Unnatural competition

1. Our education system should not be guided by international league tables. It should be guided by every single child's individual needs - personal, social, academic.

2. "Stretching" a child to get more than a "C"! Why. If a C is a child's natural grade, why put them through torture to obtain a document that tells any future employers something that is not quite accurate, something they can never again live up to? 

3. Thorough academic research [Terry Wrigley and co, for a start] from Manchester and Durham Universities has proved that academisation, per se, or even at all, does not improve schools. 

4. When league tables and Ofsted measure schools, they are measuring Poverty. When they condemn the teachers in the inner-city, they are actually condemning the effect of poverty and social deprivation on the children, and showing up their own total ignorance of the education system works and why teachers go nto this profession in the first place!

Every Child Doesn't Matter

I caught daytime television this morning in my Glasgow hostel room. I was quickly reminded why I don’t normally watch it, but the set was only tuned to television channels. [Of course, I could have turned it off, and in fact, worn out by my amazement and disgust, I eventually did]. Some woman was explaining her version of the laws of parental choice and school admissions. It was gibberish in a posh accent, and seemed to be based on the assumption that once “free” schools had been established, they would be good, “failing “ schools would wither away, Bob would be your uncle and probably Every Child Didn’t Matter.

The man she was set against was not putting up a very good fight, but then sometimes it’s hard to fight the truly bizarre. However both of them implicitly accepted the government line, too often accepted and perpetuated by a less than questioning media. This is the line that suggests that League tables are the best measure of a school’s worth. And that our country is rife with “failing” schools.

One school I teach in was previously damned by its overall/average exam results. I sent my two younger children there because that’s not how I would begin to work out a school’s worth. The older of the two got eight A to C’s [including 2 As] and the younger got 9 A-Cs [including 3 As]. They got these grades thanks to a supportive and “educated” home background, and a team of well-informed, experienced and caring teachers and support staff.

I’m only mentioning the grades here because that’s the measure, and yes they got them. And, yes, they could have got more As. But I didn’t send them to this school for the grades. Visiting it on a regular basis I observed and felt the harmonious race relations, and I thought my relatively privileged children would benefit from getting to know children from other countries, children with sad stories, those from children’s homes – poor and underprivileged, but not necessarily down-trodden, just people with different life experiences. And I like to think they did. They learnt how to interact with and care for others, go on dates, fall out with people, have a laugh, and all in a protective and supported environment.

I went into education myself because I wanted to make a difference. And I used to believe in education to do that. But until we return, or get to a point where we put each child’s individual needs first, without having to worry about average grades, schools are just in it for the meaningless exam factories that they are in danger of becoming.

Tripe: The unincomparable chasing the uncomparable*

The media has done so much in recent times to expose injustice especially institutional injustice. Why is it that when it comes to education, they don't seem to have done their homework?

It seems it's just a game to them. Where are the newspapers that stand up and refuse to print league tables? Surely it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that these raw statistics are meaningless on their own. And actually damaging; and damaging children and vulnerable adults [i.e. parents deseprate to get school choice right for their own children but with no proper information to go on].

I would expect papers to be probing, and more interested in establishing the truth; I have no such expectations of politicians, though, so Michael, my Gove of Little Brain, please press on with whatever rubbish you choose. History will prove you wanting, and sooner rather than later.

We, the inner city teachers of this country are under siege, under attack. We chose to go into the hardest places, deal with the rawest of situations, work on the educational frontlines, where deprivation and injustice walk hand in hand around our little city centres, looking for little people to scythe down. Before the Government inventing counting things as a way of evaluating them, our reward was what we did every day for a living.

Instead of a thankyou we find we stand accused. "Schools are failing children in the inner-city." No. Inner-cities tend to be areas of deprivation, and you could say, but I wouldn't, that inner-cities are failing to get their schools onto the top table. It's not the schools, but the tables that should stand accused.

And enter into this troubled world, the Daily This and the Sunday That, in search of prey and an easy story. OMG what fun could be had with a reality statistic!

So, let's try and help the newspapers in their search for a story. If you really want to judge how well a school is doing with the number of GCSEs without or without English and or Maths, A to C or A to G, then you could, for example look at all the children who started high school in Yr 7 on the first day. At City of Leeds, the school I know best, for example, in any given Year 11 there would be 40% of the students who didn't start on Year 7 Day 1. I realise that the Roma children and the Afghans are percolating beyond the ringroad, but, on the whole, these outer-city schools are perceived as better. and are therefore full.

So, for a start, compare all the students who have done a full five years. You could refine the search further by removing from the comparison all those in both schools whose parents pay for extra private tuition. maybe look at children who have to share bedrooms and have nowhere to work privately at home.

All I'm trying to say here, is that we already have local innuendo and urban myths if we want to rubbish a school. League tables of GCSE results barely scratch the surface of a school's worth. As most parents aren't trained educationalists, they look to the media for impartial observations, but, instead they get served up tripe.


I think you would find that once you started comparing the comparable, then the schools so cavalierly dismissed by politicians [Ed Balls in his letters to Education Leeds and Vince Cable on Questiontime to name but two], then you find City of Leeds School dancing on the top of the League Tables, and simultaneously saying what's the point.

*Stress the 3rd syllable of both comparing words to discover what they should mean.

Dear Mr Gove . . .

I wrote this letter to TES in May. They printed some of it. Here it is in full:

Dear Editor

I woke up one day last week to hear the BBC World Service telling me that a Lib Dem was going to be Minister for Eh. Eh? What was that? Education? Sadly no, It was Eh for Energy. So we still have that nice cove of a Gove, I guess, for Education.

Mr Gove is keen to let parents get together to form and run schools of their own. Will this be in their spare time, I wonder? Will they not need some type of a training to be able to do this? I spent years at Uni preparing to be a teacher. I found it all very helpful.

But, Michael, you don‘t need to go to all this expense, take all the chances when amateurs think they know how to run a school, and you have to worry about it not working out, like that school in Surrey [your own constituency, I believe] where the local authority had to step back in and take over again.

Parents’ schools are already here. It’s called home schooling. Groups of parents can get together, and hire in tutors as and when; then when their offspring are safely at Oxbridge, they can leave it to the next generation of parents to pick up the baton for their own kids.

Or you could do what most parents with a bit of cash do now. Let their kids go to school with the local riff-raff, then hire in private tutors to cover any subjects that they feel need extra time on. [Eighteen years ago, I earned a packet, briefly, as a private tutor to five GCSE students of Russian at a local high school. That school was covered in league table glory, whereas my own school, in much poorer area, got closed two years later]

One big advantage also of going to a real school is that they meet some real people [aka riff-raff] at said local school before they get to be government ministers and have to rule over us,.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, Russian graduate, teacher, blogger, parent, school-governor, writer, band-leader, part-time saver of the world, riff-raff and ex-private tutor