state comprehensive secondary schools stretching able pupils - opinions?

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Hi all

DD1 is happily selted into her secondary comprehensive which is rated 'GOOD' by OFSTED.

In Year 7 all classes are mixed ability. Gradually from Year 8 they start to stream - most classes in Year 9 are by ability.

So far I've had some niggles (little or no maths homework coming home - everyone giving the same worksheet and the homework is for pupils to finish the worksheet, but DD1 finishes in class 95% of the time. DD1 scored Nc L6 at KS2 SATs). We have raised this with the teacher and our solution has been to do more at home.

Last week there were a slew of reports in the press about secondary schools failing to stretch their most able: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22873257 - based on the second OFSTED repoert into progress of pupils achieving NC L5+ at KS2 SATs in English or Maths in secondary (www.gov.uk/government/news/schools-not-doing-enough-to-support-most-able-students).

It's quite clear that if you are in a miniority of bright pupils at a state comprehensive your chances of going on to achieve an A/A* at GCSE are much lower (ca. 28% in Math if

I still think some mealy-mouthed "you're getting above yourself" is entrenched in some schools.

Absolutely, Brenda.

ragged DD's school ran GCSE revision classes. I asked if she could attend and was told no. They were for C/D students. DD was a comfortable B so she wasn't allowed to attend.

Now I'm the first to admit that DD wasn't a highly motivated student at that school and she might have got higher grades despite them. But it's amazing how she's flourished since, in institutions that did foster her ambition.
It's hard when everything - the school, the teachers, your peers - are only concerned with the C/D boundary. WF is right with "institutionally embedded underachievement".

Yes to that, Sensua.

When we wailed to the school about ds's Eng Lit GCSE result, we were rather testily told, "What are you complaining about? There are pupils who got Ds and we have to concentrate on appealing their results." Dh was madder than hell (and all this education stuff usually washes over him).

ragged too many schools are giving poor advice, which inevitably disadvanatges the high ability students.

One of the most pernicious, yet most widely accepted in schools, is the idea of equivalence.

The idea that all qualifications are created equal. Wrong.

Sil who is a MFL teacher was hauled over the coals for advising (able) pupils to take French instead of Health & Social Care. In an assembly the pupils had been told this was a good qualification for anybody wanting to be a doctor... Sil was reprimanded and told that every qualification must be portrayed as equal.

I believe the very able will do as well wherever they go, certainly in a Good school. However their priority is always results and league tables. So the middle borderline C pupils get huge input and the dead cert A* do not.

BrendaBlackhead DS went on an aspirational trip to Cambridge and when he told the head it was his ambition to go there he said pretty much it's not for the likes of you.
DS1 was always streets ahead in maths but never, in spite of my best efforts, stretched at secondary. He managed all Aat GCSE and 4 A at A level. He couldn't have got any better grades at another school, whether fee paying or grammar but he might have got off curriculum challenges.

yes "The idea that all qualifications are created equal. Wrong" this.

dd has chosen 9 academic subjects for her GCSE options & an arty BTEC, but why on earth are the school making high achieving children do a BTEC? Their answer is that it improves study skills. I expect it has more to do boosting headline result percentages.

She has bright friends doing double science, no MFL, one humanity, a 'study' or two (business etc) or a couple of arts & an arty BTEC ... because that's what they enjoy. No advice or consideration about what happens at A level or afterwards, the only input from the school is whether or not they are likely to pass.

I have looked at all the secondary schools within a 20 mile radius. There are some which offer triple science and music gcse and some which offer neither. I have a musical ds who loves science but it is down to the whim of bureaucrats whether he can study the subjects he excels in or not. If the allocations go one way he'll be in sets from y7 and given a full range of gcse options allowing academic or vocational paths. At another school he'll spend y7 doing cross curricular learning packages in mixed ability groups. There is no school choir or orchestra. There are no music lessons but the children do study performing arts from y8. They all have to do pe gcse and options have to include a btec. The options blurb describes health and social care gcse as an essential for careers in the health sector. I don't mind poor league table results but this sort of limited curriculum funnels all the kids away from achieving their academic potential.

This thread is depressing. It makes me feel so...angry.

But also reassuring. My husband and I didn't like the look of things at our local comp. others have said its all "fine." I was beginning to think we might be mad. Now I think we are awake..

We've opted for private school next year. Look for me n the "back to work" boards.

I really don't think think you can put all comprehensive schools in the same box. Some will be good at stretching their most able, offer music, triple science and have parent evenings from year 8 focussing on universities (the distinctly mediocre comp my dc's go to do this). A few will be utterly shocking in that regard. Most however will be ok in terms of decent advice and guidance and won't damage the prospects of their students with duff advice.

So as long as you avoid the truly awful, I think you'll be ok.

Yes, although I complain about our local comp, they do do triple science, a mfl GCSE is compulsory for all (except for a very small number of very low ability students) and there is a great deal of music and arts provision.

It's certainly not bad enough to drive me onto the "back to work" boards!!

IMNSHO, the view that provided they get the grades to go to university all is well is wrong - catastrophically, tragically wrong, and I see the effects of it every day.

Here's what often happens to clever children who don't get stretched: they turn into perfectionists. They develop a self-image in which part of the definition of being them is that they never find academic work hard. For them the only respectable challenge available is to get 100%. And they shouldn't have to work hard to get it - other people have to work hard. For so long as they can meet that, and don't have to deal with actually finding things hard, all is well, the school regards them as a success story, parents think vaguely "s/he worries too much" and may notice the perfectionism, but don't really think it's a problem.

Then the child reaches university, and (with luck) is faced for the first time with a genuine intellectual challenge, with concepts s/he can't immediately understand, tasks s/he isn't immediately confident of being able to do to a high standard. Some young people take this in their stride, relish the challenge, learn the skills, do fine. Many fall apart. Not only do they not have the practical skills they need to deal with something that's hard for them; far more troublingly, they feel there's something terribly wrong with them and with the universe if they can't do it. They decide they're doing the wrong subject, or they're in the wrong place. Often, they stop doing any work, because that gives them a reasonable explanation for why they aren't getting high marks, and is far less threatening than having to face the risk that they might work hard and still not get high marks, because who would they be then?

People get ill, and miserable, and fail because of this effect. Lots of people.

Over the several decades I've been teaching in universities, the entry grades of the students I've worked with have risen quite dramatically. It seems to me that I see this phenomenon far more often than I used to, and I think this is why: I'm now seeing the students who've never been challenged before, instead of the ones who were pretty good but still did experience needing to struggle sometimes in their later years of school.

It makes me angry and it makes me cry, and it's why my child isn't at a state school even though as an academic it's not easy to afford fees. For goodness sake, do whatever it takes to get your child appropriate challenges, in their area of strength not just their areas of weakness (or they'll learn that they have to work in subject X but never in subject Y, and won't be much better off when they go to university to do Y), while they still have the level of individual attention that school can provide and they still have you nearby to support them emotionally. Please.

Amen, ScotishProf.

"Some young people take this in their stride, relish the challenge, learn the skills, do fine. Many fall apart"

My understanding is that state educated high achievers are more likely to complete their degrees than similarly able children coming from the private sector.

Far be from me to disagree with my colleagues, but scottishprof the reason why you are seeing more students with 'issues' is that there are more students going to university. 20 years ago the top 15% went, now it's the top 45%.

A level grades have been inflated so that doesn't make comparisons with older cohorts easy.

And all the ACTUAL evidence points to state school kids actually performing better in higher education than their privately educated counterparts.

And not all kids who aren't stretched too much become perfectionists - some do, plenty don't.

To say they're all like that is as ridiculous as saying all comprehensives fail their most able.

"For goodness sake, do whatever it takes to get your child appropriate challenges"

Is getting an A* at A level not challenge enough for most bright children?

Are you saying that state schools don't encourage high achieving children to achieve high grades?

My dd's rough old London comp (33% high achievers) seems to produce respectable numbers of children leaving with a clutch of fantastic A level results. ....

Ach, people are very loyal to their educational choices for their children, especially if they feel a bit guilty about them. If you impoverish your family to pay school fees you've got to believe your child is going to massively underachieve in the state sector - anything else would make you feel like a bit of a tit.

ScottishProf That's an extremely interesting argument and one I've genuinely never heard before.
DS always complained of finding the work too easy and never had to try hard for anything. He is certainly a perfectionist and never happy with less than 100%.
What we did - because the school didn't, was to stretch and challenge him at home.
I think sixth form made the difference. He self taught some maths that the school couldn't deliver and so did find for the very first time something that wasn't easy. Hopefully this will help him avoid falling into the trap you describe at uni.

Your understanding is faulty, but the research that I think you're referring to was widely misreported, so that's not too surprising. What it showed was that if you match school leavers for A level grades then the ones from non-selective state schools do better by some measures than the privately educated ones. If I remember rightly, even that only applied to A level grades below the ones my current university requires anyway, by the way, i.e. it doesn't apply to the children who are most at risk of being unchallenged at school, so it's off the main topic. (I haven't checked just now, but if I remember rightly, once you got to BBB, you'd be overcompensating if you gave the pupil from the worst school an offer that was 1 grade in 1 A level lower than the offer you gave to the pupil from the best school, and at AAA the effect has gone altogether.)

But since you ask: suppose you take two young people who both achieve BCC at A level, and I tell you that the one from a comprehensive is more likely to finish with a good degree than the one from a private school. You want me to conclude that this means the one from a private school has somehow been invisibly damaged by the education, compared to the comprehensive school pupil. But what seems far more plausible to me is: those results were the best the private school pupil could achieve even with more support than the comprehensive school pupil received. Probably, the comprehensive school pupil is cleverer, or harder working, or less troubled, or in some other way doing better than the private school pupil who had more help but achieved no better grades. Now if we put them in the same environment, sure, we expect the one who achieved given results with less help to do better.

It's the wrong question. What parents want to know is: given this 4 year old, or 10 year old, will they do better at university or in life if I send them to this school or that school? Comparing students with the same A level grades tells you nothing that helps to answer that question. The results they showed are consistent with a quite different hypothesis: private schools, on average, get the same young children higher grades than those children would achieve at comprehensive schools. Some of that advantage may well be retained at university and throughout life. But, since not 100% of the advantage is retained after the pupil leaves the school (that's all we can tell), private school pupils don't quite keep up with comprehensive school pupils who have the same grades when they leave. Who's surprised? It would be absolutely astonishing if the only advantage private schools gave their pupils were via mechanisms that would last all their lives.

My reply above is to minifingers post immediately following my earlier one; sorry, many posts have intervened.

titchy, do read my post, I carefully didn't say it applied to all children. I have only ever taught cohorts of young people who would always have gone to university so the increasing numbers going has no impact on what I've seen. Sure, there's been inflation, but without saying too much about where I've been and what's happened to their admissions policies, I know that the position in the school cohort of the average student I see has risen considerably.

minifingers, no, there are many many children who are not intellectually challenged by getting A at A level. The difference between an A and an A, in STEM subjects at least, is the level of perfectionism required, not the intellectual challenge encountered, anyway. In fact the introduction of the stars at both GCSE and A level has been a wholly bad thing in my view: it has given schools incentives to encourage perfectionism, taking time and energy away from out of school activities that might have provided children who were going to get As anyway with genuine challenges. And no, I'm not saying schools don't encourage children to achieve high grades, though I'm sure there are some that don't; I'm saying they don't encourage children to think about hard problems. There's a difference.

minifingers again, let me not understate the professorial salary, my family is not impoverished; and I am angered far more by what I see in my office than by thinking about my own child, who was always going to be challenged one way or another.

I think the challenge you would like for pupils Scottishprof is not always possible because the caliber of secondary teachers isn't consistently as high as it would need to be.

You may be right, Springisontheway, I don't know, but I think a lot of it is not so much about the teachers as about the teaching. Compare teacher A who is in a job where she has time to complete their necessary workload and still spend some time thinking about what a few unusual children may need and maybe planning some extra help for one and an extra challenge for another, and she can still get some exercise and enough sleep, with teacher B who can barely get through her marking and paperwork load for her much larger classes before collapsing into bed at 3am. They could be equally good teachers - they could be the same person! - but teacher A is going to do better teaching. This matters already at primary.

I think you are describing the de-professionalisation of teachers in the state system. They aren't given much trust or discretion. They also aren't paid adequately. I think this makes it hard to keep teachers in the profession.
I don't say this out of disrespect, I say it with sadness. My mum and SIL are both teachers.

Consider maths students at Oxbridge. Twenty years ago Oxbridge was taking pretty much the same number of students as they do nowadays. They are choosing from the highest achieving students, so the fact that the total number going to university has increased is completely irrelevant.

Twenty years ago selection was partly by grades at further maths. Nowadays Oxbridge maths certainly doesn't use A levels as more than a preliminary filter: MAT and STEP are used instead, because all maths students should get 2 x A in maths easily. Getting As in maths definitely isn't challenging for the top maths, economics, physics and engineering students.

So the demographics haven't really changed but nowadays as ScottishProf says it is far more common to see students who have never been challenged and don't know how to deal with anything for which the answer is not obvious to them. This is precisely why STEP was made compulsory for Cambridge maths and why interviews are very challenging.

Where I would disagree with ScottishProf is in the statement that private schools are necessarily better at challenging pupils. Many private schools are indeed good at this, many do teach beyond the curriculum, but not at all do. I'm sure they are also some very good non-selective state schools in which teachers really push the top pupils. However, like earlier posters on this thread, I find it depressing during outreach visits to realise the poor choices some non-selective state schools are making for their high ability pupils. I also find it incredibly depressing to interview students who have been taught to get A*s but not to understand the material. (Yes this is possible.)