EDUC/GralInt-The schools at the top and the bottom of the pile.Education - the great divide

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The schools at the top and the bottom of the pile


Education - the great divide


At the start of his second agenda-setting series on education, award-winning writer Nick Davies investigates schools at the top and bottom of the pile to try to find out how education for the majority of British pupils can be improved


Nick Davies

The Guardian, Monday 6 March 2000



Today is speech day at Roedean College. The string orchestra plays Mozart as the parents gather in the centenary hall. They have come to hear the report on the state of the school, to join the applause for the retiring staff and to watch the three head girls deliver their review of the year, but most of all, these mothers and fathers have come to salute the achievements of their children.

The headteacher, Patricia Metham, calls the girls up one by one, announcing their awards and their prizes and their exam results. "Irina Allport, eight and a half passes at GCSE. Leonara Bowen, nine and a half passes. Angelica Chan, 11 passes." The applause drenches the hall.

Mrs Metham says the school's results are the best in Sussex and place Roedean high in the first division of league tables. And the future? "For those at Roedean," she declares, "it need hold no terrors."

Down the grassy hill, on the far side of the Roedean playing fields, on this October Saturday it is just another morning on the Whitehawk estate - lads belting a football around East Brighton park, dogs sniffing at the dustbins. Whitehawk is a sprawl of terraced red-brick houses, home to something like 11,000 people, most of them white, many of them out of work. Whitehawk is the poorest estate in Brighton and one of the poorest 10% in the country.

While Patricia Metham is celebrating success, another headteacher is having a very different experience. Libby Coleman spent three long years as the headteacher of Stanley Deason comprehensive school on the Whitehawk estate and now she sits at home, less than a mile away, staring out at the sea and looking back over those years that began with so much hope when she had no idea - really, none at all - that by the time she left, her career as a head, her health and the school would all be in ruins.

This is the story of two women. In many ways, they are quite separate - the secure and confident head of the famous old private school where almost every pupil scores at least five top grades at GCSE, and the rueful and defeated head of the state school where only 10% of the children could achieve the same marks.

The two women have never met. The strip of land between Roedean and Whitehawk marks the most notorious division in British society. And yet, for all this separation, the women have this in common: that after several decades in teaching they know what makes schools tick.

High achievers
A few weeks before Roedean's speech day, Tony Blair appeared on Channel 4 news and talked about this same division. He made clear how passionately he wants state schools to match the results of their private counterparts. You can see why. There are 550,000 children in private schools. They count for a mere 7% of the pupil population and yet provide more than 20% of those who make it to university and nearly 50% of those who go to Oxford and Cambridge. A Financial Times survey of A-level results last year revealed that all but 13 of the top 100 schools were in the private sector. In the private schools 80% of pupils pass five or more GCSEs at grades A-C; in the state schools only 43% reach the same standard.

Why is this happening? In government circles, the answer has been agreed for years: teachers in state schools fail to do their job properly. The analysis is alarming: over a period of 30 years, beginning in the 60s, the quest for excellence was undermined by an obsession with equality; student teachers were injected with a theory of child-centred learning that poisoned the heart of pedagogy, allowing the pupil to dictate the pace and direction of teaching; discipline and effort were banned from classrooms where no child might now be accused of failure; whole-class instruction gave way to groups of children ambling along; criticism was replaced by consolation, and achievement was subverted by a poverty of expectation.

By contrast, according to this view, the private schools were innoculated from this progressive disease by their tradition of competitive achievement.

This perspective was born on the right as a rebuttal to the comprehensive movement. It was expressed with clarity by the former Tory education minister, George Walden, in his book, We Should Know Better: "The idea that every child can advance at his or her pace by informal, non-competitive techniques that favour spontaneity over effort is a beautiful dream which, lodged in impressionable minds and given scientific status, becomes unconscious dogma. In reality, it leads to overstressed teachers, low aspirations for the gifted and ungifted alike, bored or disaffected pupils, and an enormous waste of time and money. The contrast with the private sector needs little emphasis."

Rightwing journalists pursued the same critique with passion and found that, in opposition, Tony Blair's Labour party had joined their crusade. It is now close to the heart of New Labour's approach to education to see private schools not as an enemy to be abolished, but as a partner to be emulated - as "a benchmark of best practice". In the three months before Roedean's speech day, both the head of Ofsted, Chris Woodhead, and the minister for school standards, Estelle Morris, spoke at conferences of private headteachers, stressing admiration for their work. Since May 1997 the government has invested £1.6m in bridge-building schemes to allow state-school pupils to enjoy the techniques of private-school teaching.

It is explicit in this analysis that the strength of private schools is not to be explained by their intake of highly motivated children from affluent families, compared with the deprived and demotivated children in some state schools - in the government's words, "poverty is no excuse". Nor is it to be explained by the extra resources or smaller class sizes in private schools, as Mr Woodhead has explained repeatedly, pointing instead to "a toxic mix of educational beliefs and mismanagement". As the department for education recently told the Guardian: "The quality of teaching is the main thing."

Hopeful start

Libby Coleman was full of hope when she arrived at Whitehawk. It was January 1995. She had already been a head for 10 years, first in Northampton and then in Barnet, and she had done well -and yet she wanted something different. In both her schools, she had seen deprived children struggling to make the grade and she believed she could help them, that poverty was no reason for failure.

She was excited by all the new ideas that were bubbling out of the political world - literacy hours, numeracy hours, mentors, beacon schools - and so she had decided to move to a school that was really struggling and to try to use these ideas to turn it around.

Stanley Deason was struggling with poverty. Ms Coleman was struck by two things: some 45% of its pupils were poor enough to claim free school meals, and almost all of them were white. There were no aspiring immigrants here, pushing their children to succeed. These were second- and third-generation long-term unemployed. By the time the children reached Stanley Deason many of them had fallen way behind. Among the year seven children she found only 10% had a reading age of 11. And the attendance was terrible. On average, each morning, only 72% of pupils were turning up. By the afternoon, even more had faded away.

Ms Coleman was undaunted. She could do it, she was sure. As the weeks passed, she found the kids had a wildness in them. There were children who reeked of lighter fluid: they had soaked their shirts in the stuff and hooked them over their faces to suck in the fumes. One boy had started working as a prostitute down on the Brighton waterfront: as far as Ms Coleman could find out, he had originally been seduced by his stepfather who had tried to cash in by taking the lad to Amsterdam to sell him in the brothels there.

Then she was dealing with a lovely, bright girl who had the intelligence to reach the top level in her Sats tests but she wouldn't speak. Not a sound. Ms Coleman had come across such muteness before - it is often a sign of abuse. But she was told there was hardly any point pursuing it: there was so much sexual abuse on Whitehawk that unless you had real evidence no one was going to try to prove it.

In Whitehawk, she learned, the apparently simple could rapidly become bizarre and frightening. She was asked to find a place for a 14-year-old boy who had been expelled from another school. As soon as she met him she could see he had good in him but, within days, the boy was abducted from the estate by three men who drove him to some woods and raped him. She had the boy and his mother in afterwards to talk about it, but the mother was incoherent with tears and the boy attacked her. There was nothing she could do. He ended up in a locked ward.

The parents were as troubled as the children. She held an open day for new parents but a group of them turned on a young mother who had been a pupil there with them years ago and started bullying her, just as they had done as children. Some parents disappeared; one ran off to London with her pimp, leaving her boy with his blind grandmother.

Still, this was why she had come here, to help kids in this kind of trouble. She was sure she would be all right. But if there was a problem that worried her it was in the staffroom. From the first she had been warned she was in trouble. The vice-chairman of the governors, a man called Robert Metcalfe, universally known as "Met", was apparently dead set against her. Having retired as the school's deputy head, he seemed to look upon the place as his personal fiefdom. He had backed another candidate for head and lost. Now he was telling anyone who would listen that this Coleman woman was no bloody good. She was warned that Met had several friends in the staffroom who were sewing the seeds of dissent. They were saying she would be out in less than six months.

Free thinkers

Patricia Metham's study is a peaceful place. There is a group of wicker chairs in front of the fireplace, a Persian rug, a collection of sculpted hands, a computer, a printer, a teddy bear, a neat and tidy desk and a picture window looking down over the playing fields to the sea. Mrs Metham is intelligent, forceful and clear in her thinking. First of all, she is clear that Roedean is not the private school of familiar cliche, all fresh air and hockey sticks. It is a place of academic excellence but, more than that, she says, it is a place of breadth, which prizes drama and dance and sport and music. Even more than that, she wants it to be a place for free thinkers. She was rather proud to find one of her old girls leading a rent strike at Oxford last year. "Intelligent independence" is her mantra.

It may be for this reason that although she knows what ministers and conservative journalists say about private schools such as hers, she does not agree with them. Not at all.

Teaching technique comes into their success, but her explanation has almost nothing in common with the government's analysis. It is built, first of all, on a simple foundation: the intake of children. "Those schools that dominate the league tables choose to be, and can afford to be, highly selective," she says. Every pupil who wants to enter Roedean sits an exam. The 11-year-olds who enter the school are among the brightest and the best.

Roedean puts its year seven pupils through cognitive ability tests. Last year not a single child was below the national average for non-verbal or quantitative skills. And all of them could read.

Mrs Metham goes further. It is not just that these children have their academic engines running when they reach the school, but they tend to be from homes that have impressed on them the need to take education seriously. "On the whole, we have highly motivated pupils and highly motivated parents."

This is the most important part of the story - the intake of able children from supportive families - but it is by no means the end of the explanation. Three years ago the London School of Economics produced a study that compared the educational achievements of students who went to private schools on the Tories' assisted places scheme with the achievements of those who had turned down such places.

The LSE checked the verbal and non-verbal reasoning scores of the two groups and confirmed that the two sets of students were similarly able. And yet by the time they came to take their A-levels the group who had opted for the private schools had clearly pulled ahead. First, they had sat more exams and second, they had scored better results.

Translated into A-level grades, the children who went through the private schools were achieving between one and a half and three grades higher than their equivalents who had stayed in the state sector.

The intake of children is clearly important but equally clearly, as a mass of educational research has shown, schools make a difference. The successful private schools are selecting talent. But they are also developing it.

Flirting with disaster
On the Whitehawk estate, life at Stanley Deason was sometimes like being inside a threshing machine, as one incident crashed down on the tail of another. One moment there was a neighbouring school on the phone complaining that two Whitehawk girls had been down there with razor knives, trying to cut up a girl for flirting with one of their boyfriends. The next, a boy kicked out a water pipe and flooded the library below. Someone started a fire in the toilets. And then Ofsted said it wanted to inspect the place.

Still, Ms Coleman knew what she wanted. She was just not so sure if she could pay for it. Early on she had discovered that the school roll was carrying "ghost children" - at least 30 kids whose names were being ticked off on class registers, who were being funded by the local education authority, and who were essentially fictitious. Either they had been at the school but left long ago or else, so far as she could tell, they had never existed. She called her union. It was fraud, she was told, and she could go to prison. So she called the LEA and told them about it. The ghosts were exorcised from the roll and the school lost about £40,000 out of its annual budget.

At first Ms Coleman thought she could live with the loss. Miraculously, the school had managed to store up £80,000 in its reserves. Except that the money was nowhere to be found. She called in two sets of auditors in search of the cash, but it was not there.

She wanted more teachers. There was no chance of that: the whole LEA was being told to expect a cut across the board. She wanted to buy a computer program called Success Maker for the year seven children to work with on their own, stretching each child to an appropriate level. But there was no money for that. In fact, there was no money for computers and the only ones the school had were too old to take software that used Windows.

She tried to tackle the truants, calling the parents and posting attendance figures on the noticeboard. She thought it would help to give prizes for the class with the best attendance and for three pupils who most improved their attendance so she paid for the prizes herself.

The whole school was struggling to drag itself forward and she could see the stress pumping through her staff. There were teachers who simply lost it and sobbed or climbed up on chairs and started yelling at the children. She saw one teacher screaming at a boy: "You're useless, you're completely worthless." She did not know what was more upsetting - to see a teacher reduced to such hysteria or to see a child's self-respect so battered. In any case, she went off to the toilets to be sick.

There were several staff off ill. An English teacher had died and everyone said it was stress. Another had simply disappeared. There were several who developed serious illnesses: cancer of the kidney, cancer of the colon. One of the art teachers had a breakdown, the head of maths left in tears, the new science teacher cracked up and took six months off.

Only the most talented teachers could thrive against these odds. There were others who limped along, with no help or support, constantly calling in sick, forcing the school to hire supply teachers.

And then there were those who, Ms Coleman believed, should never have gone near a classroom, teachers who treated children with contempt, who were glad when they stayed away because it made life easier and who were quite happy to manhandle them.

She wanted to get rid of these really bad ones but she couldn't. It was not just that the law created a 12-month obstacle course to dismissal, policed at every stage by unions that would jump on the tiniest procedural fault, but, worse than that, she would need the support of the governors and most of the really bad teachers were also allies of Met Metcalfe, now making no secret of his desire to oust her.

Soon, she was fighting a cold war against this group of teachers. From time to time, she would discipline a teacher for manhandling a student and there would be a storm of whispers in the staffroom. Teachers who had no time for Met and his gang of troublemakers began to worry that Ms Coleman was creating a culture where children were encouraged to dish dirt on teachers, true or not. Some began to say it was her fault they were suffering such stress, because she was so quick to criticise.

Several times she went to her desk to find that someone had been through her papers. She began to take sensitive work home. As she identified problems, she found her working day stretching from eight in the morning until late at night, spilling over the weekend. Every solution seemed to spawn another problem: there were teachers who were furious when she succeeded in steering the most unruly pupils back into their classrooms. Soon, the tide of tension was reaching her, too.

She had a lurking feeling of sickness. She found she was grinding her front teeth almost all the time, she realised that her neck and shoulders were constantly tight; in fact the tension ran all the way up around her skull and into her forehead. She was smoking more and more - up to 30 a day - and she was having trouble sleeping.

Sometimes in the evening she would drink whisky to force the tiredness upon her, but then she would wake in the small hours and wander around the house, smoking and squeezing her hands. She realised just how bad she was becoming when a girl refused to come to school because she had been gang-raped - several of the boys who attacked her were in her class. The police seemed unable to do anything, and Ms Coleman could not see a solution in the classroom. So the girl left. But what really shocked the head was the realisation that her sadness for the girl had been quickly supplanted by quite a different feeling: dismay that she would lose the couple of thousand pounds' funding that went with the student. She was getting chest pains, too. But there was no time to worry about any of that. Ofsted was on the way.

By the time the inspectors arrived, in May 1996, she had been running the school for 15 months. Things had improved a little, but not enough. The Ofsted team did a good job. They told Ms Coleman what she already knew: not enough children were coming to school; too many were failing exams; the school was in deficit and was going to have to make cuts to stay alive. Privately, one of them told her, they had never come across such treachery in the staffroom.

The Ofsted inspectors offered their own version of support, but it was not one she welcomed. They suggested the school should be put into "special measures". They said it would help: the LEA would have to give more support, she could get a better budget, the staff would have to work together to keep the school open. But Ms Coleman was worried. She knew special measures could be a poisoned chalice: the school would be branded a failure and the few remaining middle-class families would run, taking precious money with them. If she was really unlucky, the best staff would start fleeing, too. And this was all the help on offer.

She went home, too exhausted to think. It was half term and she believed she was dying, she could not speak, she could only shuffle, and she stayed cocooned in fatigue, wondering whether she might be rescued by death. In the car on her way back after the break she felt one side of her body go dead. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her face was bloodless, her lips were grey. She managed to drive to the hospital where she was told there was nothing wrong, at least not physically.

Pride of place
Patricia Metham is proud to show you her school: the chapel with the neo-classical ceiling and the Byzantine marble; through the quiet cloisters to the renaissance garden; into the language labs; the science labs; and then the network of libraries containing 20,000 books, a collection of videos and CDs, and 25 computers linked to the internet.

Here is the Roedean theatre; the dance studio; the art studio, the design technology suite where some of the sixth-form girls have been stripping down an old Austin; the six indoor netball courts, two indoor cricket nets, one indoor hockey pitch, the gym and full-sized indoor pool.

It is no secret why a private school may do more for its children than a state school. Money. "If the government want state schools to offer what we offer, they are going to have to spend on each child something much closer to the fees that our parents pay," Mrs Metham says. Roedean is paid £10,260 a year for a day girl, roughly five times the amount a school like Whitehawk is given for each pupil.

Money shows not only in physical resources but at the heart of the school's business, where the teacher meets the child. The biggest classes may have 20 girls, usually a highly motivated group of the same standard, but for those who are not so confident or who are approaching big exams, classes are much smaller, sometimes as small as three. The pupil-staff ratio across the school is 8:1. And, although Mrs Metham and her staff may work hard, they are not collapsing under stress and illness.

If Patricia Metham is right - that this combination of a bright intake and adequate resources is the real foundation of her school's success -there is nevertheless more to her account. There is a third factor that finally defines the division between these two educational worlds.

On her own
Libby Coleman knew her school was one step away from closure. She turned to the authorities for help, but the education department took five months to authorise her action plan; the LEA was being broken up, Ofsted was supposed to come back each term but disappeared for a year. She was alone. Worse, the announcement of special measures was driving families away; that meant the budget was being cut and the governors were looking for redundancies. The staffroom was a snakepit of dissent and depression. As a result of the special measures every teacher's job was now threatened. Met's allies were constantly whispering against her - the person who would decide their future - and she knew others were blaming her for failing to protect them, for raising their hopes in the first place.

She poured out ideas: catch-up lessons for poor attenders, a welfare officer for the lower school, work experience for older children, CCTV to stop vandals, a working party on staff absence, mentors for year 10 pupils, teachers to visit other schools, new homework programmes, shorter lessons, more lessons. But she was trapped by a lack of funds and lack of support. The staff were demanding that some of the most difficult children be excluded but the rules of special measures forbade it. Ms Coleman had identified the staff who ought to go but she could not get rid of them because no good teacher was going to replace them. The students started to roam wild in the corridors; she sent patrols of teachers with pagers and walkie-talkies to hold the line against chaos.

Eventually, in mid-1997, more than a year after Ofsted's visit, HM inspectors came by and said things were improving, and the new Brighton and Hove authority came up with some money for a senior teacher and the Success Maker software. That September the school was relaunched with a new name, Marina High, and it became the first secondary school in the country to introduce a literacy hour. Met's term on the governing body came to an end. Ms Coleman began to think things might be all right.

But she soon began to see that there were too many holes in the boat. The students had had a riotous summer, burning out half a dozen police cars on the estate. The police said some were working for a drugs syndicate that had moved down from Glasgow. The few new teachers were drowning in classroom disorder. One walked out for good. She decided to bring in a counsellor to help with some of the wilder children.

He arrived to find workers removing her study door (someone had smashed a fist through it) and Ms Coleman tried to explain that she had lost her sixth girl that year, pregnant; that a 17-year-old former student had just been murdered on the rubbish tip next to the school; that the brother of one student had just been accused of helping to murder the father of another; that a boy had been run down on the crossing outside the school; that she herself had just had her purse stolen by a year eight girl who had evidently given it to her older sister, and that the older sister, a prostitute, had used her credit cards, and the police had traced her to a flat where they had found her dead from a heroin overdose along with her boyfriend, and so now the year eight girl had been taken into care and it was her friends who were upset and needed counselling. The counsellor said he would have to see what he could do.

In November HM inspectors came back, saw a rotten collection of lessons and narrowly escaped disaster when someone threw firecrackers at them in a crowded corridor. In December the LEA warned Ms Coleman that the school would close if there was not dramatic change. She spent Christmas in a fog of defeat. She had seen a psychiatrist to try to release her stress but now carried so much tension in her shoulders and neck that her jaw locked tight and she lost the ability to speak.

Within weeks of the new term beginning she knew she was hurtling towards disaster. In a single week children made two serious allegations of assault against staff. She followed procedure and suspended both teachers while she investigated. The staffroom went berserk and, when she reported that both allegations were groundless, the news only increased the teachers' irritation. The education department and the LEA and Ofsted and HM inspectors were all demanding results and the more Ms Coleman passed on the pressure to the staff, the more they hated her. Some wrote an anonymous letter to the LEA saying the school was in chaos and the headteacher was mad; the former governor, Met Metcalfe, phoned and demanded that the LEA sack her.

In February 1998 the education department paid a lightning visit to the school and did not like what it saw. HM inspectors were due back and, shortly before they arrived, Ms Coleman went to the LEA and told it she could not go on. It agreed to let her go with a decent package if she would stay for the visit. The inspectors came and shook their heads and took Ms Coleman aside to tell her she had done her best, and reported that the school was still failing. It was Ms Coleman's last day. She felt mad with fatigue and maybe relief, almost speechless with lockjaw. She went for one last walk through the school, leaning on the arm of a visiting deputy head. A year eight girl saw her. "Are you pissed, miss?" she asked. "No, darling - just very tired." The next day, she resigned. She was 52 and she would never teach again.

When she was talking to the parents at Roedean's speech day, Patricia Metham warned her audience: "It's not easy being a teacher these days. What other profession is so beset by 'experts' who haven't ever done the job themselves and who wouldn't last five minutes in a real school? Having in the distant past been a pupil is felt by too many to be qualification enough to dictate terms to those who are trained and experienced professionals."

Nobody dictates terms to the teachers in Roedean. They are not answerable to David Blunkett, the education secretary, or his department or the LEA or Ofsted. They are not bound by the national curriculum or Sats or special measures or any of the superstructure of supervision that has settled over the state schools. And that is the third factor in Roedean's success: freedom to teach as its staff think best.

"All teachers in the maintained sector have been constrained by the same rather rigid bureaucracy and requirements," Mrs Metham says. "If you talk to people who have had a really good educational experience, nine times out of 10 they will tell you about the charismatic teacher who stimulated an interest in a subject, an idiosyncratic person who knew enough about pacing and matching, understanding what was required. At independent schools, teachers are highly accountable - to the headteacher and to the parents - but how they get their results and what they do in the classroom or in a department, the judgment is left to them."

Recovered
Libby Coleman is better now. She has recovered her health and found new work as a consultant. The school on the Whitehawk estate never recovered and finally closed, eight months after her departure; all of the teachers lost their jobs.

Looking now at the yawning gap between her school and Roedean, just across the fields, she finds a kind of unity with her counterpart. The two headteachers see the same three factors at work, in their success and in their failure: the intake of children; the provision of resources; the freedom to be professional. The stars of the private sector have all three. The perceived failures of the state sector work with none of them. In each case, the state sector has suffered from government policy: from the Tory reforms of the late 1980s which polarised the intake of children in state schools, concentrating the least motivated into struggling schools; from the historic underfunding of British state education; and from the interference by the department for education and its agents, with their highly politicised analysis.

The irony is that the department is trying to emulate private schools by adopting a superstructure of reform regarded with fear and contempt by the private schools themselves. Indeed, they cite their exemption from this as a key factor in their success.

In the most superficial sense the analysis of the government and the conservative journalists is right; the quality of teaching is worse in some state schools. But this is not because they use different techniques or rely on different theories. Almost without exception, teachers in the state sector have been trained at the same colleges and with the ideology as their private counterparts.

Whitehawk had no special involvement with progressive teaching. On the contrary, Its most troublesome teachers were a cynical breed of authoritarians. Roedean has no special attachment to traditional methods, such as whole-class teaching, which is embraced with such passion by Chris Woodhead and his followers.

Mrs Patricia Metham says there are times when classes should be taught as a whole and others when they should be taught in small groups. "Differentiation is the key," she says. She herself learned her teaching profession in the state sector. There is almost no connection at all between reality and the easy consensus of distant journalists and politicians. The real division, it transpires, is not between the teachers of the two different sectors but between the practitioners, on the one side, and the politicians and the pundits on the other. The great advantage of the current official consensus is that it allows the politicians to deny all responsibility for failure which is, on their account, entirely the fault of teachers, many of whom now collapse in stress and lose their jobs as a result. The great irony is that David Blunkett sits in his office, lost in admiration for the success of the private sector, entirely failing to understand that the key to that success is his own absence from their schools.

Additional research by Helene Mulholland




Source: www.theguardian.com