How do a few comprehensive schools produce seem to produce successful people?

[Bahhumbug01]

Hi ,,

We live on the outskirts of London (Beckenham/Bromley postcode area) and have a young family. We are considering moving out to Edenbridge/Godstone/Crowhurst areas in the next few years. These towns all have decent comps, and excellent connections in to Central London for DH.

Our neighbours send both their DS to a Catholic school in the next town, some 12 miles away, which is accessible by tram and then involves a relatively short walk to school. The school has excellent sports facilities (on a par with some independent schools) and pastoral provision. Good academic results too. The comps in Bromley are quite poor on the whole. There is one outstanding boys gs but you have to tutor years ahead if you want to have a chance of getting DS in.

The RC school has an impressive list of alumni and I can't understand why (or how) the school has produced so many outstanding sportsmen, politicians, media types when it is just a faith comp. Is there a pecking order when it comes to comps, or is there some kind of selection involved? Does the same apply to some of the trendy North London comps too?
Also, is there no distance criteria involved for faith comps, but distance is important for 'normal' comps? It's all really confusing.

Me and DH attended normal schools (where everyone in the town went to the same school!!) out of London so are really green when it comes to London schools. We are actually a bit intimidated by it all which makes the idea of moving further out quite appealing.

Anyone else in same position, or struggling to understand the difference in admissions between different types of comps?

@zzzzz

Innit

My DB and I are both academic high flyers who went to our local comprehensive but a critical part of our success was teachers actually wanting to help us achieve and unfettered access to the library at lunchtme.
I must admit I'm worried about my ASD DCs starting school - one thing about selective schools is SEND provision is patchy to say the least. And sports facilities are no good if the PE for pupils with disabilities and injuris is the 'sit on the side' workout.

At least there are two comps within my catchment areas which aren't faith schools - a creeping cancer if ever there was one.

“even as non-religious Comps, they admit on distance. Everyone knows that some areas have expensive houses which exclude many and are therefore effectively selective on income”

But (since your post was about London schools) my experience and observation is that this effect, selection by postcode, is less of an due because everyone is so packed in. Conservation areas backing on to high density estates, private housing and social all represented in a small area.

My kids go to a ‘sought after’ comp (we just happened to live there, we could have chosen from 3 that I would have been happy with, and more if I was able to access the faith schools). But all have a completely mixed demography, a community police officer at the gate, some kids off to Oxbridge, some off to the Youth Offending Team provision.

I only know about the London situation, and to further clarify, only about what goes on in my own borough. But the most "desirable" schools here certainly have found all sorts of clever ways to select middle class pupils by stealth, at the expense of more disadvantaged children.

These include offering music scholarships, maths scholarships, banding tests, sibling priority even if the family has moved miles away from the usual "catchment", turning a blind eye to families moving temporarily into catchment and then out again.

School admissions is an absolute farce in London.

Camden School for Girls anyone?

It's self selection.
The more hassle it is to get in (applications, special uniforms, interview, moving house, pretending like you believe in God.... ) the greater the tendancy for the kids to be from families that are either
a) privileged b) aspirational or c) both.
Where I live there's a big sectarian divide and Catholics are still discriminated against. Yet Catholic schools do a bit better. Not because Catholics are a race of geniuses, but because all the Catholic school parents have cared enough about their kids education to make a positive choice and fill out a special form. This alone indicates a level of engagement that would stand the kids in good stead wherever they went.
The other possibility is that the schools whittle kids out.
Maybe not explicitly but perhaps they just don't make much of an effort with special needs provision and sometimes sit parents down for a little chat about whether little Johnny might do better elsewhere.

Where I live the comprehensive schools with the best academic results are essentially selective by housing price.

Loopy
Which county?

Just that City schools and rural / suburban schools are different ball games.

London's schooling is deeply dysfunctional because the huge number of tiny LEAs divert massive amounts of funds into admin salaries

and there is a history of deliberate under provision
forcing up to 40% of parents to go private in some areas
leading to even greater problems.

Thank you Gordon Brown for selling off the empty schools rather than mothballing them as a sensible Chancellor would have done

Not London. Suburban town.

Loopy
As I've said up thread, my house would be worth 1/3 more if I lived over the border
but my kids still got into the other school
as did 100 per year group of their friends
House prices and catchments are not always what they seem as only 5% of houses sell in any one year
and kids change schools every 5-7 years

And if it turns out that children can get in from further away, isn't it the case that it's the more affluent or aspirational parents who find this information out, are able and willing to transport their children to the school and make the application? Isn't it the case that some more 'successful' schools aren't applied for by bathe less aspirational/affluent because they don't know many people who go to them or those schools 'are not for the likes of us' etc etc.

Some Comorehensives have a social mix which truly reflects the local area (which in some places might be a lot of affluence, or in others a lotnofnpoverty,mor in others a real mix) and others manage to not reflect the local area and somehow attract and accept more children from affluent families or aspirational families or with higher prior attainment. The reverse is also true, with some schools having far more lower prior attainment, or FSM than the local area might indicate.

It is difficult if not impossible to have a totally fair system and equal opportunities. Schooling opportunities are not equal even within a non-religious comprehensive system, because schools don't exist in a bubble outside of the social situations we live in, but are all part of the same system. Those who have a good start in life are far more likely to go to a good school and vice versa. Whether it's through paying fees or being genuinely religious or faking religion, or tutoring for selective schools, or moving into catchments or being savvy about admissions criteria, or being willing to pay for transport to further schools, or having the ability to work out which are the better schools and wanting to access them versus deciding that better is to be avoided - all of these work to bring the more affluent and aspirational families' children into the better schools. They might be called Comps in many cases and there might be a range of abilities within them, but it's often a far narrower range than would be usual and certainly not an accurate distribution of affluence and aspiration.

Anyone seen the OP lately?! Really curious as to what research she has done on the areas she's decided to move to.

Talk1nPeace: Hmmm, but Lambeth, for example, has 333,000 residents compared to Southampton’s 250,000.

In which area are 40% ‘forced ‘ to go private? There was under provision some years ago but I thought that had been addressed now.

My kids are at a top comprehensive with seriously impressive exit destinations. The school is excellent but it’s almost completely middle class, virtually all children have at least 1 tutor, parents are almost exclusively professionals. As a result the teachers are generally excellent, because the school gets the best applicants who want to work there, because they know that for the best part they’re getting kids who want to learn and whose parents expect them to learn. The parents care and are (over) involved with their children’s learning.

The school has a reasonable number of children with SEN but it’s autism / ADHD / anorexia etc but parents are on it, children aren’t waiting for CAHMS as parents pay for therapies. There are very few children from chaotic families, virtually all children were born into married two parent families and divorce rates are low e.g DS1 doesn’t have any friends with divorced parents and he is 16.

Of course a school like that will be impressive. They should be ashamed of themselves if they aren’t. They call themselves a comprehensive but they’ve probably got more in common with an independent day school than a comprehensive but they count in the data.

Believability Mines only 6 but in a primary school with a similar demographic.
DS had some academic problems earlier in the year and my first response was to get a tutor.
I arranged a meeting another with the teacher recently to see how he's getting on and Hey Presto! he's not behind anymore.
I never thought I would be the pushy, tutoring kind but DS is so much happier and more confident about school now, I know we will keep it up.
It does make me wonder if we're tutoring to help him keep up with other tutored kids! I can see now how the situation replicares itself.
Of course it's easier for the teacher!
When he was behind, she was all but suggesting I take him out of the school. Making very heavy play of the fact that extra help would not be available through them.
I was disappointed to be honest. I know of schools most Mc parents would avoid where all sorts of stuff is in place for the strugglers.
This seems to be sink or swim and expect the parents to pick up the slack.

unlimiteddilutingjuice - that's because parents generally know nothing about the reality of a school, instead basing decisions on test results and whether other parents like themselves that they know recommend the school. Having been a school governor, a governing body clerk, a volunteer and an employee in quite a variety of schools, now, I would quite confidently say that, at best, parents are several years behind reality in their understanding of the school they send their children to, if they even have the faintest idea what it is really like. It's incredible how oblivious parents can be of an utterly miserable environment and bad practice if the word on the middle class street is still that a particular school is the place to shoehorn your children into.

And of course, for some parents, so long as their children are with identikit peers, they are happy to draw a blind eye towards the fact a school is dire and all the kids are tutored.

Someone upthread mentioned an area where 40% of kids are forced to go private because of under provision. The only area that I know of where so many children go private is the London Borough of Westminster (I think at least half go private). I don’t know that these children are forced to go private but Westminster council would have a terrible problem if none of them did.

Having said that, I grew up in Brighton which used to have a terrible schools problem. There used to be a couple of comprehensives that people wanted and then if they were allocated another one, they were devastated. I know of a few people (not terribly wealthy) who ended up going private because they were going to have an awful journey to a school they were disappointed in. I think this may be partly down to the way Brighton is laid out - buses run into the centre and then out again so if your school is far away, it’s a two-bus journey.

roundabouthetown - I agree very much that many parents are deeply naive/ignorant about the reality of their children’s schools which they choose on the basis of headline performance data and a demographic with which they identify.

The results of many seemingly high performing schools would collapse if parents withdrew tutoring and their own support. I do in fact believe that state education is so underfunded that it is quite normal and sensible of parents to support their children’s education very significantly outside school. It is the state that is hypocritical and devious, trying to make people believe that school alone can do a reasonable job of educating the population.

London schools are so hierarchical - I see as much variation between state schools here in North London as between state and private. They divide between those that people who have choice would choose via faith, music places, aptitude, renting etc and those where all the rest go. If you don't make an effort to do the system then you'll end up in one of the non-choice schools and they have a disproportionate number of difficult to teach children.

Camden Girls is a good example. It is nominally a comprehensive and my friends with children say that it is because it is banded across four ability groups. However, this year not a single GSCE candidate was a low attainer at primary. In other words, not a reflection of the four ability groups across the country.

To go to Camden you have to do the banding test, which you have to register for in early September and take that month on a specific Saturday. In other words at least a month before the general admissions forms are in. The children that take the Camden test, then, do not reflect your average uninterested or non-clued up family. Then the four bands are divided along the abilities not of the national average but of those that take the test. Which is way higher. In my kids' primary, only kids on the top tables even took the test. They're all on for greater depth in sats yet most of them fell into the B or C bands.

All schools that can gerrymander their intake.

@PatienceVirtue I said exactly this up-thread. CSG is amongst the worst that I know of in this regard. The way the banding system is enacted in this part of the world is completely invidious (St Marylebone/Greycoats are the same, except with even more "aptitude" places and of course the faith element). If only more kids who are not in the top tier of their primary schools would take the tests, at least that would broaden the ability range.

To be fair, a good chunk of the girls from the local estates do go to CSG - as long as they are very local indeed.

Zinnia You're so right, in our primary, the girls who would be lower ability just don't want to go to Camden so don't even take the test. We're not particularly near the school so it's pretty random as to whether anyone would get in anyway, but I know a girl who does live near the school who's actually chosen Holloway. I was gobsmacked - Holloway gets truly woeful results, terrible progress score and really isn't a great environment for girls.

It would be really interesting to see how the aptitude test results actually correlate with national results.

In contrast, Central Foundation in Islington uses national averages for its banding test as this meant that it skewed higher than those who took the test. As its stock has risen, the A band distance is now getting smaller. I wonder whether they'll move the test to before the CAF deadline and start basing their bands on who actually takes the test.

Oh and Mary Mags, also in Islington, has introduced an aptitude test that's essentially a verbal reasoning test. You only get a place via this test if you don't qualify for a place in another way. In other words, if you get a distance, faith or sibling place your aptitude place goes to the next person on the list. It's a way of getting 21 kids in whose parents are switched on enough to get them to an exam held early on a Saturday morning.

And then all their siblings...

Ta1kinPeace: just to let you know. It’s not the government that sells off schools. It’s ususlly the LA or even the school itself. Mothballing schools is simply tipping money down the drain because accurate school population forecasts are difficult to do. Immigtation being a big spanner in the works. It’s no longer about birth rate only. Nothing is to do with Gordon Brown!

Aptitude tests can be pretty accurate. That’s why people use them.

In my area the problem with the LA school place planning is all to do with rising and falling birth rates, immigration and house sales. At the moment, in Brexit uncertainty, house sales are very slow and many international families are choosing to return to their home countries sooner rather than later. People are staying put so suddenly there are more 11 year olds than were expected and fewer 'new' four year olds.

@Zinnia I'm curious what admissions criteria are like for GCH these days. I went there (20 years ago) and it was just establishing its reputation as the best girls school in the area. We lived in Southwark so my mum had lots of comments along the lines of 'setting your sights too high' & 'you're dreaming if you think she' ll get a place there' but I did, after sitting their language aptitude test. I think the letter of recommendation from the Bishop of Fulham didn't hurt either.... Only 30 girls were offered places based on their results, the rest were admitted through normal criteria. My best friend was 4 years behind academically (due to a terrible experience at a Steiner school) and lived in Brixton, but still got a place. I gather it's got a lot more exclusive/difficult to gain entry since then.