Pass the G&T
Pass the G&T
Pass the G&T
I fear I am, once again, in the bad books.
On Sky News at lunchtime today I ranted live to Adam Boulton for rather too long about Ofsted’s much-hyped report about most able students.
That’s because I woke up to headlines like this:
Schools fail to challenge the brightest, warns Ofsted
The problem, it seems, is that ‘thousands of bright children are being "systematically failed" by England's non-selective secondaries’.
That’s us, that is - comprehensive schools.
According to Sir Michael Wilshaw - a self-avowed fan, he says, of comprehensives - we are rubbish at stretching most able students. We have very, very low expectations.
And the reason I got so irate is that - unlike most of the pundits filling the airwaves - I actually read the report as soon as it was released (this, as education regulars will now know, was much later for the teaching profession than it was for the media who would set the day’s agenda).
And I noticed that Ofsted’s ‘latest news’ site explicitly said that the report was based on visits to - roll of the drums, please - 41 non-selective schools and reports from over 2000 lessons.
This sounds impressive, but in fact it’s pretty pitiful, given that there are over 3000 secondary schools in England.
Take our own humble secondary school of 1400 students.
Each week - each week, note - we teach around 1000 lessons and each year we teach more than 37,000.
That’s in one school.
So as a true comprehensive - not an academy, not a free school, not a grammar - we resent it when we are caricatured by the very organisation that ought to be most objective - the inspectorate. We think we should be able to expect more rigour from Ofsted.
It also happens that twelve - twelve - of our students have gained places at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the past two years.
This, I would suggest, doesn’t smack of mediocrity.
Parents choose our school because of the way we cater for most able students, but also because of our commitment to all students - whether they aspire to university or apprenticeships at the local college. Oxbridge is ideal for some; not for others.
So, yes, I lose my temper when someone wags a finger and tells us that we should introduce streaming (a child being put in a certain group in every subject in every lesson for the year) or accuse us of being complacent.
I don’t think it’s any business of Ofsted’s to tell us how to group our students or how to teach them. They should regulate, not pontificate. They are inspectors, not teacher trainers.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, more than anyone else, should know that it’s up to headteachers not those who fled the classroom many years ago to prescribe how their students are grouped. I’m saddened that he is now a willing apologist for these people and so quick to undermine the state sector with broad-brush generalisations.
It so happens that at our school we have a long-term link with a school in Shanghai - a city that is number one in the universe for their teaching of Mathematics.
We have observed and admired many Maths lessons there over the years. They are happy, interesting, productive and ambitious. They are also entirely mixed ability, as Maths lessons are in other countries that we are expected to aspire to be like, such as Finland.
Most infuriating are the fatuous comparisons with independent schools. The bloke put up against me on Sky News today expressed outrage that most selective schools got most students into Oxford and Cambridge.
Er ... that’s because they are the most selective schools, dammit.
And that’s why I think Sir Michael Wilshaw’s easy soundbites have done such a disservice today to those of us committed to state education.
Those parents wavering between sending a child to their local state or independent school today will have heard that we, the comprehensives, are all complacent and complicit in low expectations.
In reality, we spend all our time neurotically fretting about how we can help our students - all our students - to do better. That’s what we do, endlessly.
Sir Michael’s thesis is as damaging and retrograde as Alistair Campbell’s caricature of the ‘bog standard comprehensive’ back in the murky depths of the Blair era.
This is why some of us rant. It’s why so many state school teachers tonight will be feeling that nothing we do is ever good enough.
And it’s why - catastrophically - some of the very parents we most need to help us keep levering standards upwards in the state system will be thinking tonight that they should play safe and send their child to the local private school - an institution where, truth-be-told, expectations, teaching quality and ambition may be no higher than in the local comprehensive.
So I fear Ofsted and its leader have done us few favours tonight.
Naively, I recently wrote a pamphlet for the National Education Trust called ‘Shouldn’t Ofsted be helping us to improve our schools?’
Today, that has felt not just rhetorical but laughably irrelevant.
Geoff Barton
Thursday 13 June
22:30
Thursday, 13 June 2013