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Oct 2015
12:55pm, 16 Oct 2015
16,744 posts
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DeeGee
My day-to-day job is the recording, analysis and reporting of student performance data for a multi-academy trust that manages successful comprehensive schools.
Secondary schools, the DfE and Ofsted use SATs data from primaries to measure the progress of individual students against their peers.
This data is flawed as some primaries cram their pupils prior to the tests, then drop an inflated (sometimes 2 levels higher) teacher assessed English level on top to skew figures further upwards. this effort goes into making sure as few pupils as possible leave with an English or Maths level lower than 3.
The secondaries must then prove progress against these artificially inflated figures or be deemed to be failing. Therefore early on the focus is on students at the bottom end to bring them forward to where their primaries claimed them to be.
Then, come Key Stage 4, schools are also judged on KS4 outcomes where Grade C is king. Therefore efforts are focussed on the students at the Grade C/D interface to improve their outcomes as much as possible.
The offshoot of this is that low-attainers do well as they have support, middle-attainers do well as they have support, and high-attainers do well despite not receiving support.
There is a fundamental difference between a grade B and a grade A*, though, moving forward, and without the high-attainers having received the base at GCSE, they have work to do to catch up at A-level, which has a knock on effect with regards their future academic career, available career pathways after degree, that sort of thing. We still need good quality doctors, chemists, engineers and the like and giving the high-attainers the support that they deserve to achieve the highest grades possible is only fair.
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Oct 2015
2:20pm, 16 Oct 2015
6,939 posts
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simbil
Cheg,
It's not the pressure, it's that it's a snapshot at age 9-10.
Kids develop at different speeds and within different subjects at different speeds.
So I still can't see the advantage of grammar over comp based purely on education. The idea of measuring and streaming kids more than once and per subject seems like a better approach to me.
Binks,
I can't think of any systems where a selfish and ruthless person cannot excel and by excelling gain power and influence over others, I think a system with more liberty gives different paths to get there rather than solving the problem in any way.
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Oct 2015
2:23pm, 16 Oct 2015
221 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
How would you explain the fact that grammar schools produce better results?
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Oct 2015
2:28pm, 16 Oct 2015
663 posts
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Cheg
I think Deegee has touched on some of that. The very top can sometimes get neglected in a comprehensive under the old 5 A-C including English and Maths. The pressure is on the C-D borderline rather than stretching the A and A* kids.
You take 5 schools of 1,000 a go and then take the top 20% and send them to a Grammar. Now the lower sets are your C students and in the top sets you can really go to town with the top kids, stretch them and gear them up for the A-Levels and Uni ahead of them.
Not getting into a Grammar really doesn't have to be the end of the world. There are other good schools in Southend, but there are some really bad ones that parents at my work are very keen to avoid. I live and went to school in Rayleigh a town 7 miles away and the catchment schools were good enough I didn't have to worry about going to the Grammar.
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Oct 2015
2:49pm, 16 Oct 2015
16,745 posts
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DeeGee
I had an interview once at my alma mater. I had to teach a Year 9 class.
Before the interview I asked them to give me an idea of the current performance level of the class, and was told that they were averaging level 7.
At that time I was teaching the top Year 9 set at my comprehensive, and we did not assess any higher than level 6. There was no expectation for any child to achieve more highly. The one or two really talented linguists in the class could be pushed through differentiation, which in some students (those like me who were able but lazy) would cause resentment because they don't think it's fair that the should get additional tasks.
In the feedback I received as to why I wasn't appointed, two points were made. The first was that, in the heat of the moment, teaching the whole lesson in French, I had made a single error conjugating an irregular imperfect subjunctive verb, but they would have let that go but for the fact that I didn't pitch the lesson at a high enough level. A level that I had never taught to a class of Key Stage 3 students at any point in my career. And a level that the whole class were working at because there were a whole class of high ability children in the same room, so all the work could be pitched at that level.
Where in a comprehensive school, you might get three or four to a year group, take those kids off the top and put them together in one class with all the similar ability kids from all the other schools locally and you'll get outcomes far in excess of what any one comprehensive school could dream of.
That is giving talented people real opportunitities, and unfortunately the current system is letting them down. No comprehensive school, not even where I work with 2250 kids, will have enough really talented kids on its own to be able to push a class in this fashion. We know, because we tried it - and I taught them!
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Oct 2015
4:18pm, 16 Oct 2015
6,940 posts
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simbil
Are there ways that comps could handle talented kids better?
Sit them with the relevant group from the year above if that is their true level or put them up a year if they are good across the board - do we really need year boundaries at all in a streamed system - can't it just be ability based regardless of age?
I don't think grammar schools should pick up where comps fail - comps should be made to work for everyone.
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Oct 2015
4:42pm, 16 Oct 2015
664 posts
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Cheg
I knew a kid that got moved up a year, this was two decades ago. I would assume that is still the case.
Every year you hear of the genius kid who is 12 and got 6 A's at A Levels and is going to Cambridge. It make's you cry.
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Oct 2015
4:43pm, 16 Oct 2015
279 posts
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larkim
The world's too complex a place to keep on perpetuating social contact only between those of intellectual similarities. School life must surely be about more than just academic education?
Grammar schools, private schools and oxbridge (all as an over-simplification) are what most of the population perceive as being "wrong" with clique based society (particularly the political world, but also business etc).
Better rounded human beings come out of schools when they have had experience of mixing across cultural, ethnic, intellectual, wealth / poverty, etc divides.
Yes, of course for an individual student access to guaranteed high quality, high achievement education can provide the impetus towards "betterment", whether that is in terms of social movement or achievement of material wealth. But society is about more than that, surely?
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Oct 2015
4:55pm, 16 Oct 2015
665 posts
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Cheg
I really do know nothing about the Chinese education system, but I always thought the story went at Olympics time that they picked guys and girls very early on and went you will specialise in gymnastics for example. Then that is all they knew, Gold medal won, job done.
I see that as destroying individuality and that ones success/happiness can not be governed by just one element. You will break a lot of people along the way.
I don't see Grammar schools as doing that. It's just bringing the brightest minds together and improving them through co-operation competition.
I hope that makes sense. It's Friday, I need my weekend.
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Oct 2015
5:01pm, 16 Oct 2015
7,660 posts
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Joopsy
I would suggest that teen mothers know all about sex and contraception. What they lack is any kind of ambition.
Applauds narrow minded quote of the day. Bravo.
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