How bad are schools in England, really?

[dang65]

If you're talking about GCSE results, 60% A-C represents the best (state) schools around here. The secondary nearest to where I live has 33% of the kids getting 5 or more GCSE's at C or above.

I'll have to check again. It's actually 'er indoors that checks all this stuff in detail and decides what's acceptable. I think she sets her sights a bit too high myself. Seems to me that a reasonably hard-working and intelligent child with encouraging parents would do fine in one of those schools, unless the place was full of the kind of psychos that target anyone who shows any sign of wanting to do well. But 60% doesn't really indicate that sort of place does it.

[Bagpuss]

Went to a very bad inner city comp in the 80s. Emerged with 3 good A-levels and hence a good university place. Was the only one to make it to university in my year though.
But teaching yourself because the teachers are carp makes you incredibly self-reliant in later life.

That's not really a good advert given the ratio in your year who made it to Uni, your schoolmates can't all have been thick. Add to that, didn't you say your parents were teachers once?

[chicane]

The question is, though, are the schools which have poor exam results actually that bad? I'm talking about 60% A*-C passes

If you're talking about GCSE results, 60% A-C represents the best (state) schools around here. The secondary nearest to where I live has 33% of the kids getting 5 or more GCSE's at C or above.

[sasguru]

Went to a very bad inner city comp in the 80s. Emerged with 3 good A-levels and hence a good university place. Was the only one to make it to university in my year though.
But teaching yourself because the teachers are carp makes you incredibly self-reliant in later life.

[derekthedalek]

I blame the parents.

Whilst we haven't got any kids of our own my mrs has been a teacher for 7/8 years now. The main problem she has is that parents are too quick to blame the school and back up their kids even when the kid is quite plainly in the wrong (she's worked primarily in good-ish schools in mostly middle class areas). This leads to a breakdown in discipline and the symptoms you describe.

Fortunately she's never had to work in an inner-city school but her mate who does regularly regales us with stories of police coming to schoool to deal with knives and occasionally guns.

Hey, I'm not blaming the teachers here. There's only so much they can do and when that's exhausted, they have to lump it.

[Bob Dalek]

I've got two kids. One goes to a grammar which is blinding. The other goes to an average, non-inner-city secondary which is not.

The biggest problem with the secondary is the 10% to 20% of pupils in every year that feck about, don't want to learn, disrupt the classes, and waste so much of the other kids' learning time. Anything up to whole lessons wasted.

And what can the average teacher do about it? Feck all. If these kids could be filtered out into their own special bootcamp school where they can't spoil it for anyone else, the rest would do very well.

A new POV... interesting.

[Moscow Mule]

And what can the average teacher do about it? Feck all. If these kids could be filtered out into their own special bootcamp school where they can't spoil it for anyone else, the rest would do very well.

I blame the parents.

Whilst we haven't got any kids of our own my mrs has been a teacher for 7/8 years now. The main problem she has is that parents are too quick to blame the school and back up their kids even when the kid is quite plainly in the wrong (she's worked primarily in good-ish schools in mostly middle class areas). This leads to a breakdown in discipline and the symptoms you describe.

Fortunately she's never had to work in an inner-city school but her mate who does regularly regales us with stories of police coming to schoool to deal with knives and occasionally guns.

[derekthedalek]

I've got two kids. One goes to a grammar which is blinding. The other goes to an average, non-inner-city secondary which is not.

The biggest problem with the secondary is the 10% to 20% of pupils in every year that feck about, don't want to learn, disrupt the classes, and waste so much of the other kids' learning time. Anything up to whole lessons wasted.

And what can the average teacher do about it? Feck all. If these kids could be filtered out into their own special bootcamp school where they can't spoil it for anyone else, the rest would do very well.

[dang65]

I've got three children going through school at the moment. As it happens, the area where we live in the North West has a number of good primary and secondary schools, and quite a few independent schools as well. But we're not from round here and want to move back down south as soon as possible. My contracts are often down there or in Europe anyway.

So, we go looking for schools. Places we've looked, like parts of London or counties south of London all seem to have one decent secondary school and loads of frankly rubbish ones. This is judging purely by exam results. The one good school in each place is always massively oversubscribed. One place we contacted has a waiting list with 77 people on it, just for Year 7.

The question is, though, are the schools which have poor exam results actually that bad? I'm talking about 60% A*-C passes, or whatever the standard measurement is. Is that actually bad, or are the 95%+ schools just freaks? Do poor exam results really point to schools with horrendous discipline and no real culture of learning, or can they in fact be really pleasant places where hard workers will excel, and the schools just get dragged down in the stats because the pupils are simply not that academic?

I went to a fairly highly regarded comprehensive but was useless at exams and came out with practically nothing on paper. There was nothing much wrong with the place though. Only very minor bullying and that, no big deal.

If it was only one child then I might go for an independent place, but three is stretching it too far.

Anyone with good experiences of a "bad" school?