Mr Cameron sends in the "hit squad".....

This week, Mr Cameron made an interesting announcement about education.  The Prime Minister has announced that rescue teams will be sent into failing schools.

Cameron to send hit squads to failing schools

I’m sure we will see more of these headline grabbing press releases in the run up to the next election in May 2015.

But, who would have thought that such a simple speech,  which is no doubt appealing policy to certain sections of society, could be wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, I’m so disappointed that we are still branding schools as “failing” based solely on such a narrow criteria.  Schools that are below the national average for the proportion of students attaining a C or above in both English and maths GCSE are at risk of being labelled as “failing”.   I’m sure we all agree that attainment in English and maths is important but I would also hope that we would agree that education is about so much more than simply attaining a C or above in 2 subjects.

So, I am hopeful that the new measure of Progress 8 (where schools will be measured on the progress of students across 8 subjects with English and maths counting as double) will start to address my concerns.  The government does have some potentially good ideas.  The way to understand Progress 8 is that English and maths will each be worth 20% of the progress 8 measure with the other 6 subjects being worth 10% each.

Back to the “hit squads”……

There are probably a small number of secondary schools in the country where chaos has descended and the only solution is a completely fresh start with a completely new Senior Leadership Team.    A “hit squad” is probably the only way the students in those schools will get any chance of academic achievement.

However, Mr Cameron has mentioned that there are 500 schools who are at risk of the “hit squads”.  I don’t believe there are this many failing schools and am not personally aware of any school that needs a “hit squad” or know any teachers who would say this about their place of work. 

On the other hand, I welcomed regional school commissioners, with a hope that collaboration would become the way in which all schools could improve attainment.   But, it seems Mr Cameron thinks the “regional school commissioners” are the army generals who decide where the hit squads go next.

Sensibly, most regional school commissioners have accumulated a group of successful head teachers to work in their area at supporting the schools that are supposed to be failing.  Sadly, in my area, all of these head teachers come from schools that are in affluent areas.  Not one head teacher from an inner city school or deprived area is represented.

So, is every inner city school failing or could there be other factors at play here?

Well, there are hugely successful inner city schools out there – we will just never recognise them whilst comparing them with schools in affluent areas.

Am I just being “unaspirational” then?  (If I would be allowed to make up my own words!)  Well, no.

If a student has 100% attendance at a school then they are in lessons for just 13% of a calendar year.  

Assuming students sleep for 8 hours a day, which would be 33% of the calendar year, they are still left with 54% of the calendar year.  This 54% is the part that parents and local communities control.

Having worked in an affluent school, which got 3 “outstandings” in a row from Ofsted and worked in 3 inner city / deprived area schools which have never got above a “satisfactory” or “requires improvement” I feel qualified to judge.

Many of the parents in the affluent area know instinctively what the benefits of education are.  Students arrive in year 7 assuming they are going to go to university.  The parents value homework, take a huge interest in the education of the whole child and make the 54% of time they have valuable.

It would be very simple and guileless to say that inner city schools have the exact opposite.  They don’t.  There are plenty of parents in affluent areas who don’t support the school with aspirational expectations for their children.  However, these parents are in the minority.  In some cases, these students coast and get grades at a mediocre level for them but in many cases the peers of these students drag them up and teach them to value education.

However, there are more parents in inner city and deprived areas who either don’t value education or don’t know how to support their children.  We have a heartbreakingly high proportion of students who have never left the city, let alone experienced a beach, or the moors or even a train journey.

I am proud of the school I work in and we work very hard at engaging with the whole community and spend a huge amount of time showing parents how they can / should be helping their children.  This type of school need the best, most creative teachers but this type of announcement from Mr Cameron will just make it less likely that good staff will want to work in schools like this.

For example, I took a phone call this week from a parent who was deeply annoyed at his son’s maths teacher for setting homework.  The homework was not done and, after waiting a day or two for it to be handed in late, the teacher phoned home to ask for support.  The father announced that he had told his son not to do the homework as when the son leaves school then that time is his own to do as he pleases.

This was on top of a phone call last week in which a different year 7 parent told me that his son would not be doing a detention for continuously disrupting a lesson because I hadn’t proved that it had effected the learning of others and if he wanted to misbehave, and the teacher couldn’t control him, then why should the parent be punished? 

(It turns out that this year 7 lad is required to pick up his younger brother from the local primary school on his way home and if we detained him then the parents may have to turn off “4 in a bed” and go and pick their own kid from the local primary school.)

The boy in the first phone call now does his homework after school in his teacher’s classroom and the year 7 lad did his detention…after the Principal told his parents that he either did the detention or found a different school to go to.  The amount of time this took up has obviously lowered the amount of academic progress these students have met but it was the right thing for the school to do but Ofsted won’t care that we face additional challenges.

Now, I am proud to work in a school that meets these challenges head on and they are two extreme examples.  However, in the school which served an affluent area, I would have parents phoning in asking me to recommend private tutors or asking for extra exam papers. 

The league tables register none of this.

I have no doubt that there are students in affluent areas whose parents let them down but they are few and far between.  Equally, there are significant numbers of parents in my current school who are eager to support their child and have positive aspirations for them.  Sadly, there is a large number of parents who either take no interest in their child’s education or simply don’t value it as  “I never had an education and I’ve done alright”.

So, my hope for the “regional commissioners”?  Well, I hope that they understand the context a school finds themselves in and understand that some schools need a longer journey to reach the same destination as some other schools.  It would be wonderful for the mantra to be collaboration, collaboration, collaboration not “judgement, hit squads and failure”.

I believe the mantra of “collaboration, collaboration, collaboration” will mean that education will become better for all…sadly, I feel I am in a minority….