First free school failure

dawyldthing

I know i've been having a discussion on facebook with someone about something similar in teaching children at home after it was talked about on daybreak yesterday and I understand that people want smaller classes but life isn't generally about having one to one time with everything and you have to be able to work with others in the vast majority of jobs and do things you might not like doing

daveyjp

Lunar_Eclipse wrote: »

True. And as a parent, I don't automatically assume that the government and "qualified" teachers in my local school are best for my children. What about freedom of choice?

Poor kids affected in this scenario though.

No problem at all with choice, but there must be some way of comparing like with like for an informed choice to be made. The only way to assess if a free school is good is marketing material which can say and promise anything.

sassyblue

Brighton_belle wrote: »

I'm guessing you didn't fail the 11+ and experience feeling written off at 11?

That's a bit strong, the majority 'fail' the 11+ don't they?

If you were made to feel a failure the fault lies with those who should have been supporting you.

amyloofoo

Lunar_Eclipse wrote: »

True. And as a parent, I don't automatically assume that the government and "qualified" teachers in my local school are best for my children. What about freedom of choice?

Poor kids affected in this scenario though.

Neither would I - but I think the other options available should be either private education or home schooling rather than a taxpayer subsidised and insufficiently regulated 'free school'.

There should absolutely be freedom of choice, but that doesn't involve the freedom to waste the limited resources of the taxpayer. We need an evidence-based approach to state education rather than just a free for all of 'try it and see' where the children are the ones who suffer most.

peachyprice

SuzieSue wrote: »

The sooner they bring back grammar schools the better.

sassyblue wrote: »

the majority 'fail' the 11+ don't they?

That they do, so I can't quite see what good having more grammar schools would do.

All that would happen if there were more is that they would lower the pass mark and the grammar schools would be on a more even par with the better comprehensive schools, so nothing achieved there.

lostinrates

daveyjp wrote: »

No problem at all with choice, but there must be some way of comparing like with like for an informed choice to be made. The only way to assess if a free school is good is marketing material which can say and promise anything.

Was it not just very recently international league tables showed our standard school system was doing rather poorly in comparison to other countries?

I don't know what the answer is, but I can understand why some parents are looking for alternatives.

pandora205

Here are the inspection reports if anyone is interested. They make depressing reading.
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/inspection-reports/find-inspection-report/provider/ELS/137326

Egypt191

Very interesting reading but I thought I'd add another thought to this thread. My ds attends a free school. It wasn't an easy choice but after he had been failed by his local secondary school abysmally, then having to remove him and home school him I felt that it was the correct decision.

The school is funded by local businesses and college, it's run by qualified teachers and only qualified teachers are allowed to teach in the classes. Ds has gone from potentially achieving no GCSE's to now aiming towards at least 6 at A*. His confidence has grown amazingly and he goes on work placements arranged by the school which allow him to experience the real work life. He has never been happier, and loves going to school each day, which he has never done before this school.

At least 3 of his teachers (the good ones) have moved from his previous school to teach at his new one, says a lot really.

I do appreciate by reading the thread that not all free schools are like this, but not all state funded schools are good either. At the end of the day it's the child's education and happiness that should come first and it's a difficult decision knowing if you're making the right choice, luckily I think I have.

seven-day-weekend

I have no patience with this prevailing notion (an I have seen it here in this forum many times) that parents know better than professionals when it comes to Education. They may be able to teach their own child (or they may not) but that is totally different to running and managing a school.

Many parents no longer support schools and their children are brought up to know all their rights but none of their responsibilities.

Then they think they can do it better. They deserve to fail.

I also agree that sometimes the local schools are abysmal, so can understand why someone would chose an alternative. If our son had not got into the school of our choice we'd have sent him to one in the neighbouring county, but no way would he have gone to a school run by other unqualified and disaffected parents.

securityguy

Egypt191 wrote: »

Very interesting reading but I thought I'd add another thought to this thread. My ds attends a free school. It wasn't an easy choice but after he had been failed by his local secondary school abysmally, then having to remove him and home school him I felt that it was the correct decision.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the free school model. After all, the various King Edwards Foundations and similar former direct grant operations in various cities, and most of the older private schools, have their origin in groups of local worthies sitting around in pubs and deciding to open schools. There's a whiff of "new money" snobbery to the objections to free schools on principle.

So there will be free schools which are roaring successes, for the simple reason that there's no reason they shouldn't be. After all, a group of governors, some buildings, some teacher, some parents and some pupils is pretty much the structure of all schools. People start up private schools and often do quite a good job of it, and there's no reason a free school should be different; and of course free schools will find it easier to recruit pupils, because they don't have to pay.

But equally private schools start, operate for a while and fold all the time, without being front page news, and it's hardly unheard of for a private school, particularly a primary private school, to be run by naive idiots. So some free schools will fail, for the same reasons private schools fail.

I think the free school project is in principle quite a good one. There's no particular reason to believe that the massive school-opening programme of the 1950s and 1960s happened in a state of grace such that the received wisdom was perfect, and if people want to operate schools differently and see if it works, that doesn't seem unreasonable. But there's a basic level of competence required, and some of the free schools are so obviously incompetent that they shouldn't have been allowed to open. Governance needs to be stronger. But the idea isn't fatally flawed: anyone who's watched LEA controlled comps collapse into special measures (two large ones near me, totalling 3500 pupils at any one time, in the past ten years) will realise that the status quo doesn't have the monopoly on wisdom.