Do you teach in a comprehensive school? Could you give me your thoughts on this programme...

[SarfEasticated]

I am doing a BA Education, and am writing an essay on the birth of comprehensive schools after the war. I came across on youtube, it is a Panorama documentary on a comprehensive school in the 70's. I wondered what you (a modern day senior school teacher) would make of it. Does is all look very familiar? I went to a grammar school in the 80's so have no experience of a mixed school or one this large, but the teachers and lessons look very close to what I remember.
I thought it was a positive programme, showed committed teachers, fond of their rather unruly students, rather like Educating Yorkshire but with flares.
I am just curious as to what are your reactions to the programme? Don't worry I won't use you in my essay, just wondered...

I has little in common with my experience in the classroom. I was quite shocked by how rude the staff and students were and the level of noise.

I am a primary teacher who was at a comprehensive school in the 1970s.

The school in the documentary was nothing like where I went. Although the lesson format ( if it could be called that) for some subjects ( taking dictation and copying diagrams) the general attitude of the students was terrible. How anyone ever learned anything in these chaotic classrooms- the teaching was just awful. OFSTED would have had a field day!

It would be very interesting to assess the lessons shown against current OFSTED criteria.

It would also be very interesting to know if educational standards have risen or dipped since the 70s.

I am not an inspector but am in SMT so have to assess lessons ala OFSTED. With the exception of the head taking the English class on Pride and Prejudice ( really liked him- he had a lovely rapport with his pupils who were engaged and interested ) I would be hard pushed to have given any of the rest higher than RI and some were without doubt at the bottom end of inadequate.

Having said that, the documentary was probably edited to show the very worst of the classes- surely they can't have all been like that- the students in the VI form must have been doing well to be getting high enough grades to do medicine!

I wonder what the reaction was from the viewers at the time - I can imagine what my parents would have said! I will try and find that out.
When it said that they were form 3/4 does that mean they were in a lower stream? The classes looked similar to ones I remember, copying out of text books and taking down dictation, the careers advice was similar to what we received too.
It looked like the girls had biology and careers separate from the boys, I wonder if that was just because they were talking about puberty.
It would be interesting to know what happened to the children.

"at the bottom end of inadequate"