I was pleased to see that I am not the only person perplexed by the promise made by nearly all free school proposers that the teaching in their school will be outstanding. This claim appeared most recently in the website of the
school being set up by my former colleague Peter Hyman. Now Laura McInerney, author of the excellent
pamphlet 'The Six Predictable Failures of Free Schools and How to Avoid them' has applied a more forensic approach to this claim in a post
here.
Most heads and governing bodies spend a great deal of their time focussed on how to become a good or outstanding school, the key feature of the latter being a very high proportion of outstanding teaching. Unfortunately excellent intentions don't always translate into reality. As Laura McInerney points out finding good or outstanding teachers in shortage subjects isn't always easy and keeping them can be a problem. She asks of the free school proposers : "The puzzle is this:
how will you guarantee outstanding teaching? Are your local schools so packed with surplus super-human teachers that they will flock to your gates? Even if they do, will they honestly be instantly brilliant even though they have never worked with the management team or the students before?"
Free school proposers also like to make grand claims about their small class sizes. I find this incredible too. Delivering small class sizes requires extra teachers. Even if they are not qualified , they will still need to be paid ( unless free schools are proposing to use volunteers?) so where is the money coming from? Moreover the small size of some free schools may militate against excellence. Higher teacher turnover in US charter schools is partly due to the limits that small schools put on professional development.
All schools, whether free or otherwise, have the potential for great teaching if they are well led, recruit good staff , then nurture and develop them. However it is nonsense to claim that this can be guaranteed before a school has even opened,
Visionary statements about outstanding teachers and small class sizes may be very seductive to anxious parents but I wonder how many of these will be translated into reality, and how many parents are being sold a false prospectus?
Comments
There is nothing wrong with the intention but as you say, it could be more theory than practice. The danger is that parents may be open to 'seduction' as life as we know it appears to be all doom and gloom.
I suspect state schools may have to lose children and families to the other side only for them to realise in time that the grass wasn't any greener after all - not in all cases anyway.
It would be nice to think we could prevent the unnecessary pain and discomfort by engaging (re-engaging) those families before they leave. Highly unlikely under current circumstances; 'too little too late' I hear them cry.
I went to the Head Teacher's Questions and Answers evening last night at my local comprehensive school. It is a genuine community school, non-selective, teaches children of all abilities, plays a large part in the local community. The head re-affirmed the school's ethos to strive for excellence in all areas of its mission to teach and get the best out of all the kids there. Free schools are promising nothing radical from what good maintained schools have been quietly and confidently delivering for many many years.
What the free schools are offering is escape routes for dissatisfied parents. Instead of using coercion just be good at what you do so people want to use your service. If people don't like it they are free to not use it, legally, morally and ethically. We should be comfortable with successful community schools and also people leaving them if they don't like them. Don't forget it's a democracy and there are limits on normative power, mainly in the form of the will of the people.
Ben - education isn't like the retail industry, where if someone doesn't like Tesco's offering they can do their shopping at the nearest branch of Asda or Morrisons or Sainsburys. The idea of parental choice is a myth - everyone wants to send their children to the most successful school in the local area, so it ends up being the school that chooses that pupils rather than the parents choosing the school. Free schools will just end up choosing the pupils that are the most likely to be successful, and anyone that thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. And what about escape routes for the dissatisfied parents of free school pupils, who enrol their children in one of Michael Gove's new schools, only to find that the reality does not meet the grandiose claims? Fiona is quite correct - there is no way that free schools can meet the promises that they are making, and I have no doubt that there will be a great many disappointments as a result of the Education Secretary's experiment in opening up educational provision to the masses.
Plenty of great football clubs out there helping kids to make the most of their talent and plenty of kids enjoying it.
Ben, my issue is that Free Schools have not necessarily thought through *how* they are going to be an escape route for dissatisfied parents. It is as though by proclaiming you will be wonderful you will become it. My article is intended to get people thinking about how their Free School will be beter and - if they do figure out magical formulaes - then these could be shared with other local schools so they too can improve.
For example the Newham 21 school has said some teaching will be in large 50+ lectures. This might be a way in which other teaching hours are allocated to smaller classes and personal tuition. If it works people can copy it.
Undelying all this is the simple fact that public services serve the public, not the other way around. It's galling to hear people tell the poor that they have to like it and lump it with their local schools, when the poor are crying out for better schools. What a shambles to be entrenching the lack of opportunity at the bottom when the rich can still buy it.
No-one is saying that the poor have to lump it. What parents and pupils need are good local schools for ALL pupils - that way ALL children receive a good education. You say that the "rich can still buy it". However, recent research (discussed elsewhere on this site) into the achievements of pupils at universities shows that comprehensive school pupils outperform all other pupils. This suggests that the rich are wasting their money if they are looking for attainment. And it is incorrect to say that "the poor are crying out for better schools." A more measured assessment comes from the OECD who made it clear in "Viewing the UK School System Through the Prism of PISA": when socio-economic background is taken into account, UK state schools outscore privately managed schools (page 13). In other words, UK state schools overall are effectively educating pupils from a socio-economically disadvantaged background.
One does get the feeling that some children in these schools will be the victims of an educational experiment.
As for the idea that people can just 'leave and go to another school' - that's another dangerous mistake. First of all children at secondary schools aren't easily portable. Because we don't have an age-defined national curriculum (it is done in blocks of 'key stages') students across the country cover topics at different times. Moving students from one school to another means they are likely to end up with large gaps in their knowledge which affects cognitive development and academic attainment.
Secondly, not every school does their GCSE/A-Levels exams with the same exam boards making it particularly difficult for students to move between the ages of 14-19. If moved during this stage to a school following a different exam board you are highly likely to get worse grades.
Thirdly, some US states pursued a policy of relentless competition between schools - actively encouraging parents to move their children and then the state 'shut down' schools with low role. Almost all research on these states found that the emotional and social disruption to students, coupled with the academic discontinuity of teacher planning, significantly negatively impacted student attainment, especially if moved in the 2-year period before exams.
I am for changes in education and I am not against Free Schools. That has never been my agenda. What I am against is ill thought-out implementation of policies that don't take into account the 'boring logistics', like exam boards or teacher training. It's not sexy stuff but it is the reality of running successful schools.
I am glad Laura has mentioned the social and emotional aspects of pupils' development. A lot of 'theories' about school choice fail to take into account that there are real human beings involved. Moving a child, who may be happy, settled, with good friends, can be traumatic and I don't think those are decisions most parents would take lightly. Believe it or not, it is possible for children to be happy in schools that appear in other ways to be 'failing'. My two older children were in a primary school that was a the bottom of the league tables and went through a phase when it was deeply unpopular in the local community. However they still talk of those days as the happiest in their lives . We didn't move them partly because we were committed to trying to make the school better, but also because I believe it would have been very disruptive to their social and emotional development which did benefit from the close and loyal bonds they forged with other children and families locally, from a wide range of backgrounds, which have stood them good stead ever since, and they are both now adult graduates.
No, no, no.
Janet, you make a good point about the use of statistics, but whether a school stays open or whether children leave friends is a matter for parents and children first, everyone else second. I don't think it should have to close, unless parents don't want to use it.
But if the Education Bill goes through Parliament the Secretary of State will have the power to "intervene" and close such a school irrespective of the wishes of parents. So much for freedom, parental choice and localism.
You really should invest the £6 and get a copy of Laura's pamphlet. When I read it, I realised that behind the grand announcements and revolutionary fervour, threre was a lot that free school proposers - even and especially the ones like WLFS who have got funding agreement stage - hadn't anticipated and were ignorant of. It was by reading Laura's pamphlet that I was made aware of the challenges facing Charter Schools and why so many of them have failed. There is a real lesson to be learnt from the American model and if free schools founders remain ignorant about the pitfalls or arrogant enough to assume they will somehow manage to avoid them, then there are serious ramifications for them and for the future of education in this country and it will takes decades to undo. Please get a copy
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