As half term gets under way, a provisional breakdown of August’s GCSE results shows London secondary schools outscoring those of England’s regions for the sixth year in a row. Many fellow London parents will recall when secondary transfer routinely entailed desperate searches for good schools with spare places that might take a good hour to travel to, or anxious home owners multiplying their mortgages in order to move into a desirable catchment area. Or else fleeing to the Home Counties.
No doubt such things still go on, but the difference today is that you might also be spoiled for good local choices, certainly by comparison with the 1990s. The capital can take particular pride in the achievements of children who aren’t from well off homes, of which filthy rich London, to its shame, has very many. Around half of Greater London pupils eligible for free school meals securing five or more high grade GCSEs in 2013 compared with 30% in the rest of south-east England. Inner London’s disadvantaged teens do particularly well.
This “London effect” has become very marked: it has been shown that children who move out of London during their schooling end up doing less well than they would have had they stayed, and vice versa. But there’s been quite a debate about why exactly the amazing story of London schooling has occurred, in particular the improvement in attainment among poorer children.
The most recent contribution has come from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which looked at attainment in London schools over the past decade or so in a report for the government’s social mobility and child poverty commission. The IFS found that while London’s secondary schools certainly deserve some of the credit they’ve been given by politicians of every hue, the biggest factor of all in narrowing the achievement gap between the affluent and the less fortunate was, in fact, “the power of early achievement in primary schools”.
Newsnight policy editor Chris Cook, a former special adviser to Tory education minister David Willetts, went so far as to say that “the folk narrative of London school improvement has been fundamentally changed” by the IFS study and that “it is clear that something astonishing was happening in London primary schools” around the turn of the millennium.
Precisely what that something was, the IFS itself could not say with certainty. But its report is very clear that the more help that can be given to children towards the end of primary school, the better their chances of thriving at “big school”. Sounds like a simple lesson all London politicians should learn.
