Academies Aren't Doing As Well As They Claim - Duh!

A report has just been released by "School Improvement Expert", Dr Terry Wrigley claiming that most academies have appeared to raise their results/achievement by essentially cooking the books and relying on vocational qualifications.

A link to the news story is here: Click here!

This a yet another non-story if you are a teacher and therefore have some clue about the education system in the UK. Academies up to this point have been failing schools forced into a change of status to raise standards. The problem being that the same students wander through the million pound doors, and even with the best teachers in the country, these academies are going to struggle to raise standards at the rate that they claim to have done. The children that have come on "leaps and bounds" have just been placed onto courses that require 100% coursework and therefore can essentially be completed by the staff themselves. The only issue that they have is getting these children a C grade at English and Maths, and credit where credit is due, they do a very good job at that.

Now, if you don't know, many vocational courses have been worth 4 GCSE C grades up until recently, when the government decided to "downgrade" these qualifications. You can almost sense the wave of panic going through much of secondary education, but especially academy headteachers who are paid silly money, sitting in masive offices whilst playing Angry Birds on their complimentary ipad2s. As soon as their "true" results appear in August, they will all be making a beeline for the Job Centre in a blind panic.

There are a few positives though:

• Since these qualifications have been "downgraded", employers will be able to make better judgements about who to employ as the playing field has now been levelled. Undeserving children will not feel that they have achieved by putting in zero effort and stillwalking out of school with 10 "GCSE" grades.
• The "fat cat" headteachers deserve pretty much everything they get. The good ones will stay because the results will have genuinely improved; the frauds will be unemployed, as they should be.
• The current government, who have been lauding academy status, will end up with not just egg on their face, but a whole battery farm that will hopefully lead to the sacking of the idiotic Michael Gove. Around 70% of academies will see a massive fall in their results to somewhere near where they should be. One can dream, but I won't be purchasing a "Sorry You're Leaving" card for Michael.

The whole thing only goes to prove that the current regime is purely out for headlines, not for the good of anyone other than themselves.

Academies - The Way Forward?

News has broken this week of an academy being accused of mismanagement. More precisely it's a group of academies, the second biggest in the country.

Academies, we are told in the teaching profession, are the way forward, and there are rumours that all schools will eventually be forced to become academies, with courses being held for schools' leadership to attend on how to become an academy. The theory behind schools becoming academies is this:

• Schools who become academies can plough their budgets into whatever they deem fit. Financial incentives can be made to prospective staff to encourage them to take the job, and presumably make them work harder. Academies don't have to adhere to the pay structure set out by maintained schools. Academies get money from the government but can use it in whatever way they think is most beneficial for their school. This seems a decent idea on the face of it. You would assume that a school's management would know best how to spend their money rather than be dictated to by a suit in Whitehall.
• Academies take over under-performing schools across the country and by offering better wages to staff, attract the "best" teachers who will turn those under-performing schools into beacons of education, a blue-print to be admired and drooled over by all. This also seems a decent idea in principal, as those students getting a raw deal in "failing" schools will get a better deal.
• Ultimately all schools will be encouraged to become academies because of the huge benefits of doing so. And who could blame them?

What actually happens is the following:

• All the money is spent on leadership and not very much is spent on the people who actually have to go and teach those "under-performing" children. This is what has happened at the MediaCity Oasis Academy in Salford, where 13 teaching staff are being made redundant in order to pay for the leadership team, many of whom I presume don't teach very much, if it's anything like any other school in the country. Many academy leadership teams are made up of old mates who pay themselves increasing amounts to do less and less. The only thing being that if the results don't meet expectations, those members of the leadership are out on their ear. We have a local academy whose headteacher was escorted off the premises and many senior staff are just being given a box to pack up their things. Make a deal with the devil people...
• The clientele, or "stock" as Ofsted like to call them, remain the same. It doesn't matter how many millions of pounds of public money are spent on new buildings, state-of-the-art facilities/resources and "the best teachers" in the land if those who are receiving that education are disaffected and have little or no interest in gaining qualifications because their parents hated school and have imposed their attitude towards education upon their offspring. You can polish a cowpat until it's so shiny you could do your hair in it, but ultimately it's still a cowpat.
• The number of "top quality" staff available to fill the posts falls well short of the number of posts to fill. There are lots of good teachers in the land but not all are up to it to be honest. You can't just magic up a replacement for a poor teacher over-night, and many don't want the extra stress that an increased wage can bring.
• If all schools become academies, the financial benefits of becoming one will be nullified as there's only so much money to go around.
• What isn't reported by the government is the fact that the main reason academies have appeared to make huge strides in raising achievement with their cohort is because loads of them are put on BTEC (or equivalent) courses which require little or no exams, but are mainly coursework which can essentially be dictated by the teachers and are worth 4 GCSE grades. This is changing so that a BTEC is going to be worth just 1 GCSE - I can't wait to see how the academies do then!
• The increased money paid to teaching staff needs to be earned (rightly so - you shouldn't expect to get more money for no extra work), so therefore those "top quality" staff end up burning out very quickly and either have lots of time off with stress (cover teachers will need paying) or will just leave the profession, because of stress (they will then need replacing with teachers who aren't as "high quality"). In some subjects, it's difficult to get mediocre teachers to fill posts.

Most educational policies that recent governments have pushed through are just designed to win votes and gain good press. Very few, if any actually encourage students to reach their potential in education, and just as importantly, although often forgotten, none of the policies make teaching a more manageable or desirable job. In fact, teaching is becoming an untenable job, as increased interference and demotivation become serious issues in the profession.

Article here!

League Tables Are Rigged!

Would you Adam and Eve it? The government have just realised that school league tables are rigged by schools "banking" C grades for students and making the less academic students take BTEC courses because they are worth up to 4 C grades each.

Now if you work in a school the fact that students take BTECs to boost a school's C grades will not be news to you, nor will the fact that loads of students take an early GCSE in some subjects to get a C grade and then the main focus of that school is to concentrate on those who get a D grade and push them up to C. But to those in Whitehall it is news, presumably because they are so far removed from day-to-day school life that it's taken them this long to catch up.

So what's the problem? And what are the government going to do about it?

According to the various articles I've read, the league tables aren't a proper representation of how schools are performing. Had the government bothered to ask teachers (this does seem to be a common theme) they would have found this out a while ago. League tables are all about gaining 5 A* to C grades at GCSE, and now must include English and Maths, whereas before it didn't matter what subjects they were. League tables have been sold to the public as the definitive guide to how well students from certain schools do, so the public don't really know any better (unless they know a teacher of course).

The proposal is to make 1 BTEC (that takes a lot of work, and is mainly coursework assessed) equivalent to 1 GCSE (which doesn't take as much work, although is more academic). 1 BTEC = 4 GCSEs was too much, but 1 to 1 is too little. And funnily enough all those state schools that were failing (in Ofsted's eyes), were rebranded academies and are now doing really well according to their 5 A* to C count, will suffer hugely. The only thing that makes academies appear to be improving so hugely is the fact that 1 BTEC = 4 GCSEs. The government can't really win this one to be honest - damned if they do, damned if they don't.

As far as making students sit early entries to "bank" a C and therefore focus attention on those who didn't make it first time around, do you really blame schools? The pressure to gain as many many C+ grades is huge and can make or break a school, so any potential advantage to be had by entering students early must be taken, with both hands.

As far as essentially ignoring those who achieve a C grade is concerned, well that's clearly not right, but schools are in a results business. If you don't get the results, you lose customers because parents can now choose which school to send their child too to a certain extent - another well-thought-out government policy. A school that isn't full has to endure budget cuts, which then leads to staff redundancies and ultimately to the school being unable to offer a holistic curriculum because it can't be staffed.

The prime minister has also stated that some schools coast and don't move their students on enough. He says that the league tables should reflect the "value added" to the students' knowledge. Well hooray! Finally they may be getting the message, but little will change in actual fact. As I've said in recent posts, some parts of the country have a hugely selective (grammar school) system meaning that they cream off the most academic in that area and therefore will end end at the top of those wonderful league tables.

Ultimately, whatever happens the league table system is flawed. Just get rid of them so the public aren't fooled by the propaganda.

The only way to assess whether a school is any good is to go into the school and see if the children are enjoying learning. If they are, they will probably reach their potential.

You don't need a league table to tell you that.

Ofsted went to see, see, see...

I went in to school the other day to do various things, but partly to look at our GCSE results. I was amazed at some of our results, for various reasons.

Last Saturday a popular broadsheet had an article quoting the headmaster of the school with the best A Level results in England. You won't be surprised to hear that he is head of a private school, but may be surprised to hear that around half of his school's A Level candidates achieved an A*. This is obviously the mark of some excellent teaching and some excellent learners, but when you compare the percentages of those in private and state education of how many candidates gain A* grades, the difference is pretty stark:

Private: 19% achieve an A* grade
State: 8% achieve an A* grade

Now don't be fooled by the myth that all private school students are more intelligent than state school students because that is simply not true, and at A Level class sizes are about the same. The teachers in state education are equally as qualified and talented, in some cases more so than their private counterparts, and the myth that private schools pay more than state schools should also be dispelled, because it's simply not true.

So why do private school candidates get consistently higher grades?

I think that there are a few reasons:

1. The fact that parents are forking out thousands of pounds to send their child to school, when a free option is available to them means that they are supportive of their child's education. Although you could argue that the fact that a state school pupil has stayed on to study A Levels rather than contribute to the household earnings would also show parental support for their child's education.
2. The work ethic at private schools is higher and those who don't toe the line get removed with a"we don't need your fees, go and find someone who does" attitude. This is true, private schools  can just get rid of a disruptive pupil almost on a whim, whereas any state school teacher will tell you the chain of paperwork to do the same thing in state education is growing ever longer. But at A Level the children have chosen their subject and presumably want to take them, so disruption should be at a minimum you'd suppose.
3. This is the reason the headteacher in the article states, and I think the most important and significant one: State schools are fixated on the C grade, regarding that as a pass and anything higher being a bonus. Teachers are being told by the government (Ofsted) via their senior management to ensure that as many as possible gain a C grade. All this does is leave those who are capable of gaining A*, A or B grades to fend for themselves. There is a large amount of truth in this at both A Level, and actually more so at GCSE.

Since I saw our school's results the other day and recalled the newspaper article I can't seem to shake this song out of my head:

Ofsted went to see, see, see...
A school's GCSE, E, Es...
But all that it could see, see, see...
Was the pupils with a C. C, C.

We gained a massive amount of C grades for our school this summer, with almost all students achieving 5 A*- C grades (not including English and Maths). It was a rise over over 20% on the previous year. How did we manage? I'll tell you:

1. The teaching stayed roughly the same.
2. Staff were "forced" (you could refuse but felt it was probably more trouble than it was worth to do so) to teach extra lessons after school, although they weren't compulsory for the students so only a handfull turned up in many cases, and they tended to be the ones who didn;t really need to.
3. We entered lots of our "less academic" students for BTECs and Diplomas - this is the key. Those who would previously have got one or no GCSEs above C grade now found themselves with the "equivalent" of 8 by taking 2 BTECs. It's known in the trade as "playing the game", and are essentially what makes our new academies (previously struggling schools on the whole) appear to be making progress.

Now, I'm not knocking the BTEC qualification or the schools who offer it, because not everyone is academically minded and they need to have something to show for their time at school, but are they really worth 4 GCSEs? The BTEC qualifications generally no exams but are coursework based and are assessed in schools, although the marks are verified by external examiners. Students write this coursework under the supervision of their teacher, but exams can't be taken under the same supervision. This means that in coursework based qualifications, students have to opportunity to improve their grade after a quick chat with their teacher, something that also can't be done in an exam. We have a number of students who have done just this and therefore pushed the overall percentage up significantly.

When people ask me nowadays whether exams have got easier, my reply is always this:

"At the top end no because it's still just as tough to get the top grades, but a C grade has certainly become easier to achieve."

This is purely a result of these "new" qualifications, but it is deceptive and ultimately devalues the C grade someone got in a GCSE exam since it appears relatively easy to achieve an "Ofsted pass" or a C grade equivalent in a BTEC.

Ultimately it's all a political game and a system designed to please Ofsted/the government, which is a bit sad really.