Britain’s education
problem
Transcription
The Isle of Wight, on the South coast of
England, has long been an idyllic summer getaway. To many it is known best for
sailing regattas and music festivals, but the Island is one troubled spot in a
particular national trend. It has some of the worst performing schools in
England.
Last year they were judged to be so bad that
the nearby council county of Hampshire was invited to intervene, an unprecedented
step.
“When we began to get
involved, probably only about one in fourteen of secondary age children on the Island
were going to a good school. Attendance in schools, particularly in secondary schools was frankly
disastrous. Way worse in the country.”
The Isle of Wight is not unique. England’s
worst schools use to be urban, overwhelmingly poor and black or sometimes Asian.
Today the worst results are seen in suburbs, market towns and on the coast and
particularly among poor, white children.
“When I first started
teaching, the great concern was children who would have come to England and were
speaking English as another language, as one of their additional languages. And at
that time, those children were performing really badly. There has been a
transformation in the last twenty years. Additional language children are
achieving better than English only speaking children, which is quite a shock.”
In GCSEs, the exams usually taken at sixteen,
poor white British pupils get the lowest grades.
Nationally, 59% of pupils in England got 5 good
GCSEs including English and Maths in 2012. Affluent white pupils get similar
results, but just one third of white British children who qualified for free
schools meals, a proxy for measuring poverty, achieved that level.
That yawning gap in performance is the widest
of any group. Poor white pupils have been struggling for some time and the
government is increasingly aware of the problem. Solving it demands an
understanding of why it is so bad.
“What we have seen in
some of the rural areas, you have seen a performance not move on the way that
everybody wants it to. Number one, maybe we haven’t resourced those areas in
the same way. And two, we haven’t had the education effort that you might have
seen in London when people really, not just the schools, everybody got behind
the endeavour of a driving up education as a core, element of regeneration of
economic progress of everything, social regeneration of a community and that
collective effort hasn’t been evident in some of those areas yet.”
The Isle of Wight, which is neither very rich
not extremely poor, but it is certainly white and isolated exemplifies the
problem. There students performs 15% percentage points below the national
average.
Yet even on the Isle of Wight there are success
stories. Pat Goodhead is the headmistress of the Christ the King College, a state
secondary school on the Isle of Wight that is defying expectations.
Christ the King is the only school on the
Island to be rated good by OFSTED, the schools’ inspectorate.
When it predicted high grades for its pupils the
local authority said that their forecast were unrealistic, in fact the school
exceeded them, closing a gap that persists elsewhere.
“The headline figure
they outperformed by the 20% any five A to C figure that the Island had ever
seen but nationally put these students’ performances in the top category across
the country. Our free school meals children all are performing as well as and sometimes
better than the non-free schools meal students. They are doing very very well
indeed.”
The school is doing what decent schools
everywhere do. Education is focused on each pupil individually.
“I have staff who
takes specific responsibility for knowing who our free school meals children
are, who the children are who might be going through difficult personal
circumstances. So it is not about larger teams, it’s about the right teams, the
right people, the right support for those people as well.”
In general, poor children do best in schools
where they are either very few or very numerous.
Most ill-served are those in places such as the
Isle of Wight were there are too few to merit much attention but too many to
succeed alone.
The pupil premium, money given to schools on the
basis on how many pupils qualify for free school meals has helped some but it
is far from a cure-all.
There isn’t a binary relationship between more
money better results. But if you get more money and you use well, use it the
way that evidence demonstrates that you get the best effect, then you can see
progress.
Places such the Isle of Wight might look at
east London for inspiration.
Bangladeshis, who are concentrated in the
London borough of Tower hamlets, the third most deprived place in England, now
do better than whites nationally, whether or not they qualify for free meals.
This success came from a concerted effort by educators, parents and local
institutions.
It’s well known that in the very best schools, underachievement
by students is taken very seriously, so the student begins to underachieve,
something is done by the afternoon or next week, in the worst schools people simply to wait to Christmas to see if things get
better.
One of the things we are trying to do is to put
the systems in place that leads to really good assessment, tracking of student
progress, interventions, so on and so forth.
In my experience I have never met a parent who
does not want the best for his or her child, but I have met parents who don’t know:
a) what the best could be and therefore don’t recognize the absolute potential
of their child and how well they can perform and secondly and linked to that,
what they can help and support that child.
Raising standards for this latest of group of
poor performers may come down to ensuring that they have faith in the
opportunities that education can bring.
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