The headteacher at Prescot school in Knowsley, Judy Walker, looked on as pupils in a maths class gleefully high-fived each other after correctly answering tricky questions. “It might not sound like much to you,” Walker says, “but to celebrate success, openly, publicly? This is a huge change.
“That joy of learning had gone. Children were embarrassed to achieve, they wouldn’t come to an awards ceremony or take a certificate. It wasn’t cool.” Walker catches herself, and giggles. “Sorry, ‘cool’ is so old, I’m not down with the kids. But they now want too achieve,” she adds. “Their parents want them to achieve, and they are pushing and pushing.”
Knowsley is a borough in Merseyside, made up of 1950s and 1960s housing estates that once provided manpower to local heavy industry, now long gone. After years of under-achievement, a new pushiness is significant, Walker suggests.
Last year, secondary schools in the borough, where more than 95% of residents are white British, recorded the lowest GCSE pass rate in England. Just 37.4% of pupils achieved five or more GCSEs grades A* to C including English and maths, compared with 53.8% nationally. The most disadvantaged pupils, eligible for free school meals, fared even worse, with just 20% attaining the government benchmark compared with 33% across England. This is one of the most deprived authorities, with high levels of economic inactivity and low skill levels: more than 15% of the working population have no qualifications, compared with the national average of 8%.
Four in 10 children from Knowsley are educated outside the borough – the highest proportion in England when the peculiar City of London and Westminster are taken out of the statistics. The average for pupils being educated outside their home borough is 9.6% in England.
It was against this backdrop that Knowsley council last year commissioned ResPublica, the thinktank led by the colourful Liverpool-born Phillip Blond, to examine what was going wrong and how it could be turned around. Of its 33 recommendations, published last month, 32 were uncontentious. The 33rd, made belatedly in response to Theresa May’s change of policy on entering No 10, was not.
“Reintroducing grammar schools is potentially a transformative idea for working-class areas where there are little or no middle classes to game the admission system,” Blond said. “We know that selection improves the performance of those white working-class children selected – the trouble is too few of them are. We recommend that new grammars in the first instance are exclusively focused on the needs of white working-class children.”
The response from the council and many teachers was to emit something of a primal scream. “We are absolutely clear that the introduction of grammar schools is simply not an option in our borough,” said cabinet member for children’s services, Gary See. “I believe that grammar schools are regressive, divisive and leave many of our young people behind.” A Knowsley council spokesperson said: “The council questions the credibility of the report.”
Certainly part of the reason behind the aggressive rejection of Blond’s conclusions can be put down to a widespread belief within the educational establishment that grammar schools do little or no good either for their pupils, or, more particularly, for those rejected by them. It was also unsurprising that a Labour council would want to distance itself from the policy. But within the classrooms of Knowsley and across the country there is a sense of something else: an utter exhaustion with unending structural change.
The history of Prescot school offers an extreme example of the instability. Founded in 1544 by a clergyman, who left £140 in his will to fund a free grammar for boys, the school meandered into being fee-paying before being taken back into the state system in 1944. In 1975 it joined with Prescot grammar school for girls. In 2009 it merged with Knowsley Higher Side comprehensive school. “We became the Knowsley Park Centre for Learning serving Prescot, Whiston and the wider community, because they could not agree on a name,” said Walker. “So embarrassing. If they’d put the name on a badge it would have gone around twice.”
That move was part of the Labour government’s £157m spending spree in the area under the Building Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to replace 10 ageing secondary schools in Knowsley with seven “centres for learning”. Huge PFI-funded spaceships landed, with imposing glass fronts, wall-less landings, where multiple classes would be going on at the same time. Numerous mirror-lined performing art studios appeared, to encourage creativity. The Ofsted inspectors in 2014 were unimpressed, judging that Knowsley Park “requires improvement”.
This April the school became an academy, and was renamed Prescot school, a nod to its grammar past, and became part of the high-performing Heath Family multi-academy trust. Around the same time, the government changed the rules that allowed children to resit their GCSE results, until then a common move at the school which gave their pupils the chance to do their best. This year 41.3% of pupils here achieved grades at C or above.
It has been an exhausting period of change, in a socially deprived area. And there is a feeling among staff that the government has been out to make life difficult for them at times, with unending curriculum changes. Yet, Walker says, she thinks the school is on to something now. The new buildings were necessary, if at times poorly designed. “We had three performance studios, one science lab and a cooking room. What does that say about aspiration?” she said. “We’ve still got the performing art studios, but also five science labs, four technology rooms and a proper IT suite. We’ve turned the building into a school now.”
The ability to join up with the high-performing chain of academies has allowed best practice to be disseminated, extra money to be offered to the best teachers, and a renewed focus on a traditional curriculum that will give children the skills and qualifications they need for the top professions if they want it, she says. A roll of honour, bearing the names of the best-performing students, lines the reception wall. “We do the grammar school curriculum,” Walker says. “We do the three languages, we do Mandarin after school, separate sciences. We do these sort of things now. My staff have all been on training, we have Ofsted-rated outstanding teachers. And I pay them.”
Walker, a teacher in the north-west for 32 years, now wants encouragement from the government, not further chaos. “I know the results aren’t great but we have only just started with the Heath academy trust,” she said. “There is a massive difference already. I would like the children to come back that have gone elsewhere. Because I think we can offer a grammar school education in this school without being selective.”
In this, she is likely to find an ally in Labour’s Liverpool City region mayoral candidate, Steve Rotherham MP, who is standing for election in May.
Rotherham understands why Labour spent money here. “It did work in a way because some of the school buildings, and I remember because I went to one of them, were literally falling down,” he says. “There were buckets in every classroom. That wasn’t conducive to a good education.” But now the task is to deal with an even more fundamental problem that has blighted the area for decades, he says. “There is definitely a poverty of aspiration. It’s a horrible thing. I think I had it, and all the people around me had it.
“When I was growing up there wasn’t one person who wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, or certainly an MP. And that unfortunately is still the mentality of a lot of people.”
Rotherham is happy to let the teachers work out how to bring out the best in every child. He says he wants to help outside the school gates by trying to use the mayoralty once in power to encourage the big firms to offer apprenticeships to Knowsley pupils.
“We need a step change. That’s trying to look at things outside the education system. What is it that means they believe it is not worth pushing themselves? For me, there might be really bright people but at this stage in life a technical education is the right thing for them, and at a later date they could possibly blossom into something else. What will get those pupils interested in something? For lots of them it won’t be university. The chance of a proper apprenticeship might just spur them on to the get five GCSE A* to Cs. But there has to be a real offer for them.”
Meanwhile, Knowsley council is looking again at what it can do to support aspiration and has established a commission headed by former Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert. “This won’t be about structural changes,” Gilbert told the Observer. “It will be about making changes in the classroom. But if we can get things right in Knowsley, we can get things right in the rest of the country, too.”
