St Paul's Girls

[Meg1978]

Mums at St Paul's girls school- what do you think is the reason for the results being such a big step above all the other schools? Is it the girls themselves performing because the school selects the most clever girls in London or is it the quality of the teaching? Or the standards they set? What do you think?

Or is it the demographics of the parents of the girls being more pushy than at other schools?

Hi OP. Last time I looked at the “Best Schools” league tables, SPGS achieved 98% 9-7 grades which is obviously stellar and put them at the top of the league tables. But G&L achieved 97% 9-7 and there were many other schools close to this figure, so I’m not sure the differences are such a “big step” as they once may have been? There’s a lot of very bright kids and all these schools are increasingly selective because they can be.

From friends with girls there, the teaching is really a couple of levels up and also they get to know the girls' strengths and weaknesses much better. You pay for this of course as the fees are higher. And this is combined with, as you say, a privileged position that allows them to choose the best cohorts, so yes they do get the best girls out of the sample, including with the' right' inner or outer competitive attitude to perform (and this may be something that you may or you may not want for your girl, I have heard of a few that declined SPGS for GL for example). So all in that delivers (marginally today) better results overall.

In my opinion it is mainly down to selection of girls that are both smart and hard-working/performing. Teaching helps to keep the motivation up but is a marginal factor in the outcomes.

I think on the whole the teaching is excellent and the culture very supportive of doing well, but they are taking only 110 girls from a pretty large area so they really are able to select those who seem to have most potential at 11. The boys’ school takes up to 200 so they will be from a slightly broader intake in terms of ability.

But if you want your DD to do really well, just choose the best school for her, not what looks like the best school in terms of results. SPGS is great for the right sort of kid and I would imagine terrible for others.

I would agree with previous posters and it probably applies to all super selectives (grammars and private) tbh.

I don't doubt that teaching at these top London schools is absolutely excellent but their key success factor is undoubtedly that they can cream off and cherry pick the absolute best students. I very much doubt the SPGS teachers would achieve the same level of results in a less or non selective school, simply because they would be dealing with a very different kind of cohort. We are looking at Hampton as a possibility for DS2 and what I really liked about the head was that he was very honest about the fact that they are a highly selective school which helps translate to excellent results.

I wonder whether the fact that they select at 11 rather than some of the girls earlier makes a difference. I know some people argue that the schools are remarkably able to spot potential in three-year-olds but in my kids' schools there's definitely a long tail of ability from the children who came in at pre-prep level in comparison to those who got in later.

What I've never understood about schools like SPGS is, they have one teacher for every five pupils, but fifteen pupils in each class. Why? What do the other two thirds of the teachers actually do?

Anyway, I doubt they can continue to justify fees of £26,000 a year to provide what is indeed an excellent education, but just that. Either they will change or they won't be around for much longer.

They don't have fifteen pupils in each class, at least not most of them. They have around 20-25 pupils in each teaching set up to and including GCSE (smaller in less popular subjects eg French almost certainly 20+, Russian more likely to be 10 or 15).

More generally, no standard secondary schools have a teacher ratio of one teacher to 30 pupils. If you look at comprehensives, including those nearby, they have teacher ratios that tend to be around 15 pupils per teacher. What are the other half of the teachers doing all the time, do you suppose?!

Glaciferous

Thanks for enlightening me. I know I read somewhere that SPGS has an average of 15 pupils in a class. Sorry if this is incorrect. And I got the approximate pupil-teacher ratio from the staff page on the SPGS website. Counted them up and did the math. What all these extra teachers do, I don't know.

It's 15 people in a form (which is mainly for registration etc). Although I suppose the average teaching set size could be 15 given that you might only have, say, 2 or 3 people doing Russian A Level or something else that isn't as popular as Maths or whatever. That would bring the average down quite a lot.

For compulsory subjects and popular subjects the teaching set size seems to be around 20-25.

I am sure you can work out the teacher thing if you give it a bit of thought!

The number of staff listed doesn't discriminate between the full time staff and part timers. Even if someone is listed as part time we can't tell from a website whether they teach 1, 2, 3 or 4 days.
In general independent schools like SPGS have KS3 sets of around 24, KS4 sets of around 15 and KS5 classes around 8-10 but there are outliers in all cases at KS4 and 5.

Liam - you seem to feel you have uncovered some great inefficiency or conspiracy at SPGS, as if they would hire loads of teachers and then get them to do nothing.

I looked at the list. Did you remove all the people whose name appeared in multiple subjects? Then obviously many are part-time. They have free periods for marking etc (SPGS runs an eight lesson day so it’s pretty intensive and they need the spare periods). Then the language department has language assistants who take pupils in individual lessons perhaps one or two pupils, as well as language assistants or a second teacher in class - at least for Mandarin which my DD did, there were always two teachers. Similarly often two in a science class to help with experiments. Then drama and music teachers will be organising events as well as teaching. Most of the music teachers on the main list also do 1:1 teaching not class teaching, in addition to the huge list of peripatetic teachers. Some have other responsibilities which they will also be timetabled to do such as heads of year which you can see, and school newsletter which you can’t.

They have a lot of great teachers, hence the great results. My DD was inspired by almost all of her teachers and her future path was set by one extraordinary teacher. They are very lucky girls!

Hope that helps reassure you.