“It was one of the major low-points in my life. It was absolutely gut wrenching. It was awful.”
Bill Leyland, headteacher at Kirkby high school in Knowsley near Liverpool, is reluctantly remembering GCSE results day last year and hoping for better when this year’s results are published on Thursday.
The nightmare began to unfold at around 7am on the morning before results day 2014, when Leyland and a small team of senior colleagues went into school to prepare to sift through the data.
“It’s horrible. It’s almost like you are going for the most important interview in your life, but you can’t affect the outcome – that horrible, nerve-racking, desperate situation,” he said.
By mid-morning a worrying picture had started to emerge. English and maths were not bad, there were some individual success stories, pupils who did well, exceeding expectations in this subject and that. By the time Leyland and his team had finished poring over the statistics, however, it became clear that Kirkby had some of the worst results in the country.
When teenagers finally receive their GCSE results this week after the long summer wait, much of the news will feature those who have done well, with ubiquitous pictures of happy students jumping for joy. But what of those schools and individuals who don’t do so well?
Last year just 24% of students at Kirkby managed to get the government benchmark of five GCSEs including English and maths at A* to C, compared with a national average among state school students of 57%.
Knowsley, Kirkby’s local authority, was named the worst performing borough in the country, with 34.4% of its teenagers achieving the required five good GCSEs, well below the government’s 40% floor standard.
Leyland and his team were devastated. Like other schools, they had been expecting a dip because of recently introduced government reforms to exams and assessment that caused widespread turbulence in the national results, but this exceeded their worst fears.
There were a lot of near-misses – Ds where all-important Cs had been hoped for – and each poor result translated into a disappointed teenager and a difficult conversation about rethinks and resits.
The next morning, as Kirkby’s year 11 students arrived to pick up their results, Leyland and his team braced themselves to deal with the fallout. “They are emotional. You have some who are visibly upset. You have some who try to slope off disappointed. And at the end of the day you do some phoning around to check kids are all right,” Leyland said.
Kirkby high school serves a largely disadvantaged, white working class community with more than 65% of its children on free school meals. According to Leyland, it was particularly severely affected by the government’s exam reforms last year because its results until then had been “propped up” by vocational qualifications.
In 2013, 43% of pupils managed to get five good GCSEs, but when the government decided to strip out BTEC diplomas in subjects like ICT, PE, travel and tourism from the league tables, Kirkby and other schools like it were left badly exposed. GCSE students were also required to sit their exams in an end-of-course exam instead of in modules, with only their first result counting in school league tables.
Despite their teachers’ best efforts, Kirkby children were simply not prepared for the new challenges. “It really weighs on you,” Leyland said. “It affects all the staff. But what happens is you throw yourself into making sure you are not in that situation again.”
Leyland arrived at Kirkby in January 2013 at a time when the school’s reputation was in decline. Known then as Kirkby Sports College, it had been put in special measures in 2012 – the worst possible judgment of a school – after Ofsted reported that teaching, leadership and pupils’ achievement were all inadequate.
The Rowan Learning Trust, a small academy trust that grew out of a single school in Wigan, was brought in to turn the school’s fortunes around. Leyland thought all the raw materials were there. He liked the staff, the children and the strong sense of community, and he got to work.
“The school was in chaos,” he said. “I walked around during lesson time and there were kids in the corridors, not in lessons.” There were more than 20 girls crowded in front of the mirrors in the toilets checking their makeup instead of in their classrooms.
The following week he covered up all the mirrors and a tough new regime began. First they took away mobile phones, which “were seriously disrupting learning in this school”, Leyland said. Most pupils now comply, but if a teacher spots a phone it is confiscated, put in the school safe and a parent is called to collect it at the end of the day.
Makeup was tackled next. The false eyelashes were peeled off, the nail varnish wiped away. Staff hand out baby-wipes as the girls arrive in school if they are wearing makeup, and persistent offenders are put on report and are examined in every lesson to check they have not reapplied it.
Then the jewellery went. There were protests for about two weeks, then nothing. “The key thing for everyone was consistency,” Leyland said.
The boys, who were used to coming to school with nothing but a pen in their pocket, were told they had to bring bags, and pupils designed a new uniform: a purple tie and black blazer with no braiding to keep the costs down.
Since last year’s disappointing results, the leadership team at Kirkby high school has put enormous focus on better preparing pupils for the rigour of the new exams. There were two sets of mocks for year 11s, and each student was regularly assessed throughout the year to pick up on any problems.
There were extra revision sessions after school every day apart from Friday, with Saturday revision classes and holiday revision at half-term and Easter. Gradually teachers began to see a shift in attitudes to learning. Where there used to be just a few “secret revisers” who were too embarrassed to admit they cared, now pupils took to Twitter to photograph their bedrooms plastered in notes.
“I love coming here and learning,” says 16-year-old Natalie Vaughan, who will be getting her GCSE results this week and is hoping to go to theatre college. “It was stressful, but the exams went well. I was well prepared, which I’m happy about.”
Steven Brown, also 16, wants to become a physiotherapist and is also enthusiastic about the school’s transformation. “The mobile phones [rule] was the biggest change. It made it better. It made everyone more focused on the work.”
Erica Whelan, 16, remembers the mirrors disappearing. “I was devastated. It was absolutely traumatic. I was never a big makeup freak, but I did like my eyebrows and mascara.” She too will pick up her results on Thursday and is hoping to go on to study A-levels. “I was just constantly revising and revising. I had the support of all the staff.”
Now it remains to be seen if all the hard work has paid off. The school had a positive Ofsted inspection recently, and is no longer in special measures but “requires improvement”. Morale among teachers has improved, pupils numbers are climbing slowly and the attitude of the community to their local school is shifting.
“We used to be the bottom of the pile,” says Danny Byrne, a year 11 pastoral support officer. “But people are looking up to us now.”
