Fed up with the education divide ?

[johnbunyan]

As a former Head of an independent school, I am fed up with the ideological divide in education, and want to start a national discussion on constructive ways to help the state and independent systems grow naturally together. I am secretary of a national group of independent day schools ( mostly the old direct grant schools ) and we look back to a time when there was much greater co-operation and a real sense of social mobility. Can we return to such a consensus ? I would love to hear ideas and start building towards such a consensus, since, as we approach the 2015 General Election, it will seem a long way away! I sense that many parents would like government and schools to work something out -and quickly -since the educational divide is simply not helpful to anybody - least of all the present generation. How many out there agree?

My DD just sat for a well known indie some of the maths questions were GCSE level.......shes 10 years old!!!
Also a feeder school had given the exam paper to their children before the test. Entrance exams are not a level playing field in fact they are very unfair.

MI, I could, but I get a bit yawny myself when different opinions in a discussion are dismissed in a procession of terms like 'bang on' 'yawn', 'dictated to' 'preaching' 'over dramatic' etc.

Can we just discuss?

I didn't read all the posts yet, sorry, but...
what is this outbreak of generosity from the private sector?

Is the government making plans to make us pay for good state education, while only schools in special measures will remain free? They were making noises...

That would really solve the problem with discipline and everything. Social segregation is not illegal!

johnbunyan I don't agree there was ever a consensus or a golden age of social mobility in the 1950s and 1960s. You are trying to widen the ideological and social divide while muscling in on education funding which Gove is throwing around, with his £1 billion overspend on academies conversion, millions wasted on free schools that are undersubscribed or never opened, etc. You want a slice of the cake. You want to grab that slice by offering selective places and cherry picking your pupils. The private sector has been static for years but the proportion of internationally recruited pupils is going up and you are all worried about the future.

If you're not actually suggesting going back to some bipartite system or 'assisted places' but the nationalisation of private schools (e.g. as free schools), I'd say whether that is feasible depends on the individual school. We have absolutely no idea about what value a 'non-selective' private school might add because there's no intake or prior attainment information in the performance tables, they aren't inspected by Ofsted and they hide behind 'equivalent' exams like iGCSEs. So there would have to be a whole long list of requirements:

(a) not set up in areas of surplus places or would skew the intakes of existing schools
(b) scrupulously fair admissions complying with an even tighter version of the Admissions Code - no faith criteria or academic selection for new schools, no feeder schools
(c) all financial and employment information 100% transparent - no profit-making allowed and no private ownership, no blurred lines between head, governors and management and no nepotistic appointments
(d) inspected by Ofsted and publishing full exam and financial data, with all the usual school census info
(e) all teachers qualified
(f) full health and safety and compliance and fully accessible to pupils with SEN, with playing fields, canteens and all the other amenities I'd expect of a state school.

(I may have forgotten some conditions there.)

@Tolstoysjudge- please pm the school ( if yr not happy to post here) I think my Dd had the same exam yr right it is GCSE level.
She did come out telling me the girls in her group had practised the math paper- all from the same feeder. I didn't go further asking her as I didn't think it would be the case, is yr Dd at the feeder? Is she due to find out results today too ?

Tolstoy - my Dd is not at a feeder nor has she been tutored but we hoped level 6 was enough

I'm going to guess St Paul's Girls' School

Drom waiting to hear today , no post this morning - we are overseas so waiting to be on UK time to email. Feeling truly miffed if it is true what will be will be!

Have the problems in the English system been exacerbated since the introduction of choice? Just a question as I'm in Scotland so different here.

We have what many would consider true comprehensive education. Yes we have private schools but for the vast majority of the population they are inaccessible, not because you need to pay (although that is obviously a factor) but because outwith the main cities there are few private schools so the logistics make it impractical.

Most towns have only 1 secondary school and you must fall within the catchment of that school. If you don't, you need to do a placing request for the school of your choice but there is no guarantee you will get a place if it is already at full capacity.

You might therefore think this is a fairer system as you can't go cherry picking but all that happens is that more affluent towns with less kids on FSM and more perceived middle class parents get better results so the house prices rise in those towns, the original townspeople can often no longer afford to live in their hometown and so the cycle begins.

The 1 secondary school in my hometown is always languishing around the bottom 1/3 of the league tables whilst the town over the hill has some of the highest attainment in Scotland. The main difference is the social structure within these 2 towns and that cannot ever be discounted in my opinion.

TEACAKE - you said up thread that the private schools have opted out of the scottish curriculum for excellence - not true. The big name,mainly boarding schools, like Fettes, Glenalmond, Gordonstoun, Merchiston castle etc still do the GCSE but then they did that before the CofE so no change there but I contacted many of the private day schools in Edinburgh recently and they were all, bar 1, doing the CofE that I spoke to. However they were doing 8 subjects not 6 unlike our local secondary.

Drom/tolstoy
Seems level 6 and no tutoring is enough, hv received offer letter today with the comment we need to " secure" her maths whatever that means - maybe get a tutor

Or make sure you get whatever work they do in class in advance, perhaps Stressed?
Was it BH that got given the paper in advance? Why would they want to do that? Surely it means they won't get the true toppity top ones.

Hi Farewell - that was the rumour BUT another parent with knowledge has pm me to say its total nonsense. They have "only" been using 13+ practise papers in Math and English since September ... TBH though even that freaked me as we did diddly squat/ big fat zero with the exception of the paper on the school website 5 days before the exam.

• will definitely ask the school for a more detailed explanation to see where the Math needs improving but she is already level 6 so it's scary to think where the others are at !!!! however it does prove that it is possible to get in without tutoring.

"The 1 secondary school in my hometown is always languishing around the bottom 1/3 of the league tables whilst the town over the hill has some of the highest attainment in Scotland."

Languishing at the bottom of the league tables for what? Value added or attainment?

There are schools across the uk which have high standards of teaching and discipline, dedicated and dynamic teachers, and good management, which will be labelled as 'bad schools' because they mostly take in children who will always struggle to attain highly.

It really drives me mad. The 'good' school in our borough is massively, massively oversubscribe and near the top of the borough league tables. It takes in a disproportionate number of high attainers and middle class children compared to the two other nearest secondaries, and the smallest number of children with special needs of any school in the borough. The average GCSE grade for high attainers at this school is a B. The average GCSE grade for high attainers at my dd's school (which is visibly much rougher, much lower in the league tables, and takes in far more disadvantaged children) is B+.

Guess which school is considered to be the 'good' school?

The bottom line is this - being highly placed in the borough league tables, and having a mostly middle-class intake doesn't mean a school is 'good'. Having low numbers of students getting 5 or more GCSE's, and large numbers of disadvantaged and low achieving children, doesn't make a school 'bad', or 'less good'.

Johnbunyan
I agree with you, the educational divide is horrendous and has not progressed in terms of social mobility. There are as many stories about education as there are people on the planet so I won't give you mine but it is a massive problem and a fundamental injustice and hypocrisy.

In some ways the Swedish model is good because at least everyone starts from the same basis with the same amount of power to put their child into whichever school they want.

I think private schools should be merged with state schools at around 14, and education should be by faculty for wont of a better word.

Within each faculty school all elements of that sector would be an option from cerebral to practical. So within the technical faculty you would have architecture, design and bricklaying. Within the arts school you would have the art, design, production, crafts such as furniture making and needlework, perhaps business skills taught. Within science you would have research, medicine, nursing and things like beautician and podiatry.

This way there is always a learning option available for each child. At the moment if you are not academic and want to be a bricklayer you go to a school where you will never aspire to be an architect. However if you start off wanting to be a bricklayer in a technical school at you might find your personal attributes are better suited to architecture. This ensures children are not excluded from the possiblity of moving to the top of their field because they are in the wrong school. It also means they don't feel like a failure if they really like bricklaying and don't want to be an architect.

Schools can't be all things to all people but they can certainly have something for everyone's level of aspiration.

motherstongue I was referring to the six subjects only in some schools/council areas. That would be my own poor education coming through.

The private schools who use scottish quals have of course missed this year's introduction of N5s by sticking with Intermediates.

Interesting idea, Horse, but tricky to divide up that way!

For architecture you currently need maths, science and art; where would they go? What about the future science journalist. technical translator or chef?

The problem with British education is that of management science and organisational behaviour, not only that of learning per se. It cannot be solved with expert opinions about teaching and learning, because the limiting factor is reality on the ground and acceptance in society. Whatever you try to do about learning will be failed and have unexpected consequences in implementation. It is impossible to transpose successes from other countries in here because they clash with accepted beliefs and reality on the ground. For the moment, whatever change is proposed, in practice results in the exacerbation of the divide.

How did middle class parents react to league tables?
Did academies and free schools end the divide?
Did moving the goal post and marking down GCSE exam papers of kids as they were already setting the exams increase their standards? I mean, did they learn more when they received English exam results two grades lower than anticipated?
Whom did that marking down really helped?

The government should IMO try to ask advice from business management and economics experts or some other unexpected discipline other than education.

In my opinion the main problem are teaching methods. They just don’t work for all pupils. They do fail the brightest or the least bright, hence the divide.
The teaching methods and school practices do not cope well with less able and disruptive students. This results in the dynamic of segregation between 'good' schools and sink schools.

WordFactory articulated very well why families that could afford it, do whatever it takes to remove their children from comprehensives.
homework, early introduction of (meaningful) language lessons… competition (lots of it), daily sports, exams, high parental involvement, zero tolerance discipline etc etc

Start a thread on MN about this and posters will queue up to tell you that they don't want it. They'll talk about stress and self esteem. They want school to be fun, fun, fun.

I totally agree that you need rigorous discipline, scholarly culture, regular assessments and homework from primary school age and a degree of pressure for success. Children need to learn on their own experience that it is much nicer to put hard work and succeed than to feel that 'everybody is a winner' and fail. However it is impossible to implement in UK society because misguided and ineffective ideas took hold like a religion.

Try to stop the 'fun, fun fun' and introduce discipline and both the teachers and parents will be up in arms protesting.

The school can't be all things to all people. I think there should be three types of school:

• Comprehensives for 80% of population
• Selective non fee paying schools for top 10% in ability
• An Eton style super schools for the most disruptive and difficult pupils. A military style boarding school will do nicely. It was said that young offenders institution cost as much as Eton per year. So it is better IMO to use the money to give those young people the best possible education, tailored to their needs.

[of course I don’t touch on SEN education and special schools which are a different animal]

An Eton style super schools for the most disruptive and difficult pupils. A military style boarding school will do nicely.

Horribly judgemental.

I teach children with challenging behaviour and can put my hand on my heart and say that in a small group with teaching tailored to their needs they learn and behave well. Borstal certainly would not be right for the majority of them, although a couple would enjoy the routine.

My suggestions would be:

National statutory limit on class size of 16 throughout.
'Prep' model of 3-13 with specialist teaching and setting from Y5.
Range of 13-18 schools available from Studio Schools, Sports and Arts Academies, Academic, SEN etc. and a 'Parent Partnership' type body to support families to choose the right secondary provision for their child.

Bird of course I haven't written the policy documents and guidelines to my master plan yet, it's was just an afternoon's lateral thinking really. But of course all schools would do all subjects, just focusing on one.

Basically, at the moment all schools teach all subjects, right? In my faculty world all schools would teach all subjects but some would specialise in a different sector route. So everyone learns maths, but the arts school wouldn't focus too much on it and the technical, and science school would.

Essentially it is a way to eradicate hierarchy through academia which is what we have now. There is no place for hierarchy in education. This is the only way I can see round it apart from having schools separated by ability which is almost impossible to measure in the first place.

Charles, the idea that implementing discipline and putting proper resources and best practices behind the most difficult students is 'judgmental' is exactly the delusion that fails those very pupils.

Let's face it, the divide works quite well for DC in selective schools. It is the kids at the bottom that need change. The point is we already have 3 tiers system

If by 'discipline' you mean sanctions I do have a problem with that.

Go over to the SN boards and tell the parents of HF ASD kids that their children just need their playtimes taking away and possibly the cane and see what response you get.

If by 'discipline' you mean high expectations of good behaviour and application to learning, fine. But boot camp is not the way to achieve that.

Charles, I do mean 'high expectations of good behaviour and application to learning'. I don't mean Victorian style sanctions.

However I do think that those kids need 'full immersion' into this environment. Boarding could be the best option. I also don't see anything wrong with a little bit of boot camp - scouts camps are not 'judgmental', surely.

I would also like to point out that there is no need to mix in the issue of SN kids. In good schools they achieve in line with 'normal' kids and in line with their potential. Kids with SN are often used as an excuse for school failure, but this is just deliberate red hearing.

My own DC has ASD and is doing very well in a selective school. No cane, but definitely a lot of homework, sports, exams, competition, and mobile phones confiscated if used.

Can we get rid of academies specialising in a particular area - eg technology or performing arts? Nearly all children just go to their local comprehensive, and they should have the same choice of subjects as anyone else.

that was done in 2010 ....
and there was never specialisation of subject offer
thats a myth that I've only ever heard on MN