I guess that the great Ian Dury produced his song Reasons to be Cheerful as an antidote to the fact that many of us find it much easier to think of Reasons to Be Anxious. Looking ahead at education is adding to my “anxious” list.
A recent report claimed to show which headteachers make the most impact on improving pupils’ chances. It categorised headteachers into types; one type is “surgeons”. Alex Hill, a researcher on this Centre for High Performance report, said schools run by “surgeons” “would lose as many as 25% of [pupils in] the GCSE year”.
When I watched the BBC’s Chris Cook talk about this on Newsnight, I thought: Wow, I bet Justine Greening is going to have to say something about that. A school with, say, 200 pupils in the GCSE year could “lose” 50 pupils? Where do they go? There must be hundreds, thousands, out there now. What are they doing? Whose attainment target are they attached to? Where in the intricate machinery of Ebacc, Progress 8 and Attainment 8 school measurements do they fit? Are there schools absorbing the “lost” pupils which, when the gov.uk statisticians have done their calculations, will show they are “coasting”?
But then, I thought: how can all the close scrutiny and monitoring of schools brought in over the past 20 years allow this level of “losing”? Didn’t the eagle-eyed Ofsted inspectors notice “surgeon” heads – reportedly on an average of £150,000 a year – lopping off low-achieving pupils for the sake of their results data? If they did, why didn’t they broadcast it so local parents would know their child stood a one in four chance of being hoofed out in their GCSE year? If they didn’t, is that because “losing” that number of pupils is easy? Can a school behave like an autumn fruit tree, dropping apples and plums with no visible motion from the branches?
Then my reasons-to-be-anxious list grew again. Surely my train of thought had been infected by something insidious: my thinking, this report and the great grammar school initiative are all trapped in the same frame. We keep thinking and talking about individual schools as if each were hermetically sealed off from its neighbour. Yet, people’s and society’s need for education can’t be sorted on the basis that your local schools are in a survival-of-the-fittest battle with each other.
What that system does is select high flyers – who may or may not benefit society – while at the same time guaranteeing that there are rejected, excluded others.
This system denies that education really is for all. It denies that it should be the job of schools in a locality to do all they can collectively to educate all local pupils for the general good.
Even a well-intentioned report such as this one misses this point. It persists in thinking that the El Dorado of good education lies in the individual good school and the individual good head – the type characterised as the “architect” (“careful planners”). Even if, as it appears, it has found the profile for that good headteacher, the report can’t show what happens in a locality when the “surgeons” or the “architects” take over and a combination of results and rumours starts to affect intakes and outcomes in neighbouring schools.
None of this is a mystery. Sir Tim Brighouse, the former chief commissioner for schools who ran the London Challenge, affected school achievement using a completely different frame: grassroots cooperation between schools. Reports on the success of his work lie unopened or ignored on your desk. In its place, we have the probability that your government will increase the number of “losers” through selection by exam. Again, the model is that education in general is improved by bumping up the exam scores of an individual school in a locality. Doesn’t the evidence point to the exact opposite?
The proposal seems to rest on two justifications: at present there is selection by house price; parents like selective schools. One curious aspect of the claim about house price selection is that you and your colleagues seem to be reluctant to give us exact statistics on that. Is this kind of selection a major problem or a minor one? Could it be handled in any way other than by selective exams at 11?
On the matter of parents liking selective schools, I wonder: do you have the statistics on whether parents like their children to go to the schools filled with children who have failed the exam at 11? Are those schools popular? How do those schools fit into the need for education to be for the general good?
Yours, Michael Rosen
