UK comp tops the PISA charts

[Refluxsux]

Not too shabby for a London Comp!

www.alexandrapark.school/news/aps-news/640-aps-students-triumph-in-pisa-tests

www.google.co.uk/amp/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/38262047?client=safari

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

How depressing. If this was a grammar the thread would be flooded with people saying how this proved that grammars should be imposed everywhere. Yet because it's a comp all people can do is decry it.

25% of pupils at this school are disadvantaged - that's above the national average. And those pupils do really well - 57% get 5+ GCSES. In the selective counties that figure is 34%.

Says on gov league table website 27% have had free school meals in the past 6 years and 29% is the national average.

Stand corrected although surely the figures are close enough to say that school has national average and is not especially privileged?

Right. So we have decidedly average comp surrounded by selective schools both state grammars and privates whose pupils outscore every other uk school and even top the Singapore average. How could this be cause for anything but celebration? Yes of course there are more disadvantaged populations; you can always find someone poorer etc.

I agree. It's a fantastic result for a genuine comprehensive. Just 15 years ago, London comps were considered the worst in the country, and now naysayers talk as if it's natural that they would be the best. Well done, APS!

The school has a national average amount of free school meal children and a mixed catchment - estates as well as houses. An above average amount of SEN pupils. No need to be churlish about a genuine success story. On funding, Haringey schools are treated as outer London, so less well-funded than inner London schools like Camden or Islington, though of course APS benefits from pupil premium funding.

Reflux and Justchanged You've both expressed my feelings better than I did. Thank you.

Well done to Alexandra Park. I wonder how the other 206 schools did. It would be interesting to see if there were any patterns based on geography and the like.

I know nothing about this school so can't comment on how good their results are, but one has to remember that the published PISA results are just national or territorial averages with individual results by school that will be much higher and much lower than the published averages.

Brighton College, which I image would have a much more privileged intake, has published significantly higher results:

www.brightoncollege.org.uk/college/college-news/item/9230

There may still be many many a school with significantly higher results than Brighton College. Averages can be very misleading.

So actually the headline about topping the PISA charts is just plain wrong. They did better than the average for Singapore (and I'm not knocking it all - it's a great result) but they were not even the highest performing school in the UK, never mind the world. We have no idea how all the indivdual schools did, as the previous poster points out.

That Brighton College news item is a bit disingenuous -it's a very selective school so really it would be very strange if it did not come out ahead of any individual country - assuming that that country was not cheating.

The Brighton College headline is a bit disingenuous, granted, as no country could be academically selective. But the article is quite factual it seems.

The APS news item is written rather misleadingly, probably unintentionally. It's a great result for a fully comprehensive school. But sentences like this - In fact, their average performance far exceeded that in any of the seventy-five countries - makes it sound as if they exceeded any school rather than the average of any country. And this sentence - It doesn’t include individual student results but remarkably this cohort of APS students topped the chart - suggests that they were at the top of all the schools who took part.

I think you might be a bit behind the times, Manumission!

But glad you are happy, wherever you went.

The Alexandra Park headline is misleading.

Alexandra Park (564) did better than the average for countries such as Singapore (535), Canada (527), Ireland (521), New Zealand (509), Australia (503) and England (500).

I'm sure there are hundreds of schools within these and other countries whose performance outranked that of Alexandra Park.

It was a very good performance by Alexandra Park. Like another poster, it would be far more impressive if it was a school in a northern or coastal town with few immigrant families and high numbers of white working class boys.

I totally disagree that the result would have been more impressive had it been in a coastal town. Just 15 years ago, London schools were at the bottom of the league tables. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/education_league_tables/32270.stm
APS is in Haringey which was second from bottom in 1997.
At that time, London schools were considered worst because they had high numbers of EAL kids. Now this is somehow cited as an obvious advantage compared to having native speakers.

APS has a very typical catchment, both for London and also the UK as a whole. FSM are close to the national average at 27%, they have a high percentage of special needs kids. Yes, some families will be middle-class, but so too are many families in the U.K. The richest will have opted for private and others grammars like Latymer which is quite close.

As a London parent (not APS), I find it heartening that a well-run comprehensive, with no selection, and where many will have shunned for grammar or private, can produce results that are as good as the best in the world. And yes, for a school like APS which is a comprehensive, a comparison with national averages is appropriate as it does not select its intake, and includes many disadvantaged children.

What APS does show is that well-run comprehensives can compete globally. The result is impressive. Full Stop. No need for qualifiers.

"Randomly selected".....to turn up for a non-compulsory three hour exam at 7am on a cold December morning? That's not random for a start. The inherent biases in this testing are notorious.

Having high levels of immigrant families is a huge advantage as shown in stats. Immigrant families have pulled up London schools and this is widely recognised. The extra funding, high aspirations and high incomes also help. The head itself recognises that many of his pupils are very privileged. Unless supported by benefits most families in the uk would never have a chance of sending their children there as they could never earn enough to live in the catchment. London is becoming a world apart from the rest of the U.K. Coastal towns are actually being targeted with extra funding to help with low aspirations.

A supposed middle class family in other parts of the U.K. will earn peanuts compared to a London middle class family. I think some London posters have no idea how low salaries can be in other parts of the country.

blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/why-we-should-thank-immigrants-for-raising-standards-in-our-schools/

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11223747/Schools-with-large-migrant-intake-get-better-GCSE-results.html

Odd that coastal towns like Skegness and Ramsgate should have problems with low expectations. Because aren't all the 11 year olds desperate to get into Skegness Grammar and Chatham and Clarendon Grammar? The fact that 80% of them will have been effectively labelled as "not academic" has nothing to do with these low aspirations presumably.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/oct/21/coastal-school-conundrum-five-challenges-how-to-fix-them

Over a quarter of APS students are on free school meals, so clearly much of the catchment is not advantaged.

London schools have lots of immigrants, but they also did in 2000, when they were the worst-performing. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4053335.stm

The evidence on why London has improved suggests it's better leadership, rather than having more immigrants.

www.teachers.org.uk/expert-view/why-attainment-higher-london-elsewhere

This is a great finding as it gives hope of replicating it elsewhere. Personally, I find the turnaround in London schools amazing. My kids are only at primary school, but I've been delighted with our state primary and pleasantly surprised by most of the secondaries I've viewed.

The evidence doesn't just suggest it's leadership, you can and do get that anywhere. Immigrant numbers have increased and London schools got a shed load more money.

And an immigrant child on fsm will probably have a whole different work ethic than a fsm white boy who lives in an area with generations dragged down by low aspirations.