Sunday, March 02, 2008

British selective schools misrepresented by official propaganda

Grammar schools languish at the foot of new-style league tables published today, prompting accusations that ministers are creating "propaganda" against selective education. Four academically selective schools were ranked among the bottom 100 in England using a new system of measurement that takes account of pupils' social class, ethnicity and gender. Despite gaining near-perfect results, some schools have been penalised for being dominated by middle-class pupils who are predicted to get good grades

The National Grammar Schools Association (NGSA) accused the Government of using the figures to justify attacks on selective education. Grammar schools continue to dominate league tables based on raw results. But in the new "contextual value added" list (CVA), schools are ranked by the progress made between 11 and 14 and they are judged less harshly if they have many pupils who live in deprived areas. Other mitigating factors include the ethnicity of pupils and even the ratio of boys to girls.

Gravesend Grammar School, Slough Grammar School, Dartford Grammar School for Girls and Invicta Grammar School in Maidstone were among the bottom 100 in the rankings. A further five were among the worst 400.

A spokesman for the NGSA said the tables were "pure propaganda to undermine good performance". He said: "This is just part of a continued and concerted effort to undermine the good work that grammar schools actually do. To continue to try to find ways to denigrate the good work of 164 grammar schools, educating around 160,000 pupils, is a complete travesty."

This is the first year that the new ranking formula has been used. Last year a similar, value-added table, which judged the progress between 11 and 14 without taking account of poverty, put grammars among the top in the country.

Chris Walls, the head teacher of Mablethorpe Tennyson High, in Lincolnshire, the most improved school in the country, criticised the "wretched" grammar school system, saying it condemned the majority of pupils to an inferior education. His school has a higher than average number of children from poor backgrounds as well as those with special needs. Lincolnshire has 15 grammar schools educating roughly a third of the brightest schoolchildren.

In 2004, just over a third of the pupils at Mablethorpe Tennyson hit the national targets in English, maths and science at the age of 14. This year, almost two-thirds of pupils did so in literacy and science and three-quarters in maths. Mr Walls said: "Some schools like Tennyson haven't been doing well because of the continued existence of these wretched grammar schools. You are always going to have 10 or 15 schools in Lincolnshire which look like they are failing because they have a disproportionately high number of less bright pupils. To get rid of these failing schools you need to get rid of academic selection."

The Department for Children, Schools and Families pointed out that some grammars also appear among the top schools using the new measurement. A spokesman said: "Surely mainstream schools have more cause for complaint because they don't get to pick their pupils and therefore struggle to keep up with grammars in all other tables."

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Exodus from Australia's government schools

Note: The figures below cover primary and secondary schools combined. The flight to private schools is much greater at the High School level

The exodus from Australia's battling state schools has grown, with more parents sending their children to Catholic and independent schools. Official figures released yesterday showed 66.4% of the nation's 3.4 million full-time students were at government schools last year, falling from 66.8% a year earlier and 70% in 1997. In Victoria, which has the second highest proportion of students in non-government schools after the ACT, just over 35% of students, or 297,970, now go to non-government schools, compared to 262,948 a decade ago.

While the proportion of Australian students attending government schools fell, the state school student population rose 1.7% to 2,268,377 in the decade. But their growth was dwarfed by the performance of non-government schools, where enrolments rose almost 22%.

The figures are given in the Schools Australia report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The snapshot of the education system also showed that while there was a jump in teacher numbers over the past decade, much of the growth was in non-government schools, where the number of full-time teachers grew by almost 38% from 1997, compared with 10.5% in government schools. In Victoria, the number of teachers in non-government schools grew 33.1% in the decade to 2007, while the government school teacher population increased by just 14%....

The figures released yesterday reignited debate about the cause and effect of the drift to non-government schools as the Federal Government stood by the contentious funding model inherited from the former government. The funding formula, known as the SES model, measures a school's need according to the socioeconomic status of families who attend....

Nationally, retention rates of full-time students from year 7/8 to year 12 rose slightly, from 71.8% in 1997 to 74.3% last year. Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said there was still a long way to go to get the retention rates to 85% by 2015 and 90% by 2020 - targets nominated by the Labor Government.

The annual Schools Australia report also showed [that] A greater proportion of teachers were female, with a 3.5% increase since 1997. Last year 68.7% were female compared to 65% a decade ago.

State opposition education minister Martin Dixon said what was of most concern was the numerical drop of students in Victorian state schools, from just over 536,000 in 2006 to 535,800 last year. "People are voting with their feet and going to what they think are better schools."

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re: British selective schools misrepresented by official propaganda

What of course gets left out is that schools that showed the most improvement were almost surely some of the worst schools to start with, and had the most room to improve. And those that were the best to begin with, had very little room to improve from already-high levels, resulting in low scores on the "level of improvement" scale.