Guardian today- great article about choosing schools....

[Hakluyt]

Frustratingly it won't let me "share" it. But it contains this paragraph- which I think sums up much of the Mumsnet debate on the subject.

"The irony is that we probably have greater levels of angst than ever, yet by most reasonable measures, our schools have higher academic and behavioural standards than ever. Nearly all schools report very high levels of parental satisfaction, yet many parents are convinced that while their own school is fine, all the others are chaotic nests of feral illiterates."

www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/23/choosing-secondary-school-teachers-guide-for-parents

YANBU
Behavioural standards are up for debate, society has changed, the treatment of DCs with SN have changed and the amount teachers can shout, put down and intimidate pupils has changed.

But academically YADNBU
DH and I both went to laid back rural schools, which had never heard of lesson planning. We did well because we were cleaver, but there was an awful lot of just do this page out the textbook. It wasn't inspiring and I spent most of Y5 being very naughty because I was bored to tears. Y6 we were put in ability groups and thrown the harder text book, to teach ourselves.

There were no TAs, less able children spent ages with their hands in the air or staring into space learning nothing.

At secondary I went a comprehensive that had a total mixed bag of teachers, some good and some utterly usless. It ran 5/6 sets. If you were in set 1 or some set 2's you got a reasonable education, but if you were in the CSE groups you got the worse teachers and no one cared if you made progress or not.

No way would my DSIS, who is far from dim, leave school today with, the equivalent of, a handful of Dsand Es.

DH is slightly older (and his home county slower to modernise). He went to a brilliant boys grammar. He did get an education as good as any today, but 80% of the local DCs in the dire secondary modern down the road didn't.

Thank you Prof.Yaffle- I wonder why I couldn't do that?

I particularly like The Law of the Ridiculous Reverse......

"The relationship between promotional material and reality is not always close."

I couldn't agree more with that article.

As an aside, op I bet you have the Guardian app - it launches automatically and is a bugger to link from.

Oh it's DisappointedIdealist (blog here: disidealist.wordpress.com/), so that explains why it's good.

Eeek: having previewed it this time a working link: disidealist.wordpress.com

If this is the case (I'm not saying it isn't) then why are current parents more worried about which school their DC's go to than my parents generation were? Why is MN talk full of parents appealing, stressing over their DC getting a place at school they don't want or scrimping and scraping to pay school fees? We do parents move house to get into the "right" catchment area? Why do so many parents I speak to seems so desperate to get their DC into school A rather than school B? Are all these parents just uniformed?

Because there is much more media than there was. Because we have been conditioned to think we live in a market place when most of us don't. Because (possibly) we have less to worry about than previous generations, we have fewer children and are more invested in them. Because we have had politicians who expressly say "there is no such thing as society". Because there is much less work than there was. Because we have been taught to be suspicious of experts. I could - and probably will- go on!

Funny that the editor of the Guardian didn't take his own paper's advice, and educated his daughters privately.

I don't think the advice in the article is state school specific is it? In my experience, private schools are particularly good at the glossy brochure/marketing spiel.

Have n't read the article but you can't take as fact what the schools 'report' regarding satisfaction.

Where is that info from? Ofsted inspection surveys? How representative are they.

parents agonise mostly because it has become a thing they can do. In those days, if you couldn't move house to a better school or have the religious school option, or afford private, or pass the exams to get into whatever higher level school was available as a scholarship student, you took what was on offer. In more than a few homes, parents didn't get as far as/finish secondary school anyway, so they were pleased to make their big contribution to their childs education of not needing them to go out to work. Choices were something few parents had or even expected.

I am not sure why and how it changed. What I know, above, is my husband's family's experience. He had no siblings involved in schools, as students or parents, from leaving school over 30 years. So I dont know how it reached the point that out school has allowed so many out of district applications that everything that made the school catchment we happened to move into good, has been eliminated due to overcrowding in the short 3 years since it opened.

Why not read the article? It won't take long.

I've read the article and agree both sectors are equally happy producing at best misleading glossy brochures/marketing material. I also agree that parents probably have less to worry about particularly in terms of health, we are more invested in our children, and more concerned about future employment/housing and materialistic possessions. There has been an enormous emphasis in the recent past on the importance of a university education and it's now shifted recently to an enormous emphasis on a university education at the right university. Apprenticeships are seen as the destination for the academically less able, and are thought by many to be associated with lower incomes and status.

I suspect we will not be able to change parental attitudes now.

Things changed in about 1987 when the idea of parental choice was introduced by the government. Up until then children went to the primary or secondary school in whose catchment they lived. The theory behind the change was that good schools would expand as more parents chose them, and poorer schools would have to pull their socks up or close down. No-one in the government seemed to realise that by following that theory to the letter it could end in a city like mine could end having two secondary schools each containing over 15,000 pupils.

15,000?

I thought ds's (absolutely fine) comprehensive was large at a tenth that size - 8 form entry plus sixth form.

15,000 is surely a typo

"Because there is much more media than there was"

::cough:: The Internet.

It's not difficult to find people much like yourself to help reinforce your prejudices, anxieties and so on.

One reason parents give a bigger stuff these days must be that pretty much all jobs require far higher qualifications than they used to, and more of them. When I was a kid, 5 GCSEs was more than enough to leave school with and get a job - nowadays employers demand a degree to do admin in an estate agents' office.

I think the burden of training and education has shifted to the state, basically. Apprenticeship schemes might be addressing this to an extent.

I said that if the theory was followed we could end up with two 15,000 pupil schools.

I left school in 1987 with precisely zero qualifications btw. I picked up more hours where I'd been working already, working full time from the day I turned 16 (which wasn't strictly legal, my birthday being right at the start of the academic year - but hey ho).

Sorry, Mrs Mair

Excellent article. I'd add that there's clear evidence that standards vary much more within schools than between them, which makes the extent of the angst around choosing schools even more misplaced.