Should I withold fees for Independent School ?

[TillyP]

My DTS's attend an Independent Secondary school and are in Yr11 about to take their GCSE's.
Whenever we attend parent's evening we are told they are doing fine etc etc but their mock exam results were quite poor so now they are predicted low grades.
The whole point of paying for an Independent School is to get a good education so can anyone in a similar situation tell me whether I would be within my rights to withold fees for their last couple of terms?
In any other walk of life, if one receives poor service you are not expected to pay, but with schooling you seem to have to pay up whether or not the school has done a good job!

FM is right.

GCSEs are there to test and grade that years cohort from A to U. If everyone got A they'd change the marking system and questions anyway.

IME most teachers in the private sector either;

1. Were privately educated themselves so couldn't imagine teaching state..or
2. Couldn't hack the the state sector (where you have to be much more resilient)so jumped ship

You cannot assume the teaching is better in private schools. In fact it is much more old fashioned and teachers have less pressure on them to be 'all singing all dancing' (I mean creative!).

They have the bonus of small class sizes and all kids coming from a background where the parents have high aspirations for them..so damn right they should do better overall! It would be a joke if they didn't.

IMO - If you can't reach your potential in a private school you are not putting enough work in.

Exactly to above post - it's all about reaching your target grade/potential.

Exactly, Jajas! We have always thought that DS1 with ASD & learning difficulties has worked much harder to achieve than DS2 who is very bright. DS1 can read, write and do basic Maths; DS2 is at Uni. DS1 is unlikely to get or hold down a job, but that is not his fault - he has battled throughout his life to learn new things, it's just that his brain can't cope with so much and cannot retain information.

Of course there is a difference in ability. I have students who are going to coast to an A* without too much effort, and others who are going to work very hard for a C.

Bad mock grades don't necessarily lead to bad exam grades. There is more of an incentive to revise for the real thing.

I don't think teaching is better in private schools either. Or worse, for that matter. IME, there are good and bad teachers in both sectors.

so, assuming you are a Biol teacher then mitochondria?

How do you know that the school did not make the mock exams extremely difficult on purpose, intending for the pupils to get lower grades than expected and therefore ensuring that they will all work/revise harder for the real exams? Go and speak to the Headteacher.

I agree that at the end of the day the kids have to "do it for themselves" but they have to be given the tools to enable them to do that.
Yes, obviously parental support is also hugely important but if that was the main factor then why send kids to school at all when you are perfectly within your rights to home school them?
The reason you send them to school is so that they can benefit from the expertise the school has to offer and if they are not benefiting isn't that ultimately the school's (either State or Independent) fault?

Pandamoanium one of my DS's has SENs and we thought that sending him to an Independent school was the best for him rather than trying to avoid kids like yours.
I took that statistic from 'Jamie's Dream School' (CH4) I find it quite shocking myself. If 50% of kids are failing at GCSE's why are they being used as the benchmark for educational success? Has it always been the case that 50% of kids fail or is a recent occurence? In which case why?

There are kids from all walks of life and abilities at Independent Schools and a lot of parents are going without to educate their kids privately because they feel the State sector will let them down.(rightly or wrongly) A significant number of the kids are also on bursaries or scholarships.

FallenMadonna Its good to have a teacher's perspective, but why is there such a huge disparity between the top and the bottom? Are the kids at the bottom being let down by the way education is delivered? Do you think they could achieve a lot more if they were tought in a different way or tought different things?

BoffinMum you may have hit the nail on the head. There do seem to have been a lot of supply teachers lately. I am on top of the problem with grades and the kids do seem to have been 'shocked' into working harder. But I still feel the school hasn't done all it could.

Chick - that would be a fair assumption.

TillyP - you mention that your son has SENs. Does the school have support in place for this?

It's only GCSEs we are talking about here, most kids with average IQs should be able to pass five of them with grades A-C without too much grief.

Yes, I'm sure there are a few kids from 'all walks of life' in the private sector, but there will be none (unless 1 or 2 as an exception?) coming from a home from living in absolute poverty.

Do you ever find the following in the private sector..?
-Children from homes that really cannot afford uniforms, transport, lunch & books.
-Parents who will not attend one parents evening in 5 years.

• A class where 75% has no Dad at home

-Families with three generations of adults who have never worked.

I think not.

Please see the independent Black & Acheson reports.

But the thing about average IQs (leaving aside my scepticism about IQs) is that not everyone has one. Unless you have a very odd distribution.

That's a bit pedantic statistically - we're kinda meaning the group between the lowest 25% and the top 25% here, i.e. no SEN, no G&T, broad group in the middle.

So the children I am talking about are in the lower 25%. Some with SEN, though not all. Some of those lower 25% will, with good teaching and hard work, get an F.

I can understand your problem . The school should have informd YOU sooner that your children were not performing to the required level in comparison with their peers or to a level that would meant they would be predicted to do well. Then you would have been informed and been able to deal with the stuation...perhaps by helping them with areas of difficulty - providing more individual attention that the school would not or could not provide.
I have heard this happen a lot ie where the school tel parents cild is doing very well...no real problems etc and then when it cmes to crunchtime...the truth is revealed.
My feeling is that schools don't lke parents making them too accountable and if a parent realises their child not up to scratch the first thing you are likely to do is ask what the SCHOOL is doing to help.They dont like parents breathing down their necks - checking up on progress etc . I do think te school has a certain duty to let you know how your children are doing in detail ...you arethe only other people as paretns that cna do anything about it. In my opinion they have failed u and your kids. Witholding fees though won't fix anything...I would concentrate on giving your children that extra support.

You can't withhold fees, and you risk your children being withdrawn from their exams.

If you are unhappy, you need to talk to the school. Do not let your feelings fester.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers in the independent sector is unreasonable parental expectations. You simply can't buy A grades. The student has to do their bit.

When a school says that a student is doing well, they mean versus their innate ability. The school will have done baseline testing in Year 7, and possibly in Year 10, and will have a good idea of predicted grades if the child were working well. For some students, C grades are amazing achievements, and parents and teachers should celebrate that. For others, a B is a 'fail' and there will be tangible reasons for why.

Please, unless you know your children are not working well (you will see their work ethic based on their attitude to homework), let your disappointment show, and don't try to blame anyone else.

Let your children's best be good enough.

If the mocks are based on past papers, you have to realise that they won't have finished the course or have the crucial weeks of exam practice, and serious revision. It is normal to have disappointing results in mocks, and the teachers will take this into account.

amerryscot I am more than happy to "Let my children's best be good enough." My worry is that they aren't being helped or encouraged to achieve their best.

Also, from my own experience at school (ie being written off as a failure then later going on to university) I know that with the right help a lot of these so called 'low acheivers' could do a lot better. The key thing is self esteem and believing you can do it. But unless you are a very self confident kid you need to have that self-belief instilled in you by being stretched and encouraged by your teachers. If you are categorised as someone who can only get as F grade you start believing it and that affects how much work you do. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

I work in an independent school, and I think it does sound quite bad that you weren't given a heads up about their performance. You have every right to take this up with the teachers. Ours are very honest with parents, and a big part of their job is actually to manage parental expectations, i.e. downgrading first choice of senior school, rather than put the child through an exam they will certainly fail and make them feel like a failure.

However, you cannot tackle this by withholding fees. Our bursar has been through several court cases with parents who haven't paid. The start of the recession saw a steady stream of parents pleading poverty, some who'd just parked the new registration Lexus 4x4 outside! You can imagine his response to that one. So court cases had to be initiated to send a very clear message to others. Now obviously your refusal to pay is not sparked by hardship but dissatisfaction. But I'd still advise strongly against it, and instead talk to the school, lodge a complaint, and perhaps during the course of negotitations you could raise the question of a discount on fees due to a poor service.

Again. It would worry me if my children had been at school right up to gcse and I had not noticed that they were being dismissed as low achievers.
How do your dts predicted results stack up against the schools normal standard of results?
When they chose this gcse subjects were they given feedback upon how they were likely to fare?
When ds chose his gcse option we met with each subject teacher to discuss he grades and marks up to that point and were able to glen which subjects he was likely to find tough. Year end results were given with feedback on whether he was on course for good grades. Of course we got feedback on any course work too.

Were you not getting this?
When you mark their prep books (which I never did but you said earlier that you did) were you seeing marks and test score?

But what's the effect on self esteem if the child (say a predicted grade E child like my daughter) is told you can get a grade A, they work like Billy-oh and then get a brilliant result for them, a D or C. Their self-esteem will be much improved if they were told the truth and shafted the predictions through hard work. If they'd been looking for the A they would feel a failure. Long term self esteem doesn't come from lies. It comes from real truths.My daughter is still buzzing this weekend from her C and D and quite rightly, she has done brilliantly.

Have I missed this but are you sure your children have not just fucked up their exams? you can be doing well in class and still fail the exam.

Tilly, you haven't said what the grades involved are. Do they have end of year exams each year (I'd be concerned about an independent school that didn't) - how have they tended to do in those? In my long ago experience year 10 and 11 work is marked to GCSE standard throughout - makes for some tough to take grades early on. Is theirs marked like that? Being told they are doing "fine" tells you nothing and I'm surprised if you accepted that as an indication of their performance: fine for them could be an F or a B depending on their abilities. Which is it?

You can't possibly contemplate doing anything to disrupt their education now: they are presumably taking their GCSEs next term. It's far too late to even contemplate withdrawing them and if you don't pay the fees, the school won't enter them for the exams.

Pagwatch, it is not difficult to see how parents are not always aware of the level a child shoul be at for prep for teir exams...some actally still have a lot of faith in schools and teaching (probably too much) and a lot leave it up to the school to give an honest indication about where their child stands....as measured against peers as this is ultmatley a huge factor. Of course all children are of differing intellectual ablilities but from my experience hard work, good teaching and support do pay off and can make all the differnce. I know of a child who was in low ability maths group ...paent not informed until child said she was finding work boring...then parent went into school querying why this want mentioned during parents evening. School decided she was doing well'for her'Parent then gave child extra support at home and child received offers to top indies and is considered a very good mathemetician in her class. Now...had the parent not become aware ..no support would have been given and the child would no way have recieved theoffers they did. ....Most of the time all children can do better than the school thinks they can. ....parents need to know , schools need to be honest.