What do they do in there?

The idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but there was always a suspicion — at least among grammar-school pupils like me — that private schools had more than their fair share of duffers who gained a leg up in life through friendships made on the rugger field rather than hard study.

Yet since the Department for Education started to publish school exam results two decades ago, the results have been there for all to see. In 2014,7 19 per cent of A-level entries at independent schools were graded A*, compared with a national average for all schools of 8 per cent. It is a yawning gap which has stood out year after year, but why? It is easy to complain about ‘lack of resources’, but rather than moan about the unfairness of it all, one state school has set out to discover why children at independent schools consistently outperform their peers at state schools.

Christ the King Sixth Form College is a trio of schools in Lewisham, Brockley and Sidcup. Its own results are impressive, with pupils passing 98.4 per cent of the A-levels they took last year. When some money became available from the Mayor’s London Schools Excellence Fund, it instigated a project — involving Eton, St Paul’s, Wellington and several other state and independent schools — to see if there were lessons which it and other state schools could learn from the independent sector. Teachers were sent to observe and take lessons in each other’s schools. Meanwhile, pupils were consulted on what they thought of teaching methods, and the results studied.