It is very difficult for a school to allocate resources of only 1 or 2 pupils are good enough to apply to a G5 university and it is difficult for the pupils. Most schools tend to have a bias to the arts or the sciences so it is worse if the pupil attends a school which is not so good at the subjects they wish to study. If there are about 6 or more pupils for each A level subject who are good enought to apply to a G5 university support is much easier for the school to provide the resources and the mentoring . In addition, the pupils can help each other. Schools which regularly send people to G5 universities know what to expect and can mentor the pupils from the moment they start their A levels.

Perhaps it would be an idea for all boroughs/county to have teachers who can move around schoools and ensure all those considering applying to Russell Group and especially G5 universities are mentored and given any additional teaching required. Poor bright hard working children from inner city comprehensives need the quality of teaching which will enable them to fulfil their potential and enter our World Class universities.

a good degree does not make you a good teacher.

this kind of deluded nonsense about making all state schools like manchester grammar would be laughable if it wasn’t so offensive.

once again proving that tories and their supporters are truly disinterested in the working class. this is a transprent attempt to woo middle england but it’s still an unworkable, boneheaded policy.

sorry but this is a perpetuation of Cameron’s boneheaded elitism. There’s no reason why a graduate of UCL should be any more capable a teacher of GCSE or a-level english than a graduate of Manchester Met.

and from personal experience, teaching attracts those who are most enthusiastic about their subjects, regardless of university or degree outcome. I’ve known so many students who had no interest in the subject – it was just the one they got the best grades in at a-level. They were probably canny enough to get a 2.1 then went into finance.

and they’re the people who cameron thinks will be best equipped to teach.

the lack of logic is staggering. i know this is blatantly playing to middle england wing voters, but it still demonstrates the tories’ utter lack of genuine policy.

Perception?

The system is blatantly broken. That’s our starting point here. The Tories might not have come up with any solutions (I mean really, their proposals are nonsense) but they have identified the problem. Meanwhile the stereotypical leftwinger blames the good schools for the failures of the bad schools.

For those of us who work in comprehensives in deprived areas we aren’t calling out for more middle class students; we are calling for good management at every level: school, local authority and government. Instead we get managers who blame teachers for the anarchy in their schools, local authorities who spend a fortune on initiatives that don’t improve teaching, and ministers who are simply oblivious to what goes on in schools.

Uh huh? And how would you suggest this should be done? If you weren’t so focused on London you’d realise that there are parts of the country that have this by default simply because – as someone has pointed out above – transport makes a ‘market’ in education impossible. But how is this going to happen in a big city where there’s money sloshing about and people can make placing requests, move house or go private?

Working class children need to be incentivised to swot

‘Incentivised’ indeed! Set an example and write proper English, goddamnit!

Bob b . Last para good point. Those who want to leave school but have to wait until the GCSEs are over can be very disruptive and serious damage the education of others.

It could well do but policies of any sort take a longtime to change any real outcomes on the ground. It is useless to pretend that command and control policies, even if they happen to be useful, get there quicker. It is actually a very bad habit of politicians to promise watershed changes in service provision overnight. Like all services, improvements in educaton will happen very gradually as a result of local experimentation and competition.

Yes, I understand the competitive theory but market pressures may take longer to work out than the length of a child’s school career.

Secondly, because of deeply embedded neighbourhood cultures, there are localities where tradition and habit effectively determine school choice and outside biggish urban areas there may be little practical alternative to going to the local comprehensive school. In short, the competitive market theory isn’t necessarily effective in rooting out bad schools.

Does no one here recall the case of The Ridings School in Halifax:

“The Ridings School in Halifax – once labelled the worst school in the country – is to be closed down after more than a decade of rescue attempts.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7067956.stm

Is no one addressing the issue of the very different structures of comprehensive schools: the popular combination of 11-16 comprehensives linked to 6th form colleges, all through 11-18 comprehensives and the Leicestershire Plan structure of 11-14 junior high schools feeding 14-18 senior high schools.

IMO the major problem with 11-16 comprehensives is that the final year is highly likely to be dominated by early school leavers in deprived neighbourhoods and that effectively decides the character and values of the school.

Thats the “lump of good schools” fallacy you have there. So long as new schools are permitted to come into existence to challenge bad practices, overall bad schools will be driven out of the marketplace.

In the same way, there are different sorts of supermarkets catering to different customer requirments, but it is very difficult to say which one is truly “the best” because anyone that truly stands out as better for very long is emulated by all the others. Is there a “best optician” in the UK? If there is, there isn’t very much in it.

Does this happen in all public sector roles or just teaching? Do Doctors get paid more based on their degree grade? Isn’t there a case for more intricate and careful grading at uni level – as the male teacher in my example above may have done only slightly better if she had a high 2:2 and he had scraped a First?

There is also the issue of working class graduates doing worse than middle class grads – it seems unfair that their socio-economic background should dictate their salary so starkly…

That said – I do seem to meet a lot of middle-class grads with Thirds who seem to have better jobs and positions in society than I do due to having more money for an MA, better contacts through parents, etc, so perhaps they should get less money than ppl with upper seconds who scraped their way through uni like I had to!

I don’t think so. It mopped them up because they had nowhere else to go that had a pension attached. Clever, educated women especially, had limited career choices compared to today and would become teachers rather than going into banks or joining the FO where they would only be allowed to do the typing. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘secret subsidy’ of state education post-war.

The way to get good people back into schools, though, isn’t to make it better paid or more ‘prestigious’, it is to make it more dossy. That has always been the attraction of teaching: lots of time off. It is the whittling away of this that has forced out the aspiring novelist of real ability and it is why the public schools do better in that regard, I think.

The parasitical dominance of financial services has distorted the British economy to the point where these are virtually the only realistic career choices for anyone who desires anything as basic as a house in a half-way decent part of London

The rest of us, however, don’t give a shit. A teacher’s salary is pretty good money in most places.

Really? Presumably the kids who don’t get into the good schools have to go somewhere? A manager who was better at delivering some form of education on the cheap might just find his/her niche in such a ‘market’.

…or school managements will screw down wages to cut costs?

One word for you:

Bussing.

Schools need to have the socially mixed intakes that facilitate classroom learning.

Not so.

The 7% who pay to have their kids educated privately do not tend to live in the catchment areas of the sink schools; they live in upmarket parts of town.

If you stopped the rich from educating their kids privately tomorrow, they wouldn’t be sending them to the down at heel comprehensives near the council estates. They’d go to the schools in the affluent leafy suburbs.

So how would their inclusion in the state system help?