Parents in the North need to be more pushy like their Southern counterparts.

[Sixisthemagicnumber]

According to the BBC breakfast news a new study has found that parents in the North are not pushy enough with their children's education and they need to be more like Southern parents.
Apparently children in the North are doing less well in Secondary school and this is due to their parents not pushing them hard enough.
They haven't even bothered to take into consideration the vast funding differences between schools in the North and the South

Did I read that data and art lie differently to you mum? It seems to confirm that independents schools are doing very well.
This particular line shows how well:

Over a third of GCSE entries from fee-paying school pupils were awarded the top grade of A*, almost five times higher than the equivalent UK-wide level of 6.5 per cent.

5 times more A* grades from fee paying schools I would say is an indicator that they are doing very well.

Sixisthemagicnumber Tue 06-Dec-16 16:57:47 Did I read that data and art lie differently to you mum? It seems to confirm that independents schools are doing very well.

Erm, no. It confirms that some are. Unless you think the schools at the bottom of that table are "doint very well". As my nearest state secondary school achieved 30% A and 57% A/A, I would say that a number of those schools are not "doing well" in the context of league tables.

You did also note Many schools boycott the tables, which means that not every school is listed.

Did I read that data and art lie differently to you mum?

No idea what you are going on about tbh

Insofar as "Northern" is a proxy for "economically deprived" (i.e. to some extent) I think the problem with some schools is partly because teenagers aren't stupid. If a teacher in Hackney tells a working class teen of average intelligence "work hard, get good grades and you can get a decent job" then the teen will see that this makes sense. They can get decent grades, maybe do a degree at one of a huge range of tertiary establishments within a bus ride while still living with family, or maybe just go straight into a job and then shift at regular intervals into something that pays better with more prospects, still a bus ride away from Mum's flat. Yes it's tougher for some London teens than it is for others, but for a lot of them the basic equation of
Work => qualifications => job => money
does make basic sense.

If you're a working class teen in Burnley or Great Yarmouth (because this is not just a Northern issue) however then this reasoning will not stack up in the same way. There just aren't well paying jobs with decent prospects visibly out there for the taking for the students with the best grades.

And then there's the discrepancy between England and the other nations in the global rankings www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-38157811

(I meant specifically, UK nations)

mumtrying- that's the telegraph - schools choose to submit to that. Most choose not to.
I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.

PhilODox Tue 06-Dec-16 20:24:46 I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.

Really?

None of the private schools I know have any GCSE data on the dfe performance tables. I must be looking in the wrong place. I must be looking in the wrong place. Perhaps you can provide a link?

I am really quite cross about this article blaming the parents given the funding inequalities and weakness of the schools available in some places.
But of course it is all our fault for not being pushy enough, I suppose if we really cared about our kids we would have made sure our area was better funded.

The reason not all private schools are on that data mumtrying is partly because some schools do IGCSEs rather than the normal GCSEs. How would you put the two on the same table when it is (as far as I know) essentially a different exam?
I know of one very good private school which stopped submitting data to the league tables a good while ago mainly because it didn't agree with league tables and the manner in which it causes some schools to teach only to test (because league tables are the be all and end all) rather than providing a more rounded education. That particular school gets over 90% A*-A at GCSE and does publish its results on its own website. I dontnknownifnot could go on league tables now though as I think it primarily does IGCSEs now.

School league tables GCSEs

"Reallytired Private school parents are supportive of education - how many do you actually know? Many I know say education is school's business, that's what they pay for, and are completely hands off and non-supportive."

I met plenty of private school parents and they have all been supportive, but not necessarily pushy. By supportive they provide a comfortable place for children to do home work, they get their children to school on time and ready to learn. They often see school as important even if they aren't ultra pushy.

Sixisthemagicnumber Tue 06-Dec-16 21:03:42 The reason not all private schools are on that data mumtrying is partly because some schools do IGCSEs rather than the normal GCSEs.

I was responding to:

PhilODox mumtrying- that's the telegraph - schools choose to submit to that. Most choose not to. I'm talking about the dfe performance tables.

Inwasnpartly responding to your post of 17.18 mumtrying. Your local secondary school is doing very well and no doubt better than some private schools. Some private schools are poor but on the whole they are better than state schools based on them receiving an average of 5 times as many A as state schools. Anybody who chooses to pay to send their child to a poorly performing private school (unless it specialises in a specific need which the child has) is IMO a total ass. If most people had the choice of sending their child to a state school which achieves 57% A-A they would jump at the chance and wouldn't consider going private. But most people don't have that choice.

Sixisthemagicnumber just to reiterate my previous point - Do all fee-paying schools do well? How many of them include resits in their results? How many of them actually place their results in the public domain in a way that they can be easily compared to state schools?

mumtrying- DfE tables do not include igcse. The dfe performance tables have the results (2015) of 2 local to me independents, but not the other 2 which do IGCSE (because that does not count in 5 A*-C measure, so it look like 0%). 2016 will be published in January.

reallytired- I do not consider getting "children to school on time and ready to learn" as supportive- that's the bare minimum, surely? I'm talking about parents whinging about being expected to hear small children read every day because "that's the school's job", not just the odd one either.

Pushy parenting is not good. We have seen more than a few car crashes. However DC have picked up a lot from the sky high aspirations of their central London peers. They really do believe anything is possible. Not something that I think they would have had if they had grown elsewhere.

I don't live in London but I live in a city with a wide range of free cultural activities in my doorstep. There are so many things I can take my DCs to which can put learning into context. Hearing Tim Peake was a five minute car ride away, my DC had two years of summer camps at the local zoo. Where I grew up, everyone worked on farms, in tourism or occasionally admin for the local council. Lots of artists (I knew more willow weavers than accountants) but I really had little concept of any kind of professional employment. It was quite hard to work out what I wanted to "be" and whether it was worth striving for when my primary source of info for most jobs my DCs see being done every day by people they know was the telly.

Feeling slightly peeved that I started a thread on this yesterday in the "In the News" section and it only got 3 posts, but who's counting ...

Anyway, at the risk of repeating myself, I probably fit the Tsar's definition of being relatively pushy - encourage my kids to do well at school, do lots of extra-curricular stuff etc. I also live in the South. However, I'm from the North-East. I moved south after Uni because it's where the work was (and also because it's a little warmer). Many thousands of others do the same. London is not just full of people from abroad - it's also full of people from other parts of the UK!

So if all the aspirational (a much better word than pushy) types gravitate towards where the work is, maybe they should solve the work (and weather) problem in the North first. Perhaps they will then find the aspiration spreads itself more evenly.

London gets shed loads of arts funding plus into the infrastructure to get there.

'Ooop North' right here in Cheshire we have Kumon, tutors and everything!

I've heard both sides here, too pushy because the parents ask too many questions, want more feedback, interfere too much or not pushy enough if they don't write in the homework diary every night or helicopter with a 100 questions outside the classroom door each day! It seems you can't win sometimes.

There is huge aspiration in this little market town, my son in is Y5 and the grammar school entrance exam talk has been alive and well for years, the 'local comp' is the best performing secondary school in the borough, there are many private schools - so the choice is good.

The report headlines are boiled down to it seems sweeping generalisations, I lived in London for 15 but moved to Cheshire when I had children mainly for family, house prices and access to a decent state schools. I have friends still in London who've done the state and private route. I don't think the data proves much and it can all be taken in many different ways.

"....who then had to take a step back and go to College instead."

Have you seem some of the fantastic college courses you can do now? Many 4 A level equivalent, none of these courses and many others are considered a huge step forward and them some, not at all a step back.

I really thought the mind-set of A levels and uni being THE ONLY routes to life success had died years ago

PISA Results out today. Hidden in the Executive Summary is this little gem:

"Students in private schools score higher in science than students in public schools: but after accounting for the social economic profile of students and schools, students in public schools score higher than students in private schools on average across OECD countries and in 22 education systems."

Understand that this thread is just about the England, but one should not blindly think that children will do better at private schools.

mumtrying I have said more than once that not all fee paying schools do well. Are you deliberately ignoring those bits of my posts?

vietnam I find the OECD Pisa rankings interesting but limited in their usefulness. In some of the countries fee paying students are mainly overseas students who might attend international schools. In some countries I would absolutely expect home grown students to outperform international students because of different societal norms and different parenting techniques. plus the OECD samples are quite small in relative terms.

Sixisthemagicnumber Wed 07-Dec-16 06:02:33 mumtrying I have said more than once that not all fee paying schools do well. Are you deliberately ignoring those bits of my posts?

No but you appear to be deliberately ignoring the fact that my posts were responding to posts made by PhilOBox, not you.

MumTryingHerBest Tue 06-Dec-16 14:41:00

PhilODox Really? Why do you think fee-paying schools do so well then?

Do all fee-paying schools do well? How many of them include resits in their results? How many of them actually place their results in the public domain in a way that they can be easily compared to state schools?