Today's GCSE results prove that academies work

Saskia

Yes, let's see more of the Acadamies; but in the poor areas where they are needed most (like some of the ones cited here). Do 'Outstanding' schools in affluent areas where students have more parental support and enrichment activities available need Academy Status? And the extra wealth that comes with it? If we make all schools 'good' or 'Outstanding'then students will have a fairer chance of achieving rather than giving the already outstanding schools more. It will be up to the students then to take the opportunities offered to them rather than a postcode lottery or political agenda.

jonnyjackhammer

Perhaps a minor improvement but not a big deal. Academies are not free from the national curriculum, not free from OFSTED and current educational fashions and not free from the potentially misleading statistical tables you are quoting. What is needed is not just a change of Corporate Image and ownership but a serious change of culture. The King is in his “all together” as many secondary schools struggle under the burden of regulation and teachers under a regime of continuous disempowerment. Stalinist record breaking results are declared in all seriousness - 99.6% pass rate at A level! Meanwhile, the decimation of engineering, technology and the hard sciences in most schools and most of our further education colleges is almost complete. After years of professional and Government meddling the nonsense that currently passes for education is so entrenched we probably need to start again. We must attract teachers who actually know something and can teach it with passion. We need to stop force feeding children with mind numbingly boring one hour lessons and introduce variety and pace. Then we need to remove children who refuse to learn and more importantly prevent others from learning. We need to welcome a few mavericks into senior positions so as to encourage risk taking and we need to find and recruit educational enthusiasts with energy and vision and not the management clones that have done their latest Head teacher training course. Most importantly we should stop talking about inclusion and start talking about educational excellence. Unfortunately few educationalists and Head Teachers know what “up” is anymore and they are totally incapable of understanding the difference in conceptual difficulty between subjects. Lastly we should understand that “qualifications” are not the only measure of success. We need to hit relativism hard and practice a form of cultural imperialism - specifically we need to promote those values that we really need in a future generation. Not least the ability to take responsibility for one's own actions and life. Our children are children and it’s not OK to stand back and let them get on with it. Fraser – don’t get carried away. GCSEs grades are a very poor indicator of anything. It’s “like” measuring the car by the condition of the sun visor and glove compartment or even by the “badge”.

Liberty

Academies can do better with a little independence but would do far better with total independence. Gove should create a ‘big bang’ and made all schools autonomous. Then they could select on ability. Selective schools are two or three years above average at 11 years old. This is because differences in ability are so huge that they are unbridgeable by comprehensives. Comps put eleven year olds who read Harry Potter for fun or can do algebra – if given the opportunity - with the barely literate or numerate. Even in a comp 1000 strong with 10% ‘gifted’ and 10% dim that’s just 11/12 of each per year; too few for specialised lessons. But the gifted are actually the best 2-3%. They are vital in a hi-tech world but do not have the chance to shine – except in the super selective private sector but most can’t go there.
As it is most of the bright are held back and the dim cannot fall behind; all must progress together. The bright resent this, get bored and naughty and if really gifted are lonely and frustrated; the average are held back whilst the dim spend their lives propping up the class destroying self confidence. None get the education appropriate to their abilities. They all work to GCSEs at 16 which are too easy for bright pupils, too difficult for dim ones and are no preparation for A level.
Many behaviour difficulties would be solved by autonomy. Schools could create and implement appropriate discipline regimes. Academic selection eliminates the problem of inappropriate lessons that alienated the dim and the very bright. There is always a range of ability in any class but it is very much less in a selective system and the teacher can teach one lesson with virtually the same expectations from all. As ability is normally distributed, with a few bright, a few dim, very few special schools with most in the middle then schools would reflect this. A few schools for the very bright would be in every city and a few regional ones. Exclusions would be a rarity because they would be directed to appropriate schools form 11 or earlier. Some would select on junior school report, entrance exam or interview but most schools would not select at all. In all cases, the opportunity to move around would be maintained to allow for variations in personality and maturity so virtually all would be in the right school by the age of 16.

seb

Kudos to jonnyjackhammer for reminding us about the elephant in this particular room. The now venerable styles of anti-education employed in our schools constitute a truly mountain-sized obstacle to raising standards and producing GCSEs, A-Levels and university degrees that are worth the paper they're printed on. The Beeb interviewed some lovely youngsters who'd benefitted from a scheme designed to aid comprehensive pupils from deprived backgrounds. They were charming and enthusiastic but rather incoherent, expressing themselves in that garbled 'inner city' form of English that, I think, points to the absence of a raft of basic skills. Top marks for personality and dedication: these, though, absolutely can not serve as stand-ins for those life skills that even the most inspirational schools continue to fail to impart to pupils - college-level literacy and numeracy.

Complete autonomy from the state is, as Liberty has commented, necessary for this reason: state education has its own agenda, one that has absolutely nothing to do with quality but everything to do with fluffy values of social inclusion and equality of outcome. We will only ever see a breakthrough when a genuinely independent school or type of school reverts to the use of unfashionable but effective types of teaching. Blocking the way to this, of course, is the edifice that generations of 'progressive' educationalists have been working at creating since the 1950s.

AParent

It should be noted that in the case of Burlington Danes, it was languishing at around the 30% A*-C until the current headmistress took over 2 years ago. Politicians and the media are too quick to attribute success or failure when in most cases it is as simple as the quality of leadership and teaching within the school rather than whether it is an academy or not. This is what we should be focussing our attention on.

Charlie the Chump

As Toby Young sys in the Telegraph - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100051496/gcse-results-are-now-worthless-as-a-measure-of-a-schools-success/ - the problem with this analysis is tht the GCSE system has been progressively rigged to give these results and so they are no longer any guide to the quality of educational achievement.

Victorian Medea

What self-congratulatory naivety! 'Academies' are a euphemism for the kind of lowest common denominator New World anti-education so beloved of the left-wing pedagogues who have dominated teacher training and educational theory. Sponging millions out of working-class capitalist heroes a la Lord Sugar and Jack Petchey by reminding them of their 'guilt' at rising out of the Hackney mire and their requirement to 'give something back' is now considered a successful formula for pretending that something wonderful is happening in the inner city. Money is splashed out indiscriminately on futuristic buildings and state of the art computers in the delusional belief that this will 'engage' youth with learning. Rubbish! Typewriters, monkeys and Shakespeare comes to mind, not to mention pearls before swine. If you really want to level up the playing field and provide an escape route for bright working class children to succeed, you would be better served by employing the model used by the more successful independent and public schools - formerly known as grammar schools. Access to the common culture of liberal humanities, with an emphasis on healthy competitiveness and team-spirit brought out through sports, as well as the higher side of artistic and musical expression will enormously enrich and benefit those kids who do not have an immediate anchor to what it means to be British today. In the early 20th century the children of Jewish immigrants were thus acculturated to the British way of life whilst maintaining their own culture at home. Given that the demographics of these city academies are similarly populated by the children of immigrants, it would seem desirable to foster success with a model which has seen the Jewish community through from immigrant to assuredly middle and upper class in three generations.

Or don't we want to make people British any more?

Cynic

I'd say that what today's GCSE results prove is that the exams are a lot easier than the old NUJMB papers of the 60s. I'd really like to see some of those who received A* sitting some past papers. The results should be interesting.

Janee

Let us look at Harris and question why a) they are circulating leaflets in Bromley to drum up students for their academies elsewhere and b) why that same leaflet omits the Harris Academy at Peckham which has shown consistently poor and poorer results. It would be interesting to know how much the Harris Federation spend on press releases and PR. The Harris Academy Purley is claiming the credit for improved exam results which were entirely and accurately predicted by Haling Manor school last year, before it was overtaken by Harris.

If you look at the exam results for predecessor schools to academies you can see that many of them were showing improvements in exam results BEFORE academisation and continued improvement cannot be claimed for the academy process. It is also true (Parliamentary response) that academies have reduced the percentage of free school meals students. In other words, there is considerably more than the change of governance which has led to the "improvement". As PricewaterhouseCoopers concludes: "There is insufficient evidence to make a definitive judgement about the Academies as a model for school improvement."

It is also not true that the only schools which became academies were those which were doing poorly. An outstanding school in Sandwell became an academy and has now been failed by Ofsted.

This article is poorly researched and just goes to prove that if you are selective enough you can prove anything. "Lies, damned lies and Academies".