What are STATE schools in London like?

[TeenTimesTwo]

I've been reading with mild interest the issue of exploding offers for CLGS.

But it made me wonder. From what I see in media (TV news, and papers), I have the impression that state schools in London have made great steps forward over the past 10-15 years and are now considered very good.

Is that true? Not just for schools with convoluted admissions criteria (like Grey Coats?) but on average for your ordinary run of the mill local secondary?

If so, why so much angst over applying to so many private schools? And the willingness to set up your 11 year olds for such long commutes? Is the education really so much better? Or is it 'snob value' or fear of the unknown, or 'because that's what my social circle does' or old reputations?

Once again, I just wanted to say, especially to those posting from outside London, that the posts on this forum are misleading. Most parents in London do not have a choice between state and private because private is beyond them. Their children go through the state system. Those who are really unhappy about that, and are able to do so, leave London.

"Frombothsidesnow" -yes, you are right. The vast majority of children in London attend state schools - not grammar schools either. As I said in one of my earlier posts, at the time my DC were at primary school I think only two out of 60 children attended a private secondary school - 3.3%.

It’s very complicated to fill in your 6 options in my bit of S London. I haven’t (yet!) done a spreadsheet, but I think that for dd1 the theoretical options are:

• local outstanding girls’ comp (fast shrinking, expensive catchment)
• Catholic girls’s school (only RC children get places)
• RI mixed comp (distance)
• Academy chain (distance, but not just from school)
• further away comp with small catchment and banding, plus a few aptitude places for drama, dance and music
• fairly distant, two church schools with places for a few non practicing Christian girls with musical aptitude
• fairly distant, comp with grammar stream (for which there is a specific test)
• about an hour away, girls’ grammars (two different tests as different boroughs)

So there are lots of hoops to jump through in order to have a chance of being assigned most of these schools. This makes me (and maybe others who are lucky enough to be able to afford it / get bursaries) feel that the hoops for private school (exams, interviews etc) aren’t so bad in comparison.

As others have said, I also think it makes for a starker division between schools as you need to know about aptitude and banding tests, book your child in for them etc if you want them to go to those schools.

truly comprehensive London schools (although they are single sex)
Then they are not comprehensive.

A comprehensive school looks at date of birth and catchment area. It knows nothing about the child or the parents.

Banding might work in big cities, but anywhere else its a catastrophe environmentally.

I agree with slackpanther that the MN poster demographic is very very skewed, but the DFE table are not.
Download the data set and then sort the London schools into those that are wholly non selective .... (CBA to do it right now, have done it in the past)

I think, TalkInPeace, that deciding that single sex comps are selective is going to skew your results to the point when they are meaningless. It's not a real world descriptor.

Many of us wish there were fewer single sex secondaries in London of course.

fromboth
My kids went to the same school, had the same opportunities, had the same teachers.
It was a "comprehensive" education. It covered all children.

What if you are in an area where the girls schools are good and the boys schools are bad (as is the case with the two catholic schools in this area)
State funded schools should provide equal opportunity to all

Single sex schools, broadly speaking, produce better outcomes for girls and worse ones for boys, which is why I dislike the fact that many parents in London have no choice whether or not their sons attend one.

However, in a study of which London schools don't admit purely on distance, including single sex schools in a list of those that don't is going to distort your conclusions if you're looking to capture the experience of children and parents who have to jump through hoops of auditions and tests or religious attendance to get their kids into state schools. And I think that's the question that's being asked.

I think there is a concrete difference between looking at lists and actually living the experience of being a state school parent in London. School gate conversations about which schools you can 'try' to get your kids into aren't going to include single sex ones that don't match your child. Conversely, fair banding, which isn't officially selective at all, is viewed with enormous suspicion by many parents, who note the local schools whose children don't seem to match the local demographics at all. None of that is captured by stats.

True,
Its just odd to those of us (like the OP and myself) who live in areas where there are almost no single sex state schools that London has so many.
The ONLY single sex state schools in this county are Catholic. And there are not many of them.
To my knowledge there are no other faith state schools.
The state schools are Comps.
Admissions are a simple box tick. Over 90% of parents get their first choice.
And a lot less money is spent on administration - so is freed up for teaching.

Only single-sex schools here are also selective.

Remaining schools are either nearly-comps or secondary moderns, depending how far away they are from the fairly small number of grammars.

(Areas with lots of grammars close by - remaining schools are secondary moderns. Those the other side of the county - remaining schools are almost comprehensive, as only a small number of children will make the long trek to the grammars)

There are a small number of faith secondaries, but their impact is fairly small, again because there are so few of them.

The density of population in London makes the picture much more confusing as catchments for many schools overlap, and then when you factor in the religion/aptitude/single sex issues it complicates it further. A Roman Catholic girl living to the west of my LA would have had, in theory, a choice of a fully comprehensive school, a girls only comprehensive, a Catholic school and possibly a C of E school. An atheist boy living to the east of my LA has only the choice of his nearest school.

It doesn't really matter if statistically loads of schools in London are Good or Outstanding if the one school your child will be allocated is neither. London is vast and catchment areas are small and overlapping.

Good for you. I can assure you that most parents in London don't enjoy the process. Nor, I would imagine, do the schools.

On the other hand, when we looked outside London to live, the number of places which had one secondary school which had been RI for years on end was a real wake up call to me. I am the first to query the omniscience of Ofsted (out of the 14 schools we chose one in Special Measures at the time and the untouchable school that Slack mentions has either Good or Outstanding) but it speaks to me of sustained under investment to have a school that is the only option for thousands of children performing so poorly for so long. The privilege of London schools has been that money has been thrown at those that have been deemed in need of improvement.

It would be SO much easier if schools had simple, shared, easily understood, non discriminatory admissions. And all good schools. Would love to live in Hampshire!

The only single sex schools we have in our borough are faith.

My own reservations about fair banding (it is potentially a barrier and a potentially a mechanism for jiggery pokery (the ‘lottery’ school is often viewed suspiciously in this context) are offset by the anti-polarisation effect in a densely populated area, and the schooi does end up with a true ability spread. And by and larger all the local kids go. And recognise the benefits of living close to your mates, and feeling the community effect.

Sunset, so true. Had we not had extenuating circumstances, our son would have had only single sex options, despite our closest school geographically being mixed and non-religious.

Plenty of the religious schools in our borough are under-subscribed and are the unwanted, other side of the borough, 'you didn't get any of your six' allocations on offers day. They are not very good schools I gather and actively avoided by non-religious people.

Slack, google the Crystal Palace school to see how fair banding appears to deliver some odd results.

The lottery school is the worst of all in my book because it leaves the local children with no local option. You can live literally next door to it and not get in, leaving you travelling across the borough to the school no one else wants. Meanwhile the school courts the middle classes of south London and has kids bussing in, private school style, from 5 miles away.

When we looked in Wandsworth 9 years ago the only school that offered a choice of MFL and three separate sciences was Graveney and that for a tiny band of pupils heavily selected. As far as I recall no other Wandsworth school offered a choice of MFL, triple/single science and a classical language. They could not meet the needs of the most able, therefore, no school in Wandsworth was technically a comprehensive. They were secondary moderns.

I don't think it's fair to consider a classical language as one of the essentials for a secondary school, nice though it may be to have.

And is it then surprising that Graveney has such a miniscule catchment area? Everyone wants Graveney (at least as a back-up) if they live in Wandsworth, Lambeth and Merton (and further afield, if going for the selective places). I would go so far as to say it's the most sought after non-faith, non grammar school in SW London!

Re: 'racism'...there's also MC BAME parents!
We're a mixed family and one of the reasons we'll be moving out of London is that we don't really like any of the secondary options for boys in our borough.

I also think its easier in a way out of London as there's less choice as often theres one good secondary per town and you (if you are willing/able) move near it or go to church. Whereas in London especially if you have two different sex DC there's more options and thus maybe more hang wringing (ie...shall we get DS to take the 11 plus and have a really long bus journey etc etc)

As far as I recall no other Wandsworth school offered a choice of MFL, triple/single science and a classical language. Poster think your expectations are way too high. Most of the SW London grammars don't offer a classical language as a given and they're full of the most academic!

The lottery school offers all that.

Oh it is nice to be back, wish I could spend all day here. I love the fact that here we are, STATE school parents, at last getting a look-in on a Mumsnet Education thread!
Dapplegrey; my original post was from right at start of discussion and a somewhat provocative attempt to help kickstart it . . . As they have since amply indicated, private school parents each have their own often perfectly reasonable grounds for doing what they do, and there are circumstances I can imagine in which I would be one of them . . . given access to necessary cash of course.
But, just as I am attempting to do, you as private school parents need to take a step back from your own particular self-defensiveness to look at picture as a whole. Ask yourself honestly, why, for instance, in an area like mine, maybe 50%/50% white/ethnic-minority, the almost uniformly Outstanding local state schools are 80%-100% non-white.
Where are those missing white kids???
Let me tell you a story. When I first took my little angel (aged 3, he’s summer born) round my local primary, I couldn’t help but search the classrooms and playground desperately for the tiny handful of naice white kids amid all the black and brown ones: “so he’ll have someone to be friends with”.
Then, when he started in reception, I found myself clocking the other white mums (there were more of them – 4! - in our year than ever before) and hanging around them at pick up and so on.
And then, inexplicably, I started to feel ashamed of myself. Guess what; finally, belatedly, I took a good look at my own DS, by then 5-6 ish. You know what I saw, at last?
A very cute, very brown, very curly-haired little boy exactly like many others at school, but not a bit like the golden-haired kids of my new friends.
Who is now growing into one of those large black boys I’d see hanging around street corners round here in cheap, ill-fitting school uniforms back in the day, shoving each other with London street talk, and I’d think, ugh, no way, no child of mine . . .
But yes way! He and all his very lovely, multi-talented Y6 class who I now know so well (he’s bilingual in hip-hop/street and my fairly-posh, btw). And guess what, those bus-stop black boys no longer look like louts to me – they look like sweet self-conscious teenagers, growing much too fast, hustling for social status and attempting to impress their friends just like we used to.
I went on a journey, Dapplegrey, on which only a brown DC at a very multi-ethnic school could have taken me. I would probably never have done it without him. My all-white out of London based birth family, including my v old mum, still come out with remarks and attitudes which appal me, though once I would not have noticed, or even, heaven help me, expressed myself.
Now, I don’t really believe I or my birth family are any worse than any other all-white raised person, including those who have the sophistication, foresight (and cash!) to send their kids to (mostly white) private schools. But I went on a journey – how many of them have?
How many have to, when any non-white person in their circle has effectively been selected for their willingness to conform to the (white) majority, and as such can be guaranteed not to rock the boat? (or ever mention the R-word (as my DP knows) in naice (white) company.)
See, there’s a reason why I do, so freely, here at any rate. A reason why, unlike so many, I’m such an uninhibited bigmouth when it comes to race and racism. It’s not because I have a black family. It’s because I am white.

I live in Hampshire and agree with your points Talkinpeace. We seem to be very very lucky. I don't even live in one of the very affluent bits, house prices are not extortionate here. My DC have just gone to the local schools with no angst whatsoever and done very well. Triple science, music, drama, sport, the lot. Admittedly no Latin. Move to Hampshire folks!

Also - another poster remarked on the fact that Londoners tend not to choose their very local school on some weird principle, but go a little further afield while others from some distance away happily opt for the one they omitted. Yep, I've noticed this too; am even influenced by it - not at primary, but now applying for secondaries. I think at some level I think a little bit of a journey would be good for DS at this stage. London is so vast after all; so much to see and explore! I don't know if it makes any sense really.

ReelingLush why is excellence too high an expectation for all children if we seek equality of opportunity. My DH had 3 sciences, French and German. Leeds comp, he felt he had to run to catch up when he started his legal career. He shouldn't have had to.