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