsted opinion.

DC school is now apparently "Good". 9 months ago it was merely "Satisfactory". It's the same ruddy school to me.

Just under 7 years ago, I had to choose a primary for DS [then a recovering selective mute] and DD after a house move.

I viewed schools rated both Outstanding and Good - as well as a number of private options, as, since DS's mutism was school induced, I was looking for the best option for him.

We ended up choosing one that was rated Good, despite places being available in the Outstanding schools. It felt right to us - and importantly had FANTASTIC value added despite lower top line results than the Outstanding schools

The school has since been rated oustanding under the new Ofsted criteria, and now has results amongst the top few in the county. Has it fundamentally changed? No, not at all. It has gone on doing EXACTLY what it has always done - put the children first, offered a wide-ranging and creative curriculum, not swayed with the winds of fashion/league tables. It is just that the importance of 'adding value to the children who walk through the door' has come to be valued more highly, and 'coasting with very able children' has been recognised as not so great.

You could also look at the SATs results as they don't always tally with Ofsted. Our school requires improvement according to Ofsted but gets results about the national average. Another local school is classed as good by Ofsted and has results that are significantly poorer. This may not matter to you but it is another source of information. I personally would go with instinct. I am very happy with our school despitw it apparently requiring improvement.

Schools, particularly primary schools, can change frighteningly quickly - any way of finding out what staff turnover is, or whether there is any possibility of the current headteacher moving on (and indeed, how long they've been in post) would be useful information before you base your house purchase on a school...

Staff turnover is not a reliable indicator. Staff may be moving for promotion and career development. That is a good thing and shows the school is developing its teachers. Some of the best teachers can be those that are newly qualified with boundless energy and enthusiasm, they bring vitality and vibrancy to a school. Some of those much loved by parents because they have been in a school for years and years can be the worst kind. Dull, resistant to change and actually underperforming. They've never worked in other schools and have stagnated over time. Check the Ofsted data dashboard site, the league tables although be aware that with small schools & small cohorts the data will present a fluctuating picture and can't always be relied upon. Read the Ofsted reports over time but don't be sucked in by an outstanding judgement alone. Go and visit, look at the quality of writing on the walls. Good presentation and quality displays- high expectations, smart uniform - high expectations, polite children - high expectations. Are you getting a sales pitch or do you actually get the truth? What are the schools current priorities for improvement. Don't listen to old gossip from years ago, it will be completely irrelevant to the current position!

I put outstanding (local) primary as No.1 choice and good (not local) primary as No.2 choice. Loved No.2 much more than No.1, but preferred to be in a local school. What matters is how you feel about the school.