30th December 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The standard of schools is a massive issue for virtually everybody in the UK. Within the education system schools are vying for the best positions in the league tables, and parents around the country are looking for the best schools for their children, sometimes before they are born, even moving house to be in the right area for a particular school.
Those of us in the tuition industry have a unique outlook on school standards. We don’t represent someone with a vested interest in promoting a school, and we tutor students from a wide range of schools and backgrounds. Tutors are also more heavily involved in a student’s schoolwork than anyone other than the actual student, so generally we’re in a good position to judge how much help, or ‘added value’, each student is receiving from their respective school.
I suppose that the expected continuation of this article is to explain how the fee-paying or selective schools give their students more opportunities, and provide a higher standard of teaching, but if that’s what you’re expecting, then you’ll be surprised.
The examples we’ve heard about poor teaching aren’t limited to any particular type of school, but they also don’t seem to be more prevalent in schools which perform worse in the league tables. A recent example was in a well-regarded fee paying school in London, where a teacher had firstly admitted not being qualified to teach a certain module at A-level, and later asked her students to read an exercise book to try and understand a concept, because it was not something that the teacher was able to explain.
The obvious question here is to ask if the better performing schools don’t do more for their students, then why do they perform better? The answer is fairly straightforward; it’s because the students attending the better performing schools are already at an advantage before they start. Many of these students will have academic parents from affluent backgrounds, and will have grown up in a culture where they are encouraged to do well at school. Also, the selective schools are selecting the best pupils at age 11, so obviously they are at an advantage. Another factor which self-perpetuates the success of high-performing schools is that when students are around like-minded, academic students, they will develop more quickly than if the alternative was true.
In short, there are probably a few exceptions, but generally tutors don’t notice a massive difference in the quality of teaching between schools in the UK.