Leadership

Selection On Attainment? Local Authorities, Pupil Backgrounds, Attainment And Grammar School Opportunities

Expanding the number of grammar schools is unlikely to promote social mobility by providing more opportunities for disadvantaged pupils, according to this new study published in Educational Review. Leadership Briefing (143)

The study showed how a child’s chances of going to grammar school varied depending on the Local Authority (LA) in which they lived, their social and ethnic background, and their attainment level at primary school. In other words, affluent families whose children sit the 11 plus test for grammar schools in local authorities where they do not live are gaining an edge over disadvantaged pupils.

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      string(376) "... who don’t attend those schools. Main Points:The apparent success of grammar schools is simply due to the pupils coming from more advantaged social backgrounds and already having higher academic attainment at age 11. The few authorities in England that have retained selection and grammar schools have the highest ..."
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      string(5932) "Once the pupil intake of grammar schools is taken into account based on factors such as chronic poverty, ethnicity, home language, special educational needs, and age in the year group, the Durham University analysis shows that grammar schools are no more or less effective than other schools. The study also showed that pupils attending grammar schools, on average, are far less likely to have special educational needs and are less likely to have English as an additional language. Once these differences are accounted for, grammar school pupils attain about the same as equivalent pupils in the rest of the country. The research not only looked at the social backgrounds of grammar pupils, but also:  rates of chronic poverty  ethnicity  home language  special educational needs  age in the year group The findings suggest England’s grammars take only a tiny proportion of pupils who are, or have been, eligible for free school meals.This is important, say the researchers, because such pupils’ results tend to decline with every year they are on free meals. This means that other schools in selective areas are taking more than their fair share of the poorest and chronically poor pupils. The researchers say the findings could have implications for selection policies worldwide as many countries such as China and Singapore have highly selective schools within a national system and some such as Germany and Austria have an entirely selective tracked school system. The researchers are calling on the Government to phase out grammar schools as their analysis shows that grouping more able and privileged children in grammar schools can harm the majority of others who don’t attend those schools. Main Points:The apparent success of grammar schools is simply due to the pupils coming from more advantaged social backgrounds and already having higher academic attainment at age 11. The few authorities in England that have retained selection and grammar schools have the highest level of socio-economic segregation between schools in England with the remaining schools in those areas taking the vast majority of pupils on free school meals. Pupils at state comprehensive schools achieve very similar GCSE results overall regardless of whether they live in an area with grammar schools or not, according to the research (around 330 KS4 mean points for both selective areas and England overall for all pupils, and around 260 points for FSM pupils in both selective and non-selective areas). This shows that the mere existence of grammar schools in an area does not seem to drive up standards or reduce the gap between FSM-eligible pupils and the rest. Once the pupil intake of grammar schools is taken into account based on factors such as chronic poverty, ethnicity, home language, special educational needs, and age in the year group, grammar schools are no more or less effective than other schools. Pupils attending grammar schools are far less likely to have special educational needs and are less likely to have English as an additional language. They are also much more likely to be older in their year group (the 11+ test is not properly adjusting for age), to live in more affluent areas and they are more likely to be of Chinese or Pakistani origin. Conclusions: Every grammar school creates a much larger number of schools around it that cannot be comprehensive in intake, of necessity, because they are denied a supply of so many of the most high-attaining children. It does not matter whether these schools are officially designated as ‘secondary modern’ schools, or whether they offer different curricula or not. Also, the two sets of co-existing schools will and must differ in terms of a whole set of other pupil characteristics that appear to be related to selection at the 11+ but are not directly selected for. These include special educational needs, first language and, less obviously, ethnicity and poverty. The secondary modern schools also receive less funding per pupil within their local authorities than do grammar schools. Policy-makers always focus on grammar schools, whereas an equivalent claim to ‘we must have more grammar schools’ would be ‘we must have a lot more schools that are deprived of the most talented 15–20% of pupils in their catchment areas’. In areas with selective schools, the system is a clear driver towards increased social and economic segregation between schools, and all of the dangers that this entails – such as lower self-esteem and aspiration, poorer role models, poorer relationships and a distorted sense of justice. The policy of selective schools has little to recommend it. Dividing children into the most able and the rest from an early age does not appear to lead to better results for either group, even for the most disadvantaged. This means that the kind of social segregation experienced by children and young people in selective areas of the United Kingdom, and in selective schools and countries around the world, is for no clear gain. Put together, the findings mean that grammar schools in England endanger social cohesion for no clear improvement in overall results. The policy is a bad one and, far from increasing selection, the evidence-informed way forwards would be to phase out the existing 163 grammar schools in England. WEB LINK Grammar Schools In England: A New Analysis Of Social Segregation And Academic Outcomes KeywordsGrammar schools, England, social segregation, academic outcomes, pupil intake, nonselective state schools, special educational needs"
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Leadership

Grammar Schools In England: A New Analysis Of Social Segregation And Academic Outcomes

28 Mar 2018

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      string(740) "A summary and discussion of findings from ‘Evidence on the effects of selective educational systems’ by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University. This study shows that the vast majority of England's most socially selective state secondary schools are non-grammar schools. However, England's remaining grammar schools are enrolling half as many academically able children from disadvantaged backgrounds as they could do. Grammar schools take relatively fewer bright, poor pupils than schools that do not select by ability. The report also suggests that state faith schools take fewer poorer pupils compared to other state secondaries.

Folder: Leadership Briefings Issue 3.09 (33)"
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      string(4941) "ResourceSOCIAL SELECTIVITY OF STATE SCHOOLS AND THE IMPACT OF GRAMMARSOriginal DocumentSocial Selectivity of State Schools and the Impact of Grammars. A summary and discussion of findings from ‘Evidence on the effects of selective educational systems’ by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University. This study shows that the vast majority of England’s most socially selective state secondary schools are non-grammar schools. However, England’s remaining grammar schools are enrolling half as many academically able children from disadvantaged backgrounds as they could do. Grammar schools take relatively fewer bright, poor pupils than schools that do not select by ability. The report also suggests that state faith schools take fewer poorer pupils compared to other state secondaries.KeywordsSelective state secondary schools, grammar schools, educational systems, disadvantaged childrenSummaryThis study shows that the vast majority of England’s most socially selective state secondary schools are non-grammar schools. However, England’s remaining grammar schools are enrolling half as many academically able children from disadvantaged backgrounds as they could do.The research also concludes that the impact on the academic results of non-grammar state schools due to the ‘creaming off’ of pupils to grammar schools is negligible. Grammars have a widespread, low-level, impact on pupil enrolments across the sector. A relatively small number of non-selective schools do see a significant proportion of pupils ‘lost’ to nearby grammars, but this does not lead to lower academic achievement.The Trust proposes that a further study be undertaken to review ‘eleven plus’ selection tests to see whether they deter bright pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds applying to grammar schools, and urges more grammars to develop outreach schemes to raise the aspirations and achievement of children during primary school.It also backs calls for religious schools to consider straightforward ‘binary’ criteria to decide which pupils should be admitted on faith grounds, and other ways – including the use of banding and ballots – to help make admissions to all secondary state schools operate more equitably.Key Findings:Selectivity· Only 17 of the England’s 100 most socially selective schools are grammar schools.· 54 of the 100 most socially selective schools are Voluntary Aided schools (in control of their own admissions policies), which make up 17 in 100 schools nationally; 54 out of the 100 are faith schools, compared with 18 in 100 nationally.· The five most socially selective schools in England have Free School Meal rates below 5%, despite rates of around 35% or higher in the local areas from which they draw pupils.  · Comparing the test results of the schools’ intakes with other pupils in the same neighbourhoods, 50 non-grammar schools are more academically selective than the least academically selective grammar school in the country. Of these 50 non-grammar schools, almost half (24) are faith schools. · Considering the top quarter of academic performing pupils at age 11, in grammar schools just under 2% of these pupils are on Free School Meals, compared with 5.5% of high performing FSM pupils in non-selective schools.Intakes· Across England as a whole, one third of the wards in the country (33%) contain at least one pupil who attends one of England’s 164 remaining grammar schools.  · 80 out of the country’s 150 Local Authorities have more than 1% of the pupils who live in their area attending grammar schools, compared with only 36 Local Authorities that actually have grammar schools.· 161 schools (5% of non-selective schools nationally) lose more than 20% of their potential pupils to grammar schools. · Schools that lose pupils to grammar schools are not performing academically any differently from other schools with similar characteristics. Attainment· On average pupils in grammar schools achieve between zero and three-quarters of a GCSE grade per subject more than similar pupils in non-selective schools. Different values of this estimate arise from different, but equally plausible, statistical models and assumptions, so it is hard to be more precise than this.  · The research suggests that grammar school students take subjects that are on average about a tenth of a GCSE grade harder than pupils in other schools.ActionNotesAuthorRaspal Chima, Imaginative MindsDate CreatedOctober 2008Enquiries to:raspal.chima@yahoo.co.uk (Authoring Unit)Month / YearPage 1 of 1©Birmingham City Council"
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Leadership

Social Selectivity of State Schools and the Impact of Gramma

17 Oct 2008

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      string(372) "... which would provide a fairer and potentially moreeffective education system.Overt selection exists in 36 of England’s 150 localauthorities in the form of 164 grammar schools. Sowhat is the effect on outcomes of selecting pupils intoTighter rules on school admissions policies won’t beenough to stop selection by the ..."
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      string(5932) "17November 2007    Managing Schools Today   AdmissionsOver the next two months the race is on for parentsto find their child a place in a ‘good’ school.Over half a million pupils move from primaryto secondary school each year and for many pupils andparents this is the most stressful time in their educationcareer to date.Selection in our schools takes a variety of forms. Thisarticle explores the prevalence and impact of both overtand covert selection on the pupils it affects. It discusseshow and why selection ‘by the back door’ exists in Englandand analyses whether the Government’s recent reformsare likely to have much success at tackling the unintendedsegregation caused by the current system. Finally, thisarticle describes an alternative to our present admissionssystem which would provide a fairer and potentially moreeffective education system.Overt selection exists in 36 of England’s 150 localauthorities in the form of 164 grammar schools. Sowhat is the effect on outcomes of selecting pupils intoTighter rules on school admissions policies won’t beenough to stop selection by the back door, according toSarah Tough’s hard-hitting researchGuarding the entrancegrammar schools? Overall, grammars appear to havelittle or no overall impact in the areas in which they exist.Results show that while grammar school pupils come outwith better qualifications, this is counterpoised by thesuppressed results of those in the local authorities notattending grammar school. In terms of fairness of access,however, it is important to look at who attends theseschools – and it soon becomes clear that pupils with highersocio-economic backgrounds are usually the winners of aselection system.The intakes of grammar schools are considerablyunrepresentative in terms of the proportions of poorerpupils who attend, despite being of high ability. In selectivelocal authorities, only 32 per cent of high-ability childreneligible for free school meals (FSM – the Government’s mainmeasure of pupil disadvantage) attend grammar schoolscompared with 60 per cent of non-FSM pupils (Atkinson etal 2006). From these numbers it seems clear that grammarschools are unlikely to contribute positively to social 18AdmissionsManaging Schools Today    November 2007mobility. These findings are supported by research lookingat the impacts of the changes of the Scottish schoolingsystem in the mid-1970s, when all state-supported selectiveschools were abolished on social mobility rather than solelyon attainment outcomes (Iannelli & Paterson 2006). Thestudy concluded that the education reform had no effecton levels of social mobility.Here we can see that selection, and therefore segregation,by ability is not fair in terms of access, and that researchsuggests it is also inefficient.International evidence shows that countries withoutmuch school segregation often have high-achievingschoolchildren. Countries that overtly segregate pupilsthrough tracking systems, such as grammar schools, do nothave a higher average student performance but they doshow larger variation – and the more selective schoolingsystems are, the more important the socio-economicbackground of the pupil is to their outcomes. Thisrelationship appears not to be simply due to the fact thatcountries with more egalitarian schooling systems are oftenmore egalitarian in other ways that could affect studentoutcomes. International evidence shows that countrieswhere schools are less segregated by socio-economicbackground tend to have higher overall performance. Thissuggests that segregation causes inefficiency as well asinequity in school systems.In addition, evidence looking at how the ‘quality’ of apupil’s classroom peers influences that pupil’s outcomesshows a significant positive effect from having a highproportion of high-achieving pupils in the classroom. Thesefindings are consistent with most parents’ intuition thata school full of high-attaining pupils is likely to improvetheir child’s academic performance. However, evidence ofthe effect of ‘pupil mix’ on the overall effectiveness is oftencontradictory, so these studies neither allow proponents ofselection by ability to claim that it is a more efficient way oforganising education overall, nor do they allow opponentsto claim that selection is inefficient (as opposed to unfair).The other side of the selection debate is concerned with‘back door’ selection – which is likely to affect a largernumber of pupils and parents than the overt variety.The current accountability and regulatory frameworkmeans school leaders are under huge pressures toachieved good results. One effective way of achievingthis is by ensuring they have the best possible intake.One way schools could do this would be to discourageparents from ‘low-attaining’ backgrounds from applyingin the first place, for example by making school literaturedifficult to understand for parents with poor literacy. Inaddition, schools that can gain information about thesocio-economic background of pupils could use this intheir admission decisions to potentially select in this way.Evidence from the London School of Economics suggeststhat schools that are their own admission authoritiesdo have more potentially selective admissions criteriathan those schools whose admissions are set by the localauthority (West et al 2006).Evidence of covert selectionWhat is the evidence that some schools are covertly selectingtheir pupils? One way to explore whether schools may be covertlyselecting is to look at the composition of schools compared tothat of the areas in"
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Leadership

Guarding the entrance

30 Dec 2007

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      string(324) "... TAs in our schools has been continually questioned. The assertion that many TAs are having a neutral and, in some cases, a negative influence on pupil attainment is significant cause for concern. Clearly, the government is unsure of their stance on TAs, choosing not to publish the long awaited new ..."
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      string(5700) "Difficulties in identifying good practice approaches to the deployment of teaching assistants (TAs) are nothing new. Ever since the Sutton Trust and Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) reports first surfaced between 2008 and 20121,2, the value and place of TAs in our schools has been continually questioned. The assertion that many TAs are having a neutral and, in some cases, a negative influence on pupil attainment is significant cause for concern. Clearly, the government is unsure of their stance on TAs, choosing not to publish the long awaited new TA standards and instead leaving it to the unions to take the plunge.3 Why the concern?Uncertainty around the role of TAs is entirely justified when we consider the widespread problematic nature of their current deployment. For a start, it is widely acknowledged that TAs spend the majority of their working day supporting children identified with special educational needs (SEN), or those struggling to access the learning in the main classroom. Consequently, we often have a situation in which the most vulnerable and arguably most ‘challenging to teach’ children are spending a large proportion of their time with the lowest qualified adults in a classroom. It is, therefore, not a surprise that this scenario isn’t always having positive results in terms of pupils’ academic progress.When we also consider that there are significant difficulties with TAs’ management across our schools, with staff in different positions holding the responsibility for managing TAs, and the dearth of relevant training opportunities available for TAs, the severity of the problem becomes clear. The roles that TAs undertake on a daily basis are hugely varied and the level of skills, knowledge and experience that TAs bring to those roles are more varied still. Therefore, a ‘one size fits all’ approach isn’t appropriate.There are over 200,000 TAs in English primary schools alone and, as a workforce, they cost the government in excess of £4 billion a year. Consequently, many of the aforementioned difficulties associated with their role are positioning TAs as an easy target for cuts.  Some Local Authorities have announced significant cuts to TAs’ wages in recent weeks. Durham’s decision to reduce TAs’ pay by up to 23 per cent will have a huge influence on the workforce, especially when we take into account that the average TA in Durham currently earns around £15,000 a year. Yet, many large scale research studies, including my own recently completed doctoral study into the role of TAs, have highlighted that schools overwhelmingly deem TAs to be indispensable in the smooth running of school life. So, where does their value lie, and how can we make the case for their continued employment?How should TAs be used?The Education Endowment Foundation published a report in Spring 2015 which, for the first time in recent years, attempted to highlight effective practical approaches to the deployment of TAs in our schools.4 Approaches such as ‘use TAs to add value to what teachers do, not replace them’ were an important step forward, yet, in many cases would involve a significant organisational shift if they were to be implemented well. The focus on quality intervention programmes was also an important recommendation and, again, would require a shift in approach for many schools when choosing the programmes that TAs implement. For me, shifting the way in which intervention programmes are selected is one of the most important and successful ways that many schools can improve pupil outcomes and make best use of the skills of TAs. Many TAs spend a significant proportion of their day supporting small groups of children, often in a space away from the main classroom, implementing intervention programmes. These programmes most often focus on building skills associated with maths, reading and/or writing. We know that intervention programmes based on evidence and research are far more likely to promote pupil progress. However, we also know that many schools understandably select intervention programmes based upon word of mouth, clever marketing campaigns and/or how well they fit the needs of their children at that time. These methods of selection do not always take into account the level of evidence that a programme is able to demonstrate and, therefore, may not result in the levels of pupil progress that schools would like. Additionally, the strong focus on maths, reading and writing in the intervention programmes selected often puts significant pressure on TAs to essentially ‘teach’ some of the most vulnerable children in our schools many of the basic skills associated with mastering core subjects. Unless TAs are given relevant and in-depth training on how to implement these programmes, it is likely that many TAs will not possess the level of knowledge and/or skills to implement these programmes effectively. This is contributing to findings such as those in the Sutton Trust report5—that many TAs are not having positive influences on pupil attainment.Of course, there is the argument that we shouldn’t be asking TAs to ‘teach’ children the core skills associated with reading, writing and maths in the first place. Many do not have the same level of skill or qualifications as teachers (nor should they) and, crucially, they are not paid to take on that role. Additionally, we are often asking them to take on this role with some of the most vulnerable children in schools. If we expect TAs to work essentially as ‘substitute"
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Behaviour

Can teaching assistants support social inclusion?

28 Oct 2016