What if Grammar Schools were Premier League Football Clubs?
I was recently discussing the Grammar School issue with a friend and I tried to explain why I didn’t think it all stacked up, particularly with regard to several ‘case studies’ that were trotted out in the media at the time. Here are my thoughts. There is often a line of argument in politics and elsewhere that justifies a particular strategy or policy on the basis of some very inspiring and brilliant case studies. One such case study was on the news following the Government’s announcement about Grammar school expansion and it profiled a number of pupils from inner city London who had been selected for entry into a grammar school. Don’t get me wrong, this was a truly inspirational and incredibly impressive achievement, however, it was four pupils. Four. It didn’t expand too much on the selection criteria, although it was very clear that the pupils carried on living in inner city estates while they attended and worked extremely hard. I am sure that they did and I genuinely believe that the charity (I WISH I could remember who they were..) are doing a great job. But. I don’t buy that this means there is a strong case for grammar schools to have the impact on social mobility and pupil attainment that I think people are making out. Now, back to me and my friend. We had this conversation in the aftermath of the announcement in May that Grammar Schools were getting the green light from government, David Lammy’s criticism of Oxford’s BAME admissions record and various media discussions from Radio 4’s Today Programme to Question and Time and beyond. My friend expressed support for Grammar School expansion and I expressed my lack of faith that it would be the magic bullet for education. Now, it started to occur to me that if a large majority of Grammar schools are rated ‘Outstanding’ compared to a minority of ‘Secondary Moderns’, when you read news reports that state that schools in white working class areas are unfairly stigmatised by School league tables. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44196645 I started to suggest that it wasn’t the school, but the background of the pupil that was the determining factor in the success of the pupil. He wasn’t having it, so I tried an analogy instead. Here goes. Would Manchester City still be Manchester City if you changed the squad demographic? My analogy was that an average player, plucked from a lesser team or a lower league and placed in a Top 4 squad was bound to improve. A single player, surrounded by a team of world class professionals would be inspired to improve him or herself. If he had any sort of ambition he would try his hardest to improve and learn from all those around him. During the times when he wasn’t inspired to improve, the culture of the club and the incessant drive would require him to improve and work hard. Inspired and required. The player would be completely immersed in a wraparound culture that had one aim, to win by any means, to succeed by any strategy, to improve in all areas. If you are in a high performing environment like that, you are going to adopt a similar work ethic and a similar philosophy. If he turned up to training. If he was getting support at home. If he was getting enough sleep at night to enable him to perform well enough in training. If he was resilient enough to take the knocks and keep working through the tough times. But what if he wasn’t able to do all that? In football terms, this would be unlikely – the scouts would have done their homework. They’d have researched his performance and work ethic over a period of time. In all likelihood he was already a good fit for their organisation, his work ethic and performance being more or less aligned with the destination club. They’d be able to put in place a support package, a relocation strategy and there’d obviously be a significant financial reward to ameliorate any sundry inconveniences to make the move go as smoothly as possibly. Transition. But what if we were talking about education? Would it work for a working class pupil to get a big money transfer to a grammar school? Sure there’s a scholarship available, but for how many pupils each year? How far does that go? Does it pay for the uniform? The travel? The extra tuition? The correct nutrition? Does it compensate for the lack of support at home? Does it make up for all the cultural and social opportunities that have been missed in the pupil’s first 11 years of life? How far does it go? I suspect a highly motivated pupils from a deprived setting, with supportive parents and an ingrained work ethic may well thrive in a grammar school environment, but would EVERY deprived child? I suspect not. I also strongly suspect that the ‘success stories’ from the news bulletins are pupils who have been VERY carefully selected before being admitted. Even if the player didn’t make the first team, even if they weren’t an International, even if they didn’t become a world class icon, they would still have improved as a player. They would still have contacts in the upper echelons of the football business. They would still have a significantly elevated starting point in future career opportunities, either as a coach, pundit or agent. Doors would have been opened, opportunities would arise that wouldn’t have been there before. My friend started to see my point. So I pushed on. If that is the case for a single player/pupil, what does it mean for larger numbers? What if a top 4 club signed a player from The Championship? What if they signed two? What if they signed four. All at once. Would all four succeed in the same way? Would the team be as successful as it was the year before? What if they replaced half their squad with players from the Championship? What if three new players were from League One? What if One player was from the League Two equivalent in an East European country? What if two players were injured for the whole season but had to be named in every matchday squad? What would happen to the team then? Would performances suffer? Would morale? Of course it would. What would happen to the self perpetuating momentum of the success machine? Would they still top the League Tables? Of course not. But that would be despite of the club’s previously outstanding ethos, resources and management strategies. A culture of high expectations and a relentless drive for success can only go so far without the right players to implement it. Results would suffer. It would take several seasons for the club to develop the same players and turn things around. To make progress. But top 4 clubs don’t sign players from the Championship do they? They sign them from other Premier League clubs or Top 4 clubs in other countries. Jamie Vardy is the exception that proves the rule, but how many Jamie Vardy’s are there? Where do Grammar schools get the majority of their pupils from? From already successful, high performing primary schools that produce already successful, high performing pupils. The difference is that football, while it has grossly inflated salaries and serious issues about its culture and ethics, is fundamentally meritocratic. If you’re not good enough, you don’t get picked. Ultimately you get dropped and eventually sold. The team gets relegated. You lose. But that’s not what happens in education. You don’t go to a ‘top 4’ school purely on merit. It has as much to do with your social background as anything else. My school has over 50% Free School Meals. The vast majority are delightful, hard working and a pleasure to teach. But there is no escaping the attendant issues commonly associated with pupils from a deprived background. These, even when you avoid inevitable stereotyping and remove it as an excuse, present real barriers to learning and swallow up vast amounts of time, money and resources. There comes a tipping point, a critical mass where the proportion of deprived pupils has a detrimental effect on the overall performance of the school. In a recent article The Telegraph reported that A Lancaster University study had identified that this tipping point was when 20 per cent of pupils were from a deprived background. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/02/schools-20-per-cent-pupils-poor-backgrounds-see-lower-attainment/ A grammar school can deal with isolated cases of deprivation, the child will be pulled up by those around them and they will be inspired and required to achieve. The extra support needed for a small number of pupils’ social and behavioural needs can be met. But after a certain point, the strain of deprived pupils’ needs takes its toll, from behaviour issues, poor attendance, poor diet, poor parental engagement, chronically low aspiration, poor prior attainment and a whole host of safeguarding issues. All of these issues detract from the core business of schools, namely teaching. If a Grammar School or a Premier League club had to deal with persistent absence, daily safeguarding issues and deprivation at the level of our school, I think performance would soon suffer. You also can’t ignore the fact that success breeds success. Once a Premier League club is well established, it attracts bigger signings both on the pitch and in the dressing room. Better coaching staff attracts better players and vice versa. But League positions, trophies and results attract better everything. You don’t get the best coaches managing teams in the lower echelons of the National League. I do think though that a meritocracy is at play in football in a way that we don’t get in education. The narrative is that if results are poor, the school is poor. If results are good, the school is good. There is little credit or recognition for achieving a decent set of results with a poor set of resources. In football, there is, to my mind a greater recognition of the way that money has bought success and how great an achievement it has been for a club to narrowly avoid recognition considering their humble budget and resources. I’d like to change that narrative and in recent months it seems that momentum is growing for pupils’ social backgrounds to be taken into account more when arriving at Ofsted judgements, but I don’t see how social mobility will be tackled more effectively until the admissions system is looked at with some common sense and with real evidence of outcomes. Maybe then Oxford and Cambridge will admit more BAME and ‘working-class’ students, we may even see more BAME and ‘working class’ CEOs and captains of industry. I’ll hold my breath for a BAME and working class Minister for Education… Now there are all sorts of ways that this analogy just doesn’t work and if you scratch the surface a little bit, trying to compare education with professional football is a bit silly, but I think I got the point across. And of course, unlike professional football we’re all in the same crazy League Table. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44196645
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As a school we’ve been asked to undertake a major transition project with five of our main feeder primary schools and I’ve written this in response to a Twitter chat in the hope that it will be useful for colleagues who are looking at transition in their own schools. There are lots of questions here and hopefully things that will help you reflect. I’m not sure we got too many concrete answers yet, but I’ll share them when we do.
What about the emotional and social aspects that cause the dip? So far this has all been about the academic side of things, but I’m currently a Y8 form tutor and I’ve had my bunch since they started with us. We noticed some stark differences between primary and secondary that could contribute to the dip. Again, your context may differ, so apologies if this doesn’t apply. Also, this will all be obvious, but it is the cumulative effect of everything that means it has so much impact. We are, as I have stated a school with c.55% free school meals and this is rising year on year. We have a number of main feeder primaries, but we take pupils from nearly 30 schools across our area. We have a lot of disadvantaged pupils and deal with a lot of safeguarding issues. That is a huge melting pot for a Y7 pupil to immediately feel at ease in and start to be successful straight away. We’ve had conversations with primary colleagues during down time about ‘the old days’ where the vast majority of pupils from a primary went to the same secondary and there was relative continuity during this testing and in some cases traumatic time. Relationships and hierarchies were already established. The top dog was already known to most and more vulnerable pupils were already accepted and included. Anecdotally, it took less time for things and pupils to settle down. It also meant that secondary teachers had only a handful of different ‘styles’ to incorporate and get to grips with. I don’t know if it’s a ‘marketisation’ of schools, but competition and choice now means that there are a multitude of destinations for pupils after KS2. Primary colleagues were reporting that in an average class of 30, there were up to 10 different secondary destinations, all asking for different data, examples of work and summer projects. In a Y7 class of 30, it is normal for us to have upwards of 15 different primaries represented. While I think there is a general similarity of approach in KS2, there will undoubtedly be variation in classroom practice, expectations and approaches that we need to navigate, plug gaps and gauge proficiency in. And that’s just in English. Y7 pupils have to deal with an explosion of new subjects, some they’ll love, some they’ll hate, some they’ll do very well in, some they’ll flounder in. Some they already know they useless at from SATs results and will already feel negatively about. When we visited the primary schools we saw English or writing lessons that usually lasted between an hour and half and an hour and 45 minutes. This was great and the pupils were definitely making good, steady progress. But what we also saw were pupils that were already in their seats, had their equipment ready and were ready to learn. They had been with the same member of staff for the whole day and any minor issues, to do with uniform, lateness, equipment, illness and so on had already been dealt with. There were no interruptions. There wasn’t even a pause to take the register, it had already been done. Pencils, rulers and other resources were in the middle of the table already and all pupil’s stuff was at hand in their personal, private tray that they could leave, safe in the knowledge that no-one else was going to be in the room except them and their class. In my school, a lot can happen in the 2-5 minutes it takes a pupil to get from one side of the school site to another. By the time a pupil reaches my classroom, there can have been several external events that are going to negatively impact on my lesson. We expect pupils to self organise and they must bring and look after their own equipment, their exercise books, their reading book and their planner. And their PE kit. And their cooking ingredients. Some of my Y10 and Y11 pupils struggle to do this, yet we expect all Y7 pupils, no matter how small, how immature, how vulnerable and regardless of emotional intelligence to pick this up straight away. Our lessons are an hour long. By the time pupils arrive, a register is taken, equipment is unpacked, books or resources are given out, titles are written and instructions are delivered, we can be several minutes in already. When you add on packing up time, our hour lessons are more like 50 minutes and sometimes less than that. Even my best trained, best behaved, highly drilled class will get no more than 55 minutes and I think that’s optimistic. In the primary schools they were getting at least an hour and half every single day. In the morning. With no distractions and no movement between lessons. That’s 7 and half hours a week with no interruptions. We have Y7 four times a week for 50 minutes. Sometimes with a day gap. Sometimes after break and lunch. Sometimes after a lesson they don’t like. Sometimes with major distractions before arriving at the class. Sometimes without the right equipment or resources. That’s three hours and twenty minutes with built in disruptions. Over the course of Y7 this means that pupils get less time, with less continuity and with more emphasis on them to step up than they ever experienced at primary school. In July they’re the biggest and most mature in school, but they’re getting dropped off at the gate of a school that is just ‘round the corner for most. In September they’re right at the bottom of the pile, getting the bus across town on their own and having to navigate themselves around school. From the moment they walk through the door in September we are treating Y7 pupils exactly the same as we are treating Y11 pupils who have been with us for four years. Back to my form tutor experiences. I see my form for 15 minutes a day. Realistically after I’ve dealt with four or five key pupils, done a register, said our morning prayer, checked planners, given notices and sorted missing equipment, they’re out of the door again. I know them quite well. Actually, I know four or five pupils very well (but our relationship is very negative) and I know 25 pupils ‘a bit’. In my English classes, I know my KS4 pupils pretty well. I know my KS3 pupils reasonably well. In reality this means that I know what my KS4 pupils are like in my lesson: what they’re likely to say and do for 50 minutes, how much effort they’re likely to put in and whether I’ll probably need to intervene at some stage. I know whether they’re likely to need help, or whether I can leave them to get on with a task independently. I know them well enough to tell them a joke or two and I know who I can have a bit of ‘banter’ with. In reality my KS3 classes are like that as well, only less so. What was striking was that the primary colleagues we observed seem to know their pupils intimately. There was a huge amount of trust and honesty in the classroom relationships and there was a confidence in pupils of all abilities to ‘go for it’ in the lesson, be it answering out loud, reading to a group or sharing work. Pupils had been together in the same class and social group for nigh on 7 years. They had been with their teacher for up to 6 hours a day, every day for the best part of 5 months. Routines were established, relationships were positive, great things were possible. In short the pupils knew and trusted their teacher. They knew there was a consistent approach to everything. The teachers also clearly knew their pupils inside out and back to front. Across a full range of subjects and skills, both academically and emotionally. It’s a close relationship that I don’t know how we can replicate in our school. It’s also worth noting that colleagues in MfL, DT, Art and other subjects only see classes twice a week and on rotation. Building relationships is going to be even harder. And that’s just what goes in in the classroom. That’s just what we can control. I don’t know what behaviour is like at your school, or what aspirations are like or even what the social mix is, but there are huge influences, good and bad, during break, lunch and on the corridor between lessons. There are just more opportunities for disruption, anxiety and a lack of focus. In conclusion. What are our next steps? Well, that’s the big question. We have some ideas, but we need to think more and discuss more. A final thought on ‘the dip’. Is it realistic for there to be a smooth transition and a non-interrupted gradual improvement in writing between KS2 and KS3? Why is it assumed there will be? I don’t think that would be expected anywhere else. When you get a new job or a promotion isn’t it normal to have a dip in performance while you learn the ropes and bed in? Isn’t this what football teams do when they get promotion to the league above? When teams graduate to the Champions League? When people move from the countryside to the city? When animals are released into the wild, when… (pick your analogy and see if there’s a dip). As a school we’ve been asked to undertake a major transition project with five of our main feeder primary schools and I’ve written this in response to a Twitter chat in the hope that it will be useful for colleagues who are looking at transition in their own schools. There are lots of questions here and hopefully things that will help you reflect. I’m not sure we got too many concrete answers yet, but I’ll share them when we do.
‘The Dip’ is almost built in to the system. We’re tackling transition as part of an initiative to lessen the impact of the famous ‘dip’. As part of that we’ve explored what causes the dip. In my opinion there are many factors and these may differ depending on your context, but for us there a few main causes. For context, we have c. 55% Free school meals, low attendance and poor prior attainment, but perhaps these will help you reflect on the issues affecting transition where you are. We thought we had high expectations. We do. But we have realised how high the expectations are at primary school. I am gobsmacked at what is routinely expected of Year 6 pupils. Two things that really stood out. Most primaries have a list of non-negotiables. These do exactly what they say on the tin. If pupils have been taught a skill in depth, it becomes a non-negotiable – you will use it and you will get it right. When we have tried this with Year 7 and 8 pupils, they have ‘remembered’ these skills and have begun using them again with little input from us. This one strategy alone looks like it will have big impact. The general principle is to explicitly remind pupils what they have been taught and expect them to do it, and to do this all the time, embedding skills as you go along. What does your handwriting policy say about your school? This was a real eye-opener for us and something that primary colleagues noticed immediately. All primary pupils are expected to use cursive handwriting. I know this. It’s obvious. My son is in Year 4 and he’s currently striving hard to get his ‘pen licence’. It is a criteria for KS2 that immediately relegates any work that isn’t written in cursive. Yet, for us, looking at KS4 GCSE mark schemes it hasn’t ever been a consideration. Ever. Four of my department marked for AQA last summer and the message is loud and clear, if you can read it, you can mark it. Cursive wasn’t even on our radar. And yet, something that is regarded as critical at primary school, that is then dismissed entirely at secondary clearly signposts your expectations. If pupils can get away with not writing ‘properly’ and not making an effort with something so basic, what else can they get away with? If they’re not expecting me to write to the best of my ability, what else won’t they expect me to do to the best of my ability? Does good handwriting underpin the quality of good writing? Probably not. But like a smart uniform and a well turned out student body, it probably says something about the overall approach and relentless, dogged pursuit of high standards elsewhere. I still think we have high expectations, but maybe we need to align them with Year 5 and 6 expectations. Primary colleagues are amazing. This shouldn’t really need saying, but if, as a secondary English teacher you haven’t realised this, then you should. Whatever else comes out of this process, I have been privileged to observe primary colleagues who are incredibly skilful at what they do. I couldn’t have done what they did. And I think (I hope!) they were equally impressed when they saw what we were doing at our school too. However, when speaking to primary colleagues there’s an enormous amount of pressure placed on them. The results are down to one or two teachers in each school and there is significant scrutiny, monitoring and moderation. If nothing else, I think my department and the Year 6 teachers we have been working with have a new found respect for what we all do. Primary colleagues blew us out of the water when it came to grammar knowledge and technical skills. This was embarrassing and hard to hear. We realised we had failed to build on the successes of primary colleagues. We lined up Y7 writing next to Y6 writing and the primaries were scathing about both the work and the grades we had awarded. But when we reflected, we realised most of us in the department were Literature specialists and that specific Language and grammar was something we hadn’t studied in depth for years, even decades in some cases. In fact, some of us couldn’t really recall much grammar at our own secondary and wondered if this had changed between generations. Really, what we learned was that Primary colleagues and Secondary colleagues have very different skill sets and they teach very different things in very different ways. Our job now is to take on board what the primaries are doing and build on it in secondary, without losing sight of our requirements at KS4. Which in turn prompted this question… How do we morph KS2 requirements into KS4 requirements? We started this by looking at the requirements of KS2 and comparing them to the requirements of KS4. We’re concentrating on writing at the moment, so in practice we looked at the KS2 mark scheme and the KS4 AQA Mark scheme. The KS2 mark scheme is really quite specific and prescriptive. The KS4 mark scheme is really quite woolly and open to interpretation. They don’t really seem to join anywhere in the middle. That’s wrong. They do, but you now have to fill in the gap yourself. Life after levels could, cynically be referred to as life without KS3, where you have to decide yourself what to do and how to do it until KS4. In our case I think we defaulted into making KS3 an ever-so-slightly differentiated version of KS4. In our heads we thought we were throwing pupils in at the deep end, but actually we were throwing many of them under a bus. Really tough, really hard, really challenging doesn’t necessarily equate to high expectations. Certainly not appropriate expectations. We are going to go away and look at what are doing at KS3 and whether it builds on what pupils can already do at KS2, whether it helps them prepare for KS4 and, importantly, whether or not it is fun and interesting. In essence we are going to try and re-introduce a proper, distinct KS3 that builds on previous skills, prepare for the next phase but is its own distinct entity. And I do think it’s important that there is a definite key change at the start of KS4, whenever that may begin for you. The psychological ‘step-up’ is important. You also need to know what they can already do at KS2. Not guess at it, or make assumptions, but go and have a look. Have a proper conversation with your Y6 teachers and look at their work. Some key questions we are asking:
We need to adjust and build on KS2 skills, but we can’t ignore our own needs. We also can’t be too negative – we are doing a lot of good things and actually, our schemes of work and our teaching are good. We can’t throw away a lot of hard work and good practice because we have seen something very good at primary. We need to identify what is good, what will work for us and what we can pinch. What are primaries doing different to us? A lot. There are social and emotional things that primary teachers do that are hard to recreate at secondary – more of that later- but from a writing perspective there are big differences in approach. As part of the process we are agreeing a joint approach to teaching writing to KS2 and KS3 pupils and will be undertaking some team teaching to implement this. As I said earlier, part of our process was to align expectations and we did this by moderating work. We looked at each other’s books and feedback. We undertook the same writing task, marked it and then compared our marks. This was a car crash for us. We have a KS3 mark scheme that mirrors GCSE grades from 1-9 and we are confident, with our four GCSE markers, that we know what each grade looks like. However, the primary colleagues trashed our judgements, during an excoriating and illuminating afternoon session. They literally couldn’t believe what we were awarding. We felt very bruised and battered after their feedback. But again, we went back to our CPD on the examiner’s feedback from the summer and on reflection we had confidence in our grades. What it highlighted though, was the difference in expectations for each key stage. What was rewarded at KS2 was significantly, if not 100%, different from KS4 and these differences, while perhaps small, threw up massively different results in many cases. We are so tuned in to GCSE criteria that we haven’t bothered to teach or insist on pupils using skills that are essential for higher grades at KS2. These small anomalies threw up massive differences in attainment, but also apparent massive differences of emphasis in the classroom. These differences of approach need to be more aligned and will be the focus of our ongoing work with primary colleagues. The hope is that we will both improve our practice and ultimately improve our pupils’ writing skills. So what did we see in the primary classroom? We saw big differences. I’m in danger of massively generalising, but in essence the primary approach is to carefully scaffold, constantly remind and relentlessly practice writing skills. This took place over a week or two weeks, with on average an hour and half lesson a day. Once a piece of writing was ready it was written up ‘in best’. This seems at any rate to be the model we have observed. The work we saw in writing books was uniformly excellent, with handwriting and presentation of a universally excellent standard. We had to question how independent the writing was. Was it all a true reflection of a pupil’s ability to write? Was it done under ‘exam conditions’ and so on. In contrast, our approach essentially mirrored our GCSE task taking. Over the space of six weeks, with three to four one hour lessons a week, pupils would re-visit key skills, looking at features of the specific genre and format. In that time they would write between one and three practice pieces with a short amount of practice, sometimes focusing on beginnings, endings, a specific skill and so forth. At the end of the scheme pupils were given a new, similar style question, expected to plan, write and check a piece of writing in 45 minutes. Independently and under exam conditions. Pupils are on their own. Sink or swim. In at the deep end. Under that bus. We had to question how scaffolded the writing was. Was it a true reflection of a pupil’s ability to write? Should it be done under exam conditions and so on. We were ashamed of our pupils’ work when we compared it to what we saw primary colleagues bringing to the table. When we looked back, both examples of work reflected what they were. Primary writing books are the end product of a series of lessons working on one piece. They are excellent and showcase what a pupil can do with the right support and good teaching. Our writing was in books that included everything else we did in class, were the product of 45 minutes of totally independent work under pressure, off the back of a couple of week’s work. Of course they were different. Were ours worse or did they just look worse? We thought the primary teachers were giving too much support, they thought we weren’t giving enough. We’re finding a middle ground approach that everyone benefits from. At this point it is important to say that opinion was divided about where the writing went from here. There was also some muted and limited conversation about what gets included in the final grade for pupils and what counts towards their KS2 score and there was some understandable reluctance to elaborate here. There were also an awkward few moments when we asked how much writing happened in the lead up to SATS and what happened between SATS and summer. But again, primary colleagues are under enormous pressure. Before you judge, put yourself in their shoes. |
Mr W
Head of English in a northern school. ArchivesCategories |