Anyone got any opinions on the Michaela School?

[noblegiraffe]

My Twitter is currently full of talk about Michaela as the teachers there have released a book today and are holding a conference explaining what they do. It's a no-excuses school where kids walk the corridors either in silence or chanting Shakespeare, behaviour is expected to be perfect including no slouching. Everything possible is done to reduce workload of teachers - no marking in books, lessons are all joint planned and taught uniformly, no differentiation, they write their own textbooks.

Does anyone's kids go there? Anyone decide against sending their kids there? Does anyone know how it is viewed in the local community?

Maybe the book is different from the blogs, then, because they are all very adversarial and superior. The quotations from the book highlighted earlier by noblegiraffe are also superior and dismissiv ('no whizzy, jazzy nonsense' for example).

The Debra Kidd blog raises a number of interesting issues, and is not all negative by any means. However she also raises the point I made several posts back about when the move to more sophisticated debate, discussion and consideration takes place. It clearly hasn't happened by Y9. Does it happen organically?

The website/blogs/clips that have been linked to all seem v self congratulatory and "aren't we perfect, aren't we all lucky to be here, this is the one true way." almost cult like (not seriously, just some of the psychological characteristics!)

Sausage have you read the chat thread called something like "All parents need to read this"? It describes what so many teachers have to put up with these days, and why they are so stressed and burning out so quickly. Teachers at Michaela don't have any of that: I'm not surprised they express feelings of being lucky to be there!

Noble Ok, I've had a flip through the book, reading about 25 pages at random. What I saw was almost all focused on what they do in the school, and why. There was very little mention of other schools, except in the context of "when I was teaching before, I used to think, or I experienced X".

I posted some photos taken from the book early on in the thread. One of them is the start of the chapter 'Marking is futile'. It says 'Marking not only harms teachers' work-life balance, it also damages pupil progress. Marking is futile'

Well, what is that saying other than 'other teachers are not only flogging their guts out marking (which is true) but that they are damaging the education of their pupils by doing so'! Which is a) bollocks and b) insulting every teacher who marks.
And from what I understand, Michaela teachers do mark, they're just narrowly defining marking as writing in the kids' books.

The vast majority of tweets from Michaela teachers are adversarial. One which sticks in my mind in particular was a short video from their French teacher showing "an equipment check the #Michaela way" in which she shouted stuff from the front and children held up what they had (e.g. "red pen" after which the kids held up a red pen) There was a strong implication that "other schools" don't do it right. There followed a thread where eagle eyed people pointed out that the child at the back had held the same pen up twice and so on. She looked ridiculous and took the video down. Frankly, any school that feels the need to turn itself into a hashtag so it can trend on Twitter is missing the point.

And the thing about work-life balance, as we've already discussed on this thread, is a bit daft when the school is less than half full. Its free school application talks about it aiming to be an 11-18 school. So far it has three year groups. Most marking comes from KS4 and KS5. That's why "teachers at Michaela don't have any of that".

They also don't have any parents' evenings in Ys 7, 8 and 9. I'm sure you can see teachers if you want, but, once again, this is a bit 'my way or the high way' - you sign your child over to me and we won't even meet you to discuss progress.

And, going back to the extracts noble posted, things like 'no time-wasting, transient displays' are clearly adversarial. You're wasting your time. No discussion of what the benefits of display might be: pride in your work, opportunity for pupils to learn from the work of others, opportunity for visitors to the school to see the work, and, last but not least, the importance of existing in an attractive environment. Of course, since all the work seems to be pretty much identical I guess it wouldn't do some of these things.

Just looked at the book photos again. Under the heading "The Michaela Effect" it goes on about how every initiative is assessed for workload impact and how if teacher effort is more than pupil value then it doesn't happen. As a result of this teachers can leave at 5pm and take no work home. Stupid other schools doing pointless work when they could be lazing around eating Doritos and watching X Factor.

Then apparently later in the book the English teacher (who says marking is futile) describes how she gets her marking done during her two free periods a day.

How could the original author write that about workload with a straight face?

I think Debra Kidd's blog is pretty balanced. She agrees with plenty, disagrees with plenty. What's wrong with that?

She says interesting things about reading at Michaela, which she takes from the book - great that they focus so closely on it, but not keen on the push for children to read books that aren't necessarily appropriate. Withering Heights for an 11 year old? It's my favourite book. I read it at 16. By which time I'd fallen in (and out) of love, understood passion and longing, which made me fall in love with the characters and the setting. At 11 I would have been perfectly capable of reading it, but I wouldn't have got it.

kesstrel Tue 06-Dec-16 19:04:38 around 20% arrive with a ‘Special Needs’ label attached to them

Yet only 1.7% had Pupils with a statement of special educational needs (SEN) or education, health and care (EHC) plan. This is lower than the national average of 1.8%.

www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/140862?tab=absence-and-pupil-population

45% speak English as an additional language

This is meaningless when you consider that Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet, one the top performing schools in the country, has 44.8% EAL

33% read at a standard below their chronological age but how far below?

62% perform below the national expectation in Maths again, how far below?

Are these figures based on what those children left their primary school with or are they based on assessments carried out by the school itself?

I think their co-hort profile odd. They do random allocation within a 5 mile radius. There are 407 primary schools within 5 miles of the school. None of the primary schools are inadequate, 14 are RI, 177 are good and 85 are outstanding. How has the school managed to get so many underperforming students on entry?

I hadn't heard of School21 which Debra Kidd also mentions on her blog. That also looks very interesting - again in London, lots of pupil premium attracting students, but almost the polar opposite with everything being about creativity, always sitting in circles to work etc.

Is 20% with a 'special needs label' that high? I know (for various reasons) dd's school is a bit unusual but as of their last full inspection it says that on entry 44% of yr 7 had 'a reading age below the functional reading age of 9.5 years', and 51% had some kind of special needs (though still only 2.6% with a statement).

It'salso interesting when you consider that some of the nearest primary schools have 70-80% EAL.

The borough itself has results above the national average and 3 out of 5 of the nearest primaries have very high KS2 results.

Mum

I think their co-hort profile odd. They do random allocation within a 5 mile radius.

I believe that only applied to the children admitted this year, because this is the first year they were oversubscribed. Also, it's not random allocation, it's a "lottery" among those who applied (I believe). In addition, the admissions policy gives priority to siblings of current pupils, who apparently accounted for 40 something percent of this year's intake, and would not be subject to the lottery.

I hadn't heard of School21

That's not surprising. They deliberately avoid sensational publicity - especially stories suggesting that they have found some kind of 'magic bullet' - because they see themselves very much as a work in progress, taking an evidence-based approach. If something proves not to be working, they'll change it. And, like Michaela, they are a brand new school, with no GCSE or KS2 outcomes to wave around just yet.

Many of the reservations people have about Michaela apply to School21, too ('selective' intake - in that only parents that buy-in to the approach will apply, and they have to be invested enough to take a risk, given the lack of data thus far; very small numbers - 75 per year - and so on).

But the attitude towards the students - what the grown ups think will best help develop them as successful adults - couldn't be more different.

I suspect that both approaches, by the way, will 'work', in terms of exam outcomes. But that the School21 methodology would be much easier to implement more widely, and in a range of school contexts.

kesstrel I believe that only applied to the children admitted this year, because this is the first year they were oversubscribed.

Fair enough. So the 2016 co-hort maybe quite different to the 2015 profile currently available on the DfE performance tables.

gives priority to siblings of current pupils, who apparently accounted for 40 something percent of this year's intake

According to this Brent Secondary School allocations document 18 siblings were allocated places so where did the 40% come from?

www.brent.gov.uk/media/16403939/brent-secondary-allocations-2016.pdf

Rafals Maybe Michaela, as a new and unknown quality, got more parents who were "desperate", or were attracted by the emphasis on strong discipline? But I also think that, from a statistical point of view, the smaller the size of the school's intake, the more likely it is not to accurately reflect the statistical average of the local neighbourhood.

The headteacher writes about handing out flyers in local hairdressers before the school opened!! If there is a strong word-of-mouth factor working to select the intake, that too might bias it in particular directions.

Obviously, none of the skepticism being expressed here about the intake would be completely allayed by anything but independently verified and complete statistics. Perhaps we will be provided with them at some point.

Wow school21 looks amazing!!!

Mum Sorry re siblings, I clearly mis-remembered something!

kesstrel Wed 07-Dec-16 11:04:53 Mum Sorry re siblings, I clearly mis-remembered something

No problems, I thought there may have been a reason for that figure to go up after the linked document was produced.

Noble Something's just occurred to me with regard to the "two free periods a day" issue. Doesn't it make a difference that this is an extended hours school? In the context of a school that starts at 8 and finishes at 4, wouldn't it be obvious that there would be more scope for "free periods" than one that starts at 9 and finishes at half 3? For one thing, they actually have 6 periods of lessons a day, rather than 5, plus 45 minutes of form time.

Doesn’t that mean that in order to fairly compare the two, in terms of contact time vs “free” time, you would have to compare one 8 hour day with another? Or have I got this wrong?

I don't know any secondaries that start at 9.

8:30/8:25/8:15 here

Just to expand on my post above, what Jo Facer is actually saying about the "leaving at 5" issue is: " I can get all my work done in 42.5 hours a week, (including 20 hours contact times plus 2.5 hours discussing things with the children at lunch)". Wouldn't most teachers find that pretty attractive?

Scary So how many hours of classes do they run in total? At Michaela, teachers are with the children for 7.5 hours a day, as far as I can tell.

By the way, my local secondary starts at 9 and finishes at 3:20 .