What questions to discern the reality of a school?

[KleineDracheKokosnuss]

looking ahead to secondary open days, and noting the articles this weekend about how there are hardly any subject specialist teachers available to teach classes - what would you ask to try and identify whether your local secondary is affected and how badly?

How would you need to phrase the question to achieve a useful answer? Would a question about “how many classes are taught by a permanent subject specialist work”? How can we phrase “how Often do the kids get chucked in the hall and told to work from textbooks while a warm body keeps watch?”

Sorry - that last was probably unnecessary but after a day of belittling and abuse because (while carefully saying how much I support the strikes) I express frustration and disappointment at the timing of the next lot, I lost my temper. I apologise for that.

Stop what? If you support the strikes than that's great. Why on earth are you being so aggressive? I literally didn't @ you. You have randomly replied to my post Iike it was addressed to you. If you feel upset by it, just scroll on. Stop taking over this thread with your strange insecurities.

Hope your day improves. I'm not a teacher on payroll, but appreciate the support nonetheless.

I'm a school governor and we're toning down any "showing off" of our pastoral care, because our wonderful pastoral staff are overwhelmed and we can't afford to increase the team size.

As I said immediately afterwards, I apologise and withdraw. I'll stop derailing the thread, lovely if you could likewise stop with the personal insults.

DS is 19 so my experience is 8 years old. But a neighbour's child showed me her yr7 timetable, she only had " science" one term in 3. I immediately knew the school didn't have sufficient specialist teachers. Other things I paid attention to would be how many do MFL @ GCSE, can they do 2 if they are that way inclined ? Are there options for combined science for those who don't want to do three ? And vis versa how do they accommodate those wanting to do separate sciences if combined is the default ? Do they get to try out different things ? Latin or Greek ?

I always used to ask whether any of the children of the staff were pupils in the school and what they thought of the head.

I knew it was into a winner because lots of teachers told me they would be happy to send their own kids to the school and both the pupils and teachers told me the head was fantastic.

No one is going to tell you this. I guess you could ask parents of children who already attend.

Also look on your local council website for job vacancies. The last dates for August resignation has just passed, so schools will be looking to recruit temporary or newly qualified staff for September.

@Foxesandsquirrels I appreciate that the school wouldn’t have chosen to timetable the way they did unless that had too. I was quite shocked when I got the timetable as my older children didn’t have the same issue. DS was also the final year in his school to start GCSEs in year 9, he was in year 7 when covid started so had two disrupted years and then a timetable which lacked continuity.

DS didn’t end up going back there for year 9 so it didn’t matter in the end!

School will not admit how many bullying cases they handle and how many victims have left and if instead they managed out perpetrators

Ask the pupils if there's a often lots of new teachers or if they have supply regularly.
If you've got time, look at TES jobs for your area. The schools that are on there a lot, especially within one department are ones to avoid.
Get to know other parents whose judgement you trust and ask them their experiences. Most sensible parents with well behaved children will tend to offer quite a balanced view of a school.
Ignore anyone on social media with a long list of complaints about how their DC was in trouble for nothing.

I'd also want to know whether Key Stage 3 is broad or whether it's the start of a 5 year GCSE course. My DC would be bored senseless studying GCSE type questions for 5 years and it doesn't give me confidence when I hear it happening.

Ask about how often students get non-core subjects and how much choice pupils get on GCSE options. A red flag for me would be a school that's focused on cramming as many pupils as possible into EBACC buckets and/or a very limited curriculum.

Honestly wouldnt worry about that. In that they cant know/wouldnt tell you/can change.
Worry about - strange lunchhours.
Pe -which sports (swimming)
Uniform ties/blazers
Are classes under or 30/32+ do they put more in top sets..
Gcse and alevel subjects and how many compulsory. And do they restrict who can take by which sets in or ks2 sats results.
Numbers of ehcp/sen
Results for prior attainment ie if your kid is high maye those all get the 5+ at eng and maths
But medium prior get 50% at one school or 66% at another.. Getting 5+
Which subjects they set for. How flexible they are about moving.

Bear in mind that there might be reasons other than staffing for multiple teachers - in Yr 11 I had 3 different teachers for English - 1 for Language, one for Shakespeare and one for the more modern works - because they played to their respective strengths and interests. The whole year had English at the same time so it was easy to rotate them round the classes. Almost everyone got two As so it clearly worked.

I asked the following:

• what is the % of girls doing STEM subjects at GCSE/A-levels
• destination tracking for Yr 11 girls
• at which age do the classes get specialist teachers
• what % of kids achieve grades 7-9 and how do they stretch and challenge over and beyond sets

They all have data managers now so getting that into should be hard. 1 data manager wouldn't tell me so that told me a lot about the school and ruled it out completely.

Why would the uniform be so important? And what are the strange lunch hours? Aren't the GCSE compulsory subject the same across England? Why would SEN or EHCP matter of she doesn't fall under it? God!
Progress 8 measure says the most about school- what progress the kids made between end of KS2 and KS4.
The other variables are how many 7+ GCSE At English and Math and how many 5+ ---- percentage-wise as compared to UK average.

However, having said that I would not stick to the very numbers because there are more factors:

Absence rate. It says a lot about schools and if kids love to attend.

Go and watch kids how they behave when they leave school.How they wear the uniform. Do they swear? Are they street trained or walk on red light? Do parents park in the right places or yellow zigzag in front of the school?

What are the school values/ethos?

Look at Google Reviews and other places with school reviews

Read carefully OFSTED reports

Ask the students if they were selected for open day or if they volunteered! And ask them what they would change about their school. Would they recommend it to their friends at other schools? We find students are very happy to share the good and the bad!

@LolaSmiles

How do you define KS3 broad? How do you find that out?

Try and speak to the students or parents who already have a child there. If you have a local Facebook group or anything like that might be worth asking on there as well

Why would the uniform be so important?
•Many many schools take a very military approach to uniform. So many kids aren't allowed to even take jumpers off in this heat. They get detentions for taking off their blazers whilst walking to the bus stop or having the wrong colour socks. Uniform is a very important aspect.

And what are the strange lunch hours?
• Many schools are cutting lunch more and more. 30-40mins is the norm.

Aren't the GCSE compulsory subject the same across England?
• The core of English, Maths and Science. Many schools have strict option blocks where you can only choose some subjects. Many also force kids to take Citizenship, Statistics, a language or RE on top of the core.

Why would SEN or EHCP matter of she doesn't fall under it?

• High SEN will have a huge impact on the school. High EHCP tends to bring in more funds but high SEN doesn't. Generally speaking high SEN is often a good thing if the results are good as SEN parents tend to avoid the schools that are rubbish with SEN kids.

Progress 8 measure says the most about school- what progress the kids made between end of KS2 and KS4.
• Progress 8 is a pretty bad way to judge a school to be honest.

Absence rate. It says a lot about schools and if kids love to attend.
• I agree

Go and watch kids how they behave when they leave school.How they wear the uniform. Do they swear? Are they street trained or walk on red light? Do parents park in the right places or yellow zigzag in front of the school?
• lol

Look at Google Reviews and other places with school reviews
• they're mostly written by kids

Read carefully OFSTED reports
• again, not always accurate. The worst school i worked in was outstanding

@Foxesandsquirrels

I am a bit perplexed why the uniform is more important factor then OFSTED report? You look at the date when it was granted Outstanding. One in 5 schools now only remains Outstanding and rest is gradually losing it as since 2019/2020 they are much tougher. I am talking about most updated OFSTED visits and not historical

Every single of our local schools at GCSE expects to take RE and language as a compulsory part of GCSE.

Why do you believe that Progress 8 is not a good measure

About SEN, if a child needs an assistant then the council allocates special funding for it.

I am also deciding about which school to go ahead with and only few Google reviews are written by kids. Most are by parents

Having said that I am not sure if parents are objective. There is one school with results below UK average here when it comes to results and parents are praising it as if it was top notch school. Never mind instances of ghis and that. Simply they have their kids there and ,therefore, they are rationalising things in their head by believing it is" amazing school"

I'm not sure why you're perplexed so I'm not sure I can answer that.

As for SEN, you are in dreamland if you think the council gives that anywhere near what is needed. Schools are so poor SEN funding is being used to buy basic stationery and has been for a good number of years. The reason SEN parents are attracted to schools that have a lot of SEN, is because the pool of money is bigger so naturally they can offer more support. This is still really very little and many schools have had to cut any and all vocational offerings they previously had that enabled SEN kids to leave with qualifications. Most EHCPs aren't even fully funded, let alone the kids on the bang average SEN register.

Just look up criticism of progress 8, lots of articles explain it far better than I can.

Well, yes all schools are underfunded.

Really? I'm a data manager, I just don't have time to field questions like that! (I barely have time to do all of my job sometimes, because budget means to spare admin.) Mind you, our school is oversubscribed and brimming full so I also don't NEED to answer questions like that.

I find some of the answers on this thread absolutely hilarious. The poster your answering was one of them. How entitled 😂