What makes a good state school?
People seem to have very set ideas about state schools. It’s not something a parent, who cares about education is happy to send the child off. Most parents look to grammar schools and if they can afford it private schools. Anything but a state school. But with successful state schools like Brampton Manor (who is sending the most pupils out of any school to Oxbridge), doesn't it make you question what is it that some schools are doing that some schools aren’t? I do not live in one of the best boroughs for education, in fact, I live in the worst. However, I have attended two of my borough, one on the high end of achievement in my borough and one on the lower end, and my experiences in both of the schools made me come to realise the differences between a good school and a bad school.
1. Organisation
One of the big differences between those two state schools I attended was organised. The first school I went to (which was the higher educationally achieving school) was very organised as a mainstream state school should be. The school has a lot of people that they are managing: staff, students and visitors.
They can't afford to not be organised, because things will not run as they need to. But when I moved to another state school (lower achieving), you could tell by the way the staff manoeuvred around the school that there was no strong sense of organisation, and this really messed up the whole maintenance of the school. Teachers were sometimes not present, so students decided not to show up to lessons, everyone was confused, students had to learn off their own accord because no actions were being taken to solve this. When things are under control, the students will be under control. This is why this school had such a bad behaviour problem, there was no control is put in place, so students felt like they could just act on their own accord and misbehave. This is probably why the school was not doing well academically and this made me realise how pertinent organisation is when it comes to leading schools
2. Size
The highly achieving academic school I went to was very big There were 240 pupils in my year, and they were increasing it every year below mine so obviously there was a lot of problems with classes and space. This may be seem like a problem and this is a problem a lot of parents have with state schools, but the education still was effective, I mean they wouldn't be higher up on the league tables if it wasn't. However, going to the low academic achieving school, there was only 90 people in my year to begin with and that had dropped to 50 by the next academic year but, the management of classes (going back to organisation) was nonsensical. There was three groups, with eight people in one group and almost 30 people in the other group. However, that group of eight people did no do greatly in GCSEs, majority of them actually failed.This showed me that it is actually about the quality and not the quantity. When you think about it, there is no reason a class full of eight children and one teacher should not be doing than a class of 30 children and one teacher.
3. Staff
Talking about the quality of education, it is the teachers that would provide this. The highly achieving school I went to were really particular when it came to staff. What they would do is hire staff from other well achieving schools and give them higher positions as an incentive to move schools. The teacher can make a break a student, because they are the ones teaching the students. What a teacher says is what the student will go home to learn, so it's very important that the teacher is teaching correctly and effectively. However, when I went to my lower achieving school, they were really low on staff because the behaviour was so bad and the OFSTED reports are so bad that no teachers wanted to work there. So when it came to hiring teachers, they were not really looking particularly into how effective that teacher might be, they just needed staff. They were very desperate for staff and so they were filling up these roles with useless teachers that didn't even want to teach because they were fed up of the students. This was a really big factor to why the school ended up at the bottom of the league tables every year
4. Motivation
Another topic about schools is whether the students themselves are hindrance to their own educational success. This, however, really should be the schools job to make children find the motivation to want to do well. My higher achieving school was a catholic school, so as a student, you're mainly going to find motivation from outside the school, and whilst in educational success was promoted heavily inside the school we would find it from places like church,since the students were Christian/catholic. But in my lower achieving school, there wasn't really motivation for the students. What they would tell us in assemblies that we are responsible for our own achievements, and whilst that is true, it's not really fair to say that to someone when they haven't been given the chance to do well, when they've been put in a school that's not organised, with poor staffing. This school was situated in a poorer area, so students from that school might not be able to afford to pay for a tutor or extra resources and are relying on that school alone so for education. So for the school to then turn around and say to us that it is the students fault for them not being able to do well is very demotivational, as you're telling the students that they are their own problem so that students might just want to give up and not try any more because they're being told that they are the problem, when in actuality they are most likely part of the problem, but there's other factors such as the school themselves that need to take accountability for the factors listed above.
This would definitely be useful for parents looking to send their child to a new school. I am now in my third school I have noticed that those four factors are still pertinent when it comes to a school, so make sure you look out for these things.
