How is it some state schools can offer so much more than others?

[Ffffffftttttttt]

Was just reading a thread where posters were comparing facilities at Westminster (private selective) with Tiffin (state selective) and some saying why pay. Made me go on Tiffin website to look at what they offer. I know it is a grammar and I live in an all comp borough but was shocked at the gulf in what is on offer. The drama and music on offer is incomparable, with proper productions and facilities at Tiffin, crumbling facilities and hardly anything beyond the basic curriculum at my local comp. And yet the comp by nature of its non selective intake will be receiving a high pupil premium. So presume comp income higher, or perhaps there are differences between what monies local authorities put into schools?

So where are schools like Tiffin getting their money from? Or are some schools just utilising it better than others? Please explain to me as I'm baffled.

the grammars here ask for £60 a month (direct debit please), the other schools ask for £35 a year.

"The current suggested contribution is £520 per year, per child.

Also, in affluent areas more children are likely to do things like music lessons outside school and own their own instruments so putting on concerts etc is easier in those schools.
They are also more likely to have parents who are willing and able to offer things like work experience, sports coaching, careers workshops and so on.

£10 a week is not hefty for parents who could afford £20,000 pa to go private though. I imagine their PP families do not pay! Unless they are well paid senior service families of course!

Schools also choose how to spend their money. Grammars are not less well funded on the basic formula, but they will get much lower PP funding. They just, inevitably, have so few pupils who qualify. This means money has been redirected to the children who need it most - to raise standards. If money is ploughed into those who have the highest standards anyway, where does that leave everyone else? We know, of course. Failing at school, excluded from opportunities, or not going to university. Few of these things happen at a grammar school.

Pupil premium money has to be spent in "closing the gap' Nd schools have to publish what they spend it on. Our local secondary spends it on booster sessions, nature groups, 1-1 support, practical things like food, school uniform, printer tokens so kids can print their homework, homework clubs, school trips etc. It's not to spend on staging theatrical productions unless it directly supports the pp pupils and closes the gap. So having lots of children in pupil premium doesn't mean the school has a load of extra cash floating round, in fact it may be the opposite.

Parental contribution of £520 per annum would certainly be a dominant factor in a school having better facilities. I actually would be happy to pay that myself.

DSs grammar school has classes of 30, whereas DS2s comp has classes of 25. So that seems like a huge saving.

No, grammar schools do not receive less funding than other schools except pp, but in the selective parts of our county, the grammar schools were absolutely starved of any extra central funding by the LEA for years, in comparison to the comps and sec mods. Think leaking roofs in the grammars and shiny new builds in the other schools. Not much raised by PTA either (rural and not excessively affluent areas). Certainly not enough to fix the roofs. Not all of the country is the same.

Also, the grammars here tend to be significantly smaller than the other types of schools, so much harder to make savings or stretch funding to purchase or repair anything.

Ralph- -can you hear the sound of my tiny violin playing just for you?

I don't care - I have no horses in this race! Just pointing out - once again - that not everywhere in the entire country is the same

notagirrafe: "I can't believe he walked into another job after that scandal"

It wouldn't be the first time a Head was encouraged to go quickly and quietly in return for a blemish-free reference, and it won't be the last.

Our grammar is very small (

golfball but I thought it was all over the local news. Or maybe it was just massively gossiped about locally. I remember the scandal. It was the talk of the town at the time.

He'd already secured the job in Kent before it hit the newspapers in Kingston, and news probably didn't travel so fast by social media in those days.

Interestingly, the £520 per year parental contribution was introduced in the wake of the crisis, but obviously proved too lucrative to remain temporary! :-)

It's pretty offensive for the school to describe it as the "best way" to support a child's education.

Some schools also have the knack of "box ticking" to get extra funds and grants.

One of our local state comps has enjoyed, literally, millions of pounds of EU and lottery grant money because they've converted themselves into a language specialist school. It's just about trebled in size and during the extensive building works, there were often signs up showing the supporters, which always included the EU flag. We looked around at the open day, and their facilities were simply amazing, virtually everything brand new. Every few months, there was a news release in the local press announcing another new project costing £xmillion backed by the EU and/or lottery money, whether it be yet another sports hall or pitches, or a new language block with state of the art audio/visual equipment, or a new drama block with theatre. They also tick the disability boxes so have jumped on that band wagon to get improvements throughout the school to make it more accessible, but also getting new buildings/equipment to benefit everyone on the back of it. Trouble is that they get crap Ofsted results and have a massive bullying problem, well known locally, to the extent that loads of people take their kids out to other schools, once they've scratched the surface and see the reality behind the glossy exterior.

Compare that with our state grammar, in a deprived area, which is ancient and crumbling, the library roof leaks, drama and indoor sports are done in the school hall. Yes, they have a swimming pool, but it's also ancient and has been condemned so never gets used. Trouble is, because it's selective, they can't "tick the right boxes" so simply don't get the EU and lottery money despite numerous applications over many years. Nor can they tick disability boxed for buildings improvements because it's spread over several sites, on a steep hill, etc., so it's pretty much inaccessible to people with mobility issues to the extent that the usual "modifications" such as lifts, ramps, etc., wouldn't help, so they can't even get funding for that kind of building improvement either (which usually extend far beyond the accessibility issues themselves). As it's in a deprived area, the typical parent isn't rich so it doesn't enjoy the parental backing of those in wealthy areas. But, none of that matters, because they get the results, primarily because the kids have the "want to learn" attitude, so you don't need the bells and whistles!

It's also why some leafy comps have better facilities. Our state primary was in an affluent area and the PTA raised about £30-50k every year really easily which got spent on instruments and sports and playground equipment.

This. I'm shocked how much money my DD's PTA can raise. They redid the school library and playground this year with money raised from PTA.

I'm trying to find out how much the PTA in my DD's 2-form intake primary raised last year. Looking at the newsletter, they raised £6k for Christmas alone. Back in Auckland, my local primary school (Newmarket for those who know), is in a very prime location and they raised a lot of money from billboards on the school fence alone!

There were always stark differences between the provision in the secondary modern schools and the grammar schools

I also grew up in a grammar school area and it was the opposite. The grammar school had the rubbish faciliites, in fact it only replaced its gym a couple of years ago, and the local secondary modern had eg a swimming pool. The boys' grammar on the other hand had been newly built and was lovely, but still didn't have great facilities like eg a drama suite or anything like that. I'm not sure how the money gets divided up. My school had a school fund and I think they asked for £5 a term. £10 a week is a lot but even if you only asked for £50 a term and half the parents paid, you'd get a decent amount of money in. To be honest I'd prefer that than have to contribute to school fairs and the like - just ask for the cash and save everyone a lot of time.

It also depends on the attitude of the head and teachers to extra-curricular activities I think - some schools have an amazing range of extra-curricular activities and others don't. My son's infant school HT refused to have anything because she said the kids were too tired after school and although the junior school was much better, it was kind of feeding off that attitude. My son's secondary has a range of clubs etc but it's not that great when I compare with other schools.

I don't know where Tiffin get their money from, but they are an old school that pre-date the introduction of state schools. A lot of these old schools have endowments or received church funding. Some of the richer ones had to make a choice over whether to stay independent or become state schools, so for example Manchester Grammar became a private school, while Maidstone Grammar became a state school. All church schools continue to get funding from the church and continue to sit on church-owned land at no cost to the tax payer. This is one of the many reasons why forcing them to become academies could create a tangled mess.

A surprising number of 'public' / 'state' bodies still benefit from historic endowments, livery company connections and ancient Christian charitable links. Around half a dozen state and private schools in Kent, including the famous Tonbridge School for boys, benefit from Skinner's Company links. A lot of our older hospitals, like St Thomas's (which was described as ancient 800 years ago!) have their origins in religious orders. The St John's Ambulance is a charity can trace its ancestry back to Pope Gregory, who commissioned a hospital to be built at a site dedicated to St John the Baptist in Jerusalem in the 7th century.

A lot of private schools have similar foundations. They are charitable trusts for historical reasons - in the past all educational pursuits were deemed inherently charitable. When they professed to educate 'the poor' they did not mean the destitute, they meant the non-landed gentry. In other words, ordinary people. The oldest ones existed to educate boys for a life in the clergy and places like Eton only started accepting the aristocracy about 200 years ago. Whether they have strayed too far from their reason d'être in charging fees that are no longer affordable for most professional people is something that each school should reflect upon regularly. It hits the headlines every so often, for example when the Headmaster of King's Wimbledon commented on it, but it doesn't stop these schools raising their fees at multiple times the rate of inflation each year to pay for unnecessarily indulgent infrastructure projects and to provide bursaries for a tiny minority of children (so that they can be seen to be meeting the requirements of charitable status). I think many are living on borrowed time because parents are increasingly reliant on grandparents and house price inflation to help with fees. The next generation won't have those sources of finance to fall back on. As these schools become the preserve of the super-rich living in tax havens and paying fees with money of dubious origins, they are going to alienate themselves from people whose families have gone to these schools for generations and who pay their taxes in this country. When fashions change - perhaps the Russians decide that the future lies in a Chinese education - these schools will have lost a loyal local base to the state system and may well find themselves in financial difficulty. They will have been the architects of their own demise.

So, ramble over, and back to your predicament. There are lots of reasons why some schools offer more than others. It might be an inspiring head teacher, dedicated staff a pot of money, or all of those things combined. It is frustrating if your local school doesn't benefit from any of these I know, but it doesn't mean the teaching is below par. The vast majority of state schools are in much better shape than they were a generation ago, with better facilities, better teaching and more extracurricular offerings. Despite pressures on budgets and yet more meddling from central government, I am optimistic that state schools will continue to improve.

Thanks all for ŷour insights, it has certainly opened my eyes. I had no idea some state schools were effectively charging fees, I know 'voluntary' but I imagine hard to not contribute when a specific amount is suggested and then chased up. Our non selective comp has 6 x pupil premium funding of Tiffin, for example. So I guess these schools are effectively becoming cheap private schools for the middles classes.

My old Grammar School is C of E Voluntary Aided. It is one of the oldest in the country going back many centuries. It gets no money from the Church. All its annual income is via the formula, parents and alumni. It is an Adacemy converter. Loads of C of E schools are Academy converters.

There was a financial incentive to become an academy and many schools have improved their facilities because of this money, not just the grammar schools. Having worked in Education where I live, the dreadful, poorly equipped, buildings all belonged to the secondary schools. There have been major improvements to very many schools over the last 15 years and two secondaries have been rebuilt. Here, the LA had to spend money on the secondary moderns because they had the worst buildings - structural issues etc. More recently government money has been available to the schools upon conversion to an academy so has hastened the improvements programme.

Schools like Tiffin are extra-ordinarily good value when compared to paying for a private school. The same applies in my county where until very recently the best sport facilities, music and art faciliites, never mind computer suites, squash courts, satellite tracking facilities and superb science faciliites were all found in the grammar schools. They do have the benefit of active Alumni Associations too. Drama suites and swimming pools are fairly rare in the grammar schools around here and I would not necessarily say any school is underpriviledged by not having these.

I agree PP funding is spent on the children so it is not a boost to the budget. Rightly so, but it does boost the money spent per child and, to the outsider, it looks like those schools get more money without understanding why.

" So I guess these schools are effectively becoming cheap private schools for the middles classes"
not really. the local private schools in Kingston cost £18k/year, plus extras
A voluntary £520 for Tiffin is a bargain.

"A voluntary £520 for Tiffin is a bargain."

But enough to keep the plebs out...........