Hold on to your seatbelts.......

......it's that time of year again. Yes folks, school league tables will be published tomorrow. Stand by for the usual torrent of abuse for the 'worst' schools and the hyping of the 'outstanding' schools. Don' forget though: 'Schools do make a difference and mostly they make the same amount of difference'.

The advance media yowling suggests that the schools particularly under attack this year, as every year, are likely to be those that have failed, despite the threat of closure as punishment for this failure, to meet the government's arbitrary 'floor target' of 30% of students achieving 5 or more GCSE A*-C grades including English and maths. What is never pointed out is that there are schools that haven't got a cat in hell's chance of reaching the floor targets however good they are and however hard they try. The fact is that not everyone is capable of getting 5+ A*-C including English and maths or to put it another way we can't all be James Purnell (probably just as well). You can argue about the proportion of the population who will never make it. Let's be optimistic and say it's around 20% of the population. Now there are schools which have far more than their 'fair share' of this 20%. There are even schools that only have a handful of the 80%. So these schools will never reach the 'floor' ('aim for the floor' does not make a very inspiring slogan, we might note in passing). But these are not necessarily underperforming schools.

Imagine what it must be like to teach in or lead these schools. No matter what you do, no matter how well you teach or lead, the government and the media will always tell you that you are losers.

The one positive about the league tables is the evidence they will provide that academies are not the answer. They're actually doing worse than the schools that haven't had resources squandered on them. And some of the academies that have done so poorly will be 'popular' schools (see previous post). In fact, if you believe the government all the academies are popular schools.

You will need more than a pinch of salt to understand these league tables. There'll be no salt left for the roads on Friday.

What a clown!

James Purnell (who resigned from the government some months ago hoping that others would follow him - nobody did) has written an article in 'The Guardian'. It is one of the most bizarre ever published by an allegedly intelligent politician. The part that interests us here is a madcap proposal about school organisation, one of a number of equally absurd ideas which are supposed to make Labour re-electable.

His idea may be so deranged because he has never attended a proper school or had to 'choose' one as a parent (or had a proper job come to that).

In public services, the lesson was that we should never be defenders of poor services. But the failure was pushing naive models of choice that too often gave power to the provider rather than the citizen.So we need to go further with reform in schools, for example, by having pupils apply to schools two or three years in advance, so oversubscribed schools can expand, undersubscribed ones be taken over, and new providers come in for pupils who don't get a place at one of their chosen schools.

Where to start? First, many parents around the country effectively only have one school to 'choose', and appear to be quite content with this arrangement; it's only in large urban areas that the issue arises. Secondly, how many parents would want to apply two or three years in advance? Thirdly, he confuses popularity and effectiveness; as regular readers of this blog will understand, there are many popular schools that are not particularly effective and many not very popular schools that are very effective. Fourthly, a lot can change in two to three years. In Tameside, where Purnell's constituency is located, there was a very 'popular' school that expanded very quickly and became very large, as lots of schools would in Purnell world. When it reached a certain size, the systems that had made it a reasonably effective school started to break down, behaviour deteriorated and before long it was in special measures. All those parents who had made their choice two or three years before entry would be understandably after Purnell's blood.

But it's not remotely practical anyway. How quickly does he think oversubscribed and therefore almost certainly overcrowded schools could be 'expanded'? Perhaps he has in mind inflatable classrooms? He could certainly provide the wind required.

But if you could build new facilities in time, what would happen when, in perhaps two or three years, another school in the area became the 'popular' one?

I could go on. The most extraordinary thing is how this comedian could have got a first at Oxford.

No Easy Answers

This should be written large in every school, Local Authority education department and education minister's office. There's an interesting article in Guardian Education today about a 'hero head'. You would have thought they'd gone out of fashion when too many of them lasted about eighteen months, but this one seems to have a bit going for him having allegedly resurrected two schools, developed a successful Academy and having 'a bewildering variety of other jobs' including an 'executive principal' post and an 'executive headship' position. Phew!

But wait, he doesn't do it all by himself. So is he a part of various teams then? Not exactly. He has people who are 'united and focused on the things I believe in'.

You'd think that he wanted people who believed in these things themselves, wouldn't you? In which case, surely, they would focus on the thing we believe in. The truly successful leader uses 'I' sparingly and never when s/he should say 'we'.

And what are these magic ingredients? The usual things: 'rigid discipline and traditional approaches to teaching and learning (no mixed-ability classes; subjects, not themes; heaps of homework). Pupils are sent home for wearing the wrong shoes, hair must be neither too long nor too short, ties must be straight, and there's even a Mossbourne woolly hat for cold weather. Visits to nearby fast-food shops are banned, even on the way home....' And breaches of discipline are punished by no notice detention until 6 p.m.

Leave aside the fact that this last feature is probably unlawful and that in many areas neither parents or young people would accept it, all the magic ingredients are practised in many relatively successful and many relatively unsuccessful schools. There always have been some courageous schools who have successfully persevered with mixed ability teaching (knowing that there is absolutely no evidence that any form of learner grouping is inherently superior to any other). Equally, there are still successful schools that do not find it necessary to demand that young people wear outrageously camp uniforms to prove that they attend a proper school. There are fewer schools now that use themes, although this approach appears to be becoming fashionable again, but amongst those that do can be found good and less good schools.

We're told by the article's author, Peter Wilby - who often approaches these issues with a rather breathless enthusiasm - that this is a head revered by Labour and Tories alike. Of course he is. They love easy answers, particularly ones that they assume are popular with parents. So a successful head who says, 'We are traditional here and make no apologies for it.' is always a likely candidate for a knighthood and ultimately beatification.

What a pity for them that the record will show that just as many of the relatively few schools that are deemed to fail would claim to be 'traditional' as would call themselves 'progressive'. Likewise, schools which are a bit better than most ('outstanding' in the stupid Ofsted categorisation) are by no means all carbon copies of the Mossbourne Academy, thank God.

So, there really are no easy answers. But only a fool would ever dream that there were.