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Choosing a school: the guide for parents... by teachers: Secondaries Ignore Ofsted reports and glossy ads, instead peek inside a darkened classroom(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Choosing a secondary is something of an illusion. In much of the country, there aren't a huge number within a convenient distance of our homes, and when the various religious schools for whom your child is an inadmissible heretic are stripped out, there may be only one candidate left anyway. Even in urban areas, where there are more schools to choose from, that choice is not all it seems. Nearly all schools use proximity in their admissions policy, so whether you get the school you want rather depends on how many other people with children of the same age live between you and its front gates. Nevertheless, parents can certainly worry about the order in which to place their preferences when the dreaded form lands on the mat. Ironically, the arrival of an education "marketplace" has done little to clarify choices. Schools have become adept at marketing, with glossy brochures, websites and adverts. The relationship between promotional material and reality is not always close. More than one teacher has found themselves gazing on the angelic hard-working children (often wearing safety glasses, a lab coat and a studious look) pictured on an advert for their own school before realising that one of the children in the picture has so far been responsible for a hundred disrupted classes, two flooded toilet blocks and an early retirement. In addition, the language of school marketing is now so uniformly bland and meaningless that it would have Peter Mandelson nodding admiringly as he leafed through yet another prospectus describing the educational nirvana awaiting inside the classroom. The late Simon Hoggart coined the phrase "the law of the ridiculous reverse", which states that if the opposite of a statement is plainly absurd, it was not worth making. School marketing literature is a veritable treasure trove of such statements: "We are committed to high standards" as opposed to "We aim to fail." "We demand the highest standards of behaviour" as opposed to "Teachers gather to place bets on student fights." "We aim to ensure all our pupils fulfil their potential" as opposed to "We only care about a few, and the rest can colour in pictures for seven years." Of course, sometimes schools indulge in what might attract attention from trading standards were they to be selling a product. For example, Toby Young's West London free school proudly claims to give "all children a classical liberal education, no matter what their background" but seems to struggle to attract some backgrounds (children with disadvantages) more than others. Meanwhile, Harris Crystal Palace's prospectus famously claimed that "disabled students, including those in wheelchairs, have full access to the curriculum" but then rejected a prospective student in a wheelchair on the grounds that she would "take up too much space". So how does the stressed-yet-discerning parent seek to get past the gloss and discover the real picture? Ofsted reports Essentially, these have all the value of wet toilet paper. Remember that Ofsted found several schools in Birmingham to be "outstanding" just weeks before discovering that, in fact, they were dangerously inadequate hotbeds of religious fundamentalism. Michael Wilshaw hurriedly insisted that since, in 2012, he spoke of Park View, the school at the centre of the "Trojan horse" scandal, saying: "All schools should be like this and there's no reason why they shouldn't be", things had changed rapidly. So obviously one shouldn't place too much faith in any Ofsted report that is more than, say, a week old. Also, the higher the prior attainment of students, the higher the Ofsted rating. You could get the same information from league tables, and you wouldn't have to read through the irrelevant and turgid Ofsted prose. Don't bother. League tables There was a time when I would have warned parents away from these, on the grounds that headline figures are very misleading. However, the situation has improved. Head to the government's performance information website, and you can get far more detailed information than used to be the case. In particular, you can have a look at how children of different abilities fare. Don't look at the year-on-year change to the headline figures; difficult though our politicians find this concept, not all children are the same, and occasionally a school might have a very able or not-so-able year group. So just because a school's 5 A*-C percentage may have dropped last year, it doesn't mean the school has suddenly deteriorated. Look instead at the value-added and expected progress figures for that year. You may find that the schools most likely to squeeze the last drop of achievement out of your reluctant teenager are not the grammar schools coasting their way to easy headlines. Word of mouth School-gate opinion is often not only accurate, but reacts far faster than any Ofsted hit-squad. If you can't find any parents with a bad word to say about a school, it's probably doing OK, whereas if asking about a school results in parents spitting over their shoulder to avert the evil eye, then you might want to think twice before signing up your offspring. It is not infallible, but parents are generally pretty sensitive to how a school is treating their child. Ask around your fellow primary school parents for those with older children in the schools you have your eye on. Visit the school There is no substitute for getting your boots on the ground. But the trick is to get past the head's slick corporate presentation to uncover what the school is really like. Most schools now run an open evening, and some allow parents to visit during the normal school day. Make time to go. When you do, don't worry about the head's speech, as it will be full of exactly the same marketing speak as the prospectus. Once the formals are over, get out into the corridors as soon as you can. Speak to the students. Many schools will use students as guides on open evenings. Talk to them about their experience. Students tend to be honest about such things - occasionally brutally so. If the school doesn't let you near its students, that's not a good sign. Visit the classrooms. I don't want to go overboard here, as I am hopeless at producing the kind of world-class wall displays my colleagues seem to pin up weekly. But you can quickly tell whether a classroom is being proudly looked after, or utterly neglected. Watch out for the tarting up of just a small selection of rooms for the open evening. Find a darkened room and poke your head in to get a view of what the rooms normally look like. Pretend you were looking for the toilet if anyone spots you. Talk to the teachers. I once had a parent say to me: "You look a bit like the head, but older and not as good-looking." Don't talk to the teachers like that. Especially one with a collection of replica medieval weaponry in his history classroom. But do talk to the teachers. Remember that your child will spend a long time with those teachers, but may never speak to the head. Are the teachers enthusiastic? Knackered? Knowledgeable? Clueless? Human? Again, if the school keeps you away from the teachers, that's a really bad sign. Find your fit If your evening is incredibly regimented, with a non-negotiable timescale, an endless series of set powerpoint presentations, and no opportunity for questions, then (a) that's a fearful school run by a management which doesn't trust its staff or students, and (b) that tells you what sort of relationship you and your child will have with that school. Also on any visit, you should witness interactions between the staff and students - possibly your own child if you brought them along. One emotion that cannot be faked is genuine warmth. How do the teachers speak to and about the students? How do the students talk to and behave around the teachers? Find a school with a warm and happy atmosphere, and you can't go far wrong. Of course, you may not want your child's teachers to like your child, in which case you're a weirdo and I can't help you. Don't worry The irony is that we probably have greater levels of angst than ever, yet by most reasonable measures, our schools have higher academic and behavioural standards than ever. Nearly all schools report very high levels of parental satisfaction, yet many parents are convinced that while their own school is fine, all the others are chaotic nests of feral illiterates. Very few schools are truly awful; in the overwhelming majority your child has every chance to fulfil their potential. Rather a lot of parents have felt the world is ending when they've opened the offer envelope to discover their last option staring at them, yet have later found their child seems happy, fulfilled and doing rather well. So by all means scour the performance data, question other parents, quiz passing children and invade classrooms (not in the middle of my year 9 lesson, please), but try to remember that most of us went to a school based solely on the grounds that it was the closest to our house, and we seem to have survived to adulthood. The writer is head of history at a London comprehensive and blogs at http://disidealist.wordpress.com Captions: What to look for Happy, engaged children, a range of clubs and cheerful classrooms. Below: worry less about the glossy prospectuses Photographs: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian/Graham Turner for the Guardian/Alamy/Simon McComb (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |