Choosing a secondary school

Savvy_Sue

It can be that shipping the head out to help another failing school has a bad effect on the school they were turning around / had turned around: we saw it here, and the effects were disastrous, truly disastrous.

However, how do results across your town / city look? Maybe that was just a 'poor' year?

kegg_2

Dont just look at the fabric of the building either. My son travels to an out of area school where the building is 50 years old and does look it's age. In some areas the carpets are worn and the paint flaking but it also has and extremly good media suite. Resourses are limited and they chose wisely where to spend the cach they have.

Surfbabe

THere could be many reasons that the results dropped by that much - one reason is that the last cohort of pupils to take the exams could be a much lower achieving bunch of children - it doesn;t mean that the teaching is no good or the exam results no good - it just means that the cohort were not going to achieve so highly.

Make an appointment to go and look at al the schools during a working day and ask about their vaule added results rather than the GCSE results. Of course ask if their is a reason for the drop.

Good luck

Gingham_Ribbon

Another vote for going round the schools during the normal school day. You'll get a feel for the atmosphere, the behaviour of the kids and the attitudes of staff. Taht can matter a lot more than results.

quietheart

When you start requesting appointments to go and look at schools, I know open days will be September but I would like to have a better idea before this school year ends.
Value added is 1024.1 so that's a better figure....
And as for results across the area they range from 15-100% pass rates! Lots of grammar schools, single sex schools, religious schools only a couple of 'normal' comprehensives.

chloe99_2

i might well be wrong but I have a feeling that their value added figure is really great?

quietheart

Another option is a boy's school. Ideally I wouldn't choose a single sex school as I'd rather a school that reflected 'normal life'.
I can see the advantage of teaching boys in a different style to girls though.
What have been your experiences of single sex education?

chloe99_2

They are very popular in my city and apparently do have educational benefits for boys and for girls. I think you may find now that they have opposite sex teachers in the schools too if that is an advantage for you. Those families and children that dont choose the schools because they particularly want single sex environment seem to find plenty of other ways of having their children mix with opposite sex in out of school settings.

quietheart

Yeah, it's mainly a concern for me because I only have boys but I'm sure i can get around it!

Savvy_Sue

Some time ago there was some research which suggested that girls may do better in a single sex school, but boys do better in a mixed environment. I think that's both social and academic, but don't remember too many details.

Certainly on the social side boys of my generation who went to single sex boarding schools often grew up VERY awkward socially, but these days schools seem to make efforts to overcome this with joint activities with the local single sex girls school. Whereas in my day we girls were far more protected.

The same doesn't hold true vice versa, because girls educated without boys aren't afraid to speak up, even when boys are there, whereas when they're educated with boys, the boys tend to dominate and the girls tend to keep quiet.

And there is evidence that methods of teaching and examining have swung from favouring boys to favouring girls, whether it's single sex or mixed education. In single sex schools it's easier to favour methods which suit that gender.

Of course all of this is very general. My little brother was adamant he wanted to go to an all boys secondary school, and he's turned out OK (but then he did have plenty of feminine influence at home). And a good mixed school would probably be better than a poor single sex school.

Perhaps another thing to consider is the balance of boys vs girls in a child's year group in any particular school. Perhaps less at secondary school, but certainly I have heard of primary years where girls outnumbered boys 3 or 4 to 1.

Other factors must surely be cultural: the boys' secondary school is a CofE VA school which takes 4 pupils each year from 'other faiths', out of an intake of nearly 200. While the full range of Christian belief is represented, I'm not sure I'd have wanted mine to go as one of the 4 'other faiths'.