Sunny,

Traced down the school’s website on admissions(http://www.arkbolingbrokeacademy.org/secondary/admissions/) which would have been a useful link.

Anyway, the actual admissions policy is as follows:

If the school is over-subscribed, priority will be given to:
• Children in public care
• Children with a sibling attending the school
• Children attending a named feeder school (see below)
• Children living closest to the academy, based on straight line distance

Not sure about the primary school situation there – would be interesting to see some justification for that.

Interesting thing is about the linked Balham People article that it admits that most parents are not sending their children to the local schools. Wonder why that might be?

As an ex-secondary teacher in Wandsworth we well knew the reputation of those 4 primaries – middle-class, achieving, stable families, moneyed etc. This is so blatant it is simple arrogance…

@Watchman: If the school is oversubscribed, those conditions are applied to children who are already in the catchment area. It is the catchment area itself which is exclusive.

If you don’t live in the catchment area then you’re screwed and simply won’t be getting a place – as is the case with all schools. What’s different about this school is that the catchment area has been fiddled.

Since the catchment area is consulted prior to those rules (and has itself been fiddled) then the claims of the article still stand.

Jon,

That’s my concern – schools should have to have a very good reason for what appears to be a lopsided catchment area (or at least should be able to state those are the four closest primary schools, which would be valid). Since this would have to be approved somewhere, someone should be able to defend this decison.

Now Sunny does not have the best track record in reporting things like this – far too often someone comes up with a key fact that has been ignored in the post. Hence my wondering what was going on – I will not form a judgement without seeing the defence if you like.

If it is correct that one of the four feeding primary schools is fifth furthest away in terms of distance, this is totally unacceptable, and clearly against the entire spirit of the idea of free schools (I support the idea, because it gives parents power; I cannot support the idea of exclusively middle class schools). But I will not condemn on the basis of a partisan and one-sided report which has excluded at least one key piece of information (the school’s first priority is children in care).

@ 3

What’s different about this school is that the catchment area has been fiddled.

Not so.

The primary that has been left off the list of feeders is Falconbrook. Though it is closer than Wix as the crow flies, children do not in the main fly to school like crows, but rather need to use roads etc.

Between Falconbrook and the new Academy site there is a bloomin’ great railway line that requires people coming from that area to Bolingbroke to detour via a road which crosses the line.

Wix is farther as the crow flies, but nearer as the child walks.

Wix also makes more sense as a feeder if this is going to be a “community school” – in that it is in part of the same network of streets south of Lavender Hill that all the other feeders and the Academy site are located in…. forming a discrete and identifiable district.

Falconbrook, by contrast, isn’t.

I’ve got to say I’m with Watchman on this one – Sunny does have form when it comes to… enthusiastic reporting of this sort.

This also related to same ‘free school’ and of interest:

“When St Georges Hospital Trust put in a planning application to develop the Bolingbroke site to maximize the sale price the promoters of the “free” school urged their supporters to lodge objections. 29 high flying bankers and private equity people have lodged objection with Wandsworth Council and support the “free” school.”:

Bankers “free” school – tories spend £13m public funds to acquire site in battersea
http://bit.ly/eQt0Rh

7 – nice disinterested source there… http://www.antiacademies.org

Re: Tim J. – Doesn’t change the facts, which are from the Wandsworth Council website.

No 5 Flowepower: Re the ‘as the crows fly’ vs the ‘as the children walk’ argument:

Most (if not all) secondaries use the former as a measure of distance, because it is easily understood & avoids endless rows re differing routes to and from school.

For a Free School to depart from this convention, apparently in order to manipulate its intake, is a fiddle.

Sunny – Shouldn’t your title here be:

“How a ‘free school’ MAY deliberately exclude poorer pupils”

There’s nothing to say they will do anything and your statement comes across as Labour type scaremongering which I’m sure is not your intention.

Hi,

No catchment areas have been defined for this proposed free school so the GMB report is disingenuous at best. Admissions are aiming to ensue a local school for local children. This area has one of the fastest growing birthrates in the country, 2 of the largest primary schools in Wandsworth and yet no local secondary school.

High View one of the feeder schools has a Free School Meals of over 40% with Wix not far behind.

The 3 biggest feeders (Wix has only one form) will be Belleville (350m from site, 4 form), Honeywell 650m (3 form), High View 850m (2-3 form).
Falconbrook is 2.1 Km from the new school site.

The previous GMB press release quoted above also talks about a Bankers School because 15 people work in the Financial Sector (out of 2500 registered supporters of the Bolingbroke Free School).

The GMB has a policy of blindly opposing all Academies and Free Schools, so please do not base an article on their press releases.

Andy

Anna Hedge @ 10

You could set a school catchment area by sticking the point of your compass in the school playground and drawing a circle. But any such catchment area will be pretty arbitrary… and may even have its line running through people’s gardens between the gate and the front door etc.

If you don’t know the part of Battersea/Clapham concerned – check it out on the map. All the school have done has been to make the northern boundary of their catchment area conform to a physical fact on the ground: a railway line.

Seems sensible.

Andy,

Thanks. I think I now have enough representation of both sides to make up my mind that on first impressions this is a GMB/anti-academy movement lot of fuss using distorted facts (to be fair to Sunny, I think he has accurately reported what was put in front of him – but it appears that it was somewhat economical with the truth).

Incidentally, anybody know why the GMB is opposed to new establishments which might employ their members opening? Doesn’t seem to be putting their member’s interests first (unless they believe their members work in schools that will close as a result of the new school opening – which might lead to the question, why would that happen?).

I’m confused now? The sites own admission policy states ” children living closest to the academy, based in straight line ditance” so just who is nearest?(not knowing the are myself)

@ 13 Flowerpower

You seem to be contradicting your own arguement here? you say it is wrong to construct arbitary boundaries for catchment areas yet you say if your boundary lines fall where you dont like you can move them to a more suitable place on the map?

13. Flowerpower – That’s exactly how they draw the catchment area for our local schools – circle drawn out from the school. And it includes people from the other side of the railway line from the school. I believe they use foot and road bridges to get across the rail tracks to the school.

Maybe other areas draw catchment areas differently. I understood it generally worked that way to stop arguments about who was ‘closest’ to a school.

If you know the area and walk, you would also know that the railway line argument is spurious. There are surplus places in Wandsworth Schools. The NSC claim that the nearest secondary school (outstanding according to Ofsted) is oversubscribed. This is true but the majority of those applicants come from outside the catchment area – on 6 students come from the Bolingbroke area. Battersea Park School (a good school with outstanding features) has the top of the building rented out by Wandsworth Borough Council and they have been refused permission to expand.

Very few of the children in the Bolingbroke area either attend or even apply for places in Wandsworth schools (27% are at Wandsworth Schools).

While the Council have £13 million apparently to buy the Bolingbroke site, they have not money to renovate existing schools nor do they have £100,000 to keep York Gardens Library open (this library serves the most deprived part of the borough, as does Battersea Park school).

The agenda, in my view, is absolutely clear. Reward those who have voted for the Councillors and punish those who didn’t.

So what?

Watchman: I can’t speak for the GMB but, if the Bolingbroke site is opened as a school, it is possible that another school will have to close – thus losing jobs elsewhere. If more schools are opened outside the Local Authority remit, jobs will be lost in the Town Hall.

You could argue that these jobs will be done by others in profit making companies. However, some of the companies/charities hoping to move into the free school business are not based in the UK and, therefore, the jobs being created could be in Sweden or the USA, rather than here.

Equally, whatever the failings of the local authority, they are democratically elected and do know the local area. The edubusiness organisations don’t. ARK, for example, has experience of education in poor areas across the world but very, very little in the UK and what experience they have is spread across the country, therefore not locally responsive.

Right, according to Google maps, Falconbrook Primary is 1.8km away from the proposed new school, Wix is 1.9km away (and depending on where you put the markers, you can make them both the same distance). It seems to depend on where you measure it from as to which Primary school is closest.

It would be nice to hear a point of view from the other side as to how exactly the decision was made. I suspect it’s nothing as sinister as is suggested here.

As a matter of geometry, unless you make your catchment areas perfectly circular you will always include locations which are closer to others that you exclude. If the school is trying to work with the grain of the local geography, then a deviation of 200m from a perfect circle doesn’t seem excessive unless the catchment area is very small.

If you do make the catchment areas circular, of course, it can be quite hard to fit them together without overlapping or gaps.

Skooter @ 16 & Alison Charlton @ 17

@16

You seem to be contradicting your own argument here? you say it is wrong to construct arbitrary boundaries for catchment areas……..

@ 17

That’s exactly how they draw the catchment area for our local schools – circle drawn out from the school.

There are two different criteria being conflated here.

The “circle” criterion would be used for individual pupils to determine who lived nearest the school.

The choice of which primaries to include in a cluster of feeder schools is a different matter. In doing this sensible people try not to be arbitrary and to include those schools that fall within a geographically defined area or district.

In this case Wix school, though 100 metres further than Falconbrook, does fall into the district as defined by physical realities on the ground/ community focus etc. while Falconbrook does not.

In any case, it is certain that a large number of Wix pupils will actually live nearer to Bolingbroke ….. i.e. that they live in the streets between Wix and Bolingbrooke. To exclude them would be daft and arbitrary and cause absurdities such as people living in odd numbered houses in a street qualifying while those living in even numbered houses in the same street are excluded. Far better to settle on a simply understood major feature such as a main road or a railway track.

….. also….I forgot to add… that as Andy Smithers notes, Wix has a pretty high proportion of FSM, so it is hardly being included in order to skew the game in favour of the rich/middle class.

Maybe I missed something, but why is the COUNCIL buying the site for the free school?

Surely it should be the (independant) school that acquires its own site?

A lot of parents don’t fully understand about free schools. These are not private schools and have to accept admissions from the community like the already existing state schools. I suspect they want it start it because they can no longer easily afford the private schools. The parents who want to start this school are under the illusion it will be an exclusive school for their precious little darlings. The fact is, it will be years before the school is fully operational and even longer before it can establish a solid school community that will produce the good results they want. Another disturbing issue is the fact the school can sack teachers who are not achieving the standards the school wants. Teachers and the NUT are already concerned about their jobs and pay with the newly proposed Academies. These free schools seem an even riskier proposition for teachers.

The nearby Chestnut Grove, where my children attend, is now one of the top schools in the country in terms of value-added teaching as well as producing excellent GCSE and A-Level results. It is an inclusive school (as well as an arts and languages specialist school) and takes children from all bands, and even from different boroughs, and has done excellent work in raising their educational standard. It is an OFSTED outstanding school but had its much needed Building Schools for the Future funding cancelled at the last moment by this new government, which now insists it become an academy because it is such a top performer, even though the facilities are in very bad repair. The school is a success because of the dedication and commitment of the staff as a team, and isn’t necessarily something that can be bought.

The money for the free school would be much better given to this and the other existing local secondary schools than another school in the area for the bankers and yummy mummies of Nappy Valley.

Janee – No schools are planned to close in Wandsworth. The contrary is true – more places are needed at both primary immediately (several schools being expanded to cope with immediate demand) and secondary over next few years. This is a matter of public record – which I believe you know. So please no scare mongering.

Krisht
Suggest you read http://www.thensc.net for reasons for creating the free school mentioned and
http://www.arkbolingbrokeacademy.org for type of inclusive, non selective school proposed.
Chestnut Grove is a great school/Academy, which serves the Balham area and provides 90 non-selective places to those that attend the 8 local Balham Primary school.

I do, however, disagree with your point above ” Another disturbing issue is the fact the school can sack teachers who are not achieving the standards the school wants” – what do you propose – that the teachers stay around and do whatever they wish whilst the school concentrates on improving the prospects of all children.

@26

some good points raised there. The bottom line with free schools it that it a way for the state to abrogate its responsibility in relation to education because its gives the funding and has no other involvement and it it fails it will just say it was all the schools fault and nothing to do with the state.

If it was truly interested in raising state education it would invest in state schools to make them better learning environments. The “austerity” measures have nothing to do with these changes, these plans were concocted in years of oposition when there was plenty of money about. Anyone who says they are not idealogical is just kidding themselves. I am not saying they wont be a success but to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

@ 19

“So what?”

Nicely put. No, beautifully put. I want to say more but I have to rush, being so desperate to write a sonnet and perhaps a feature film about how fucking thoughtful, engaging and forthcoming you are. Sir, the internet is yours.

@ 28

The bottom line with free schools it that it a way for the state to abrogate its responsibility in relation to education because its gives the funding and has no other involvement and it it fails it will just say it was all the schools fault and nothing to do with the state.

We have nirvana……..

I just love to see Sunny’s straw men obliterated in the comments.

@26 ” Another disturbing issue is the fact the school can sack teachers who are not achieving the standards the school wants.”

This is definately a feature not a bug. Given how few teachers have been sacked over the last decade for incompetence we need a mechanism to do this. This should also apply to all schools, both to raise standards and prevent dumping grounds being created.

Another disturbing issue is the fact the school can sack teachers who are not achieving the standards the school wants.

That this is being held up as one of the objections to academies and free schools tells us very nearly all we need to know about the motivations of the objectors.

Teachers and the NUT are already concerned about their jobs and pay with the newly proposed Academies. These free schools seem an even riskier proposition for teachers.

Free schools are academies. That’s the whole point. The only difference is in who sets the school up.

Watchman -

“But I will not condemn on the basis of a partisan and one-sided report which has excluded at least one key piece of information (the school’s first priority is children in care).”

That’s not a key piece of information. As I understand it, priority is *always* given to children in care when schools are oversubscribed; that’s the standard pecking order. (I assume it’s a statutory requirement, designed to ensure that children moving between foster homes etc don’t find themselves without a school.) It doesn’t say anything about this particular school.

Krisht @ 26

The nearby Chestnut Grove, where my children attend, is now one of the top schools in the country in terms of value-added teaching as well as producing excellent GCSE and A-Level results.

Fewer than 50% of Chestnut Grove GCSE candidates achieved 5 X GCSEs at Grades A-C including Maths & English.

You may be happy with that. You may even think it is excellent.

Many of us, however, would consider a school that fails half its pupils, leaving them without the basic qualifications needed either to progress academically or obtain anything but the poorest paid jobs, as a disgraceful failure.

No wonder the local parents want to start their own school!

Flowerpower: one of the problems with the league tables is that it leads parents to be misled by exactly this sort of information. If all schools achieved 100% 5 A*-C, incl English and Maths, would you be happy or would you conclude that the standards have dropped? I don’t know what the position is now but, in the days of “O” level, the exams were designed only for the top 40% attainment. GCSE was designed for the next 50% (if my memory serves me) with grade 1 being equivalent to “O” level. In other words, the exams were designed so that 10% of the population would get no grade at all and 50% would fail to get a grade C or above.

Add in to that selective schools which cream off some of that top 50% and then realise why a school like Chestnut Grove is outstanding. The real figure to look at is the progress made by students, against a norm and taking account of where they were on entry and the social factors which would inhibit progress. Those figures are available from the Department for Education and demonstrates that there are many schools which are achieving “good” exam results but are cruising and, therefore, failing considerable numbers of students.

The real measure of a school is not the crude bench mark of 5 A*-C, incl E/M, but how individual students make progress and maximise their potential. This is what makes Chestnut Grove an outstanding school and Battersea Park School a good school with outstanding features.

I am also saddened that assessment of schools is based on the “C” bar. For many students getting a grade D is a huge achievement but the country seems to consider them to be failures.

Flowerpower @ 34:

For goodness’ sake. Even if you ignore all the facts about the nature of this school’s intake – e.g. that “A significant minority [of pupils] are refugees or asylum seekers” (who may have had little or no prior education) and that “A high proportion are vulnerable students and have some form of learning difficulty or disability” – it *still* wouldn’t follow that it’s failing its pupils. On the contrary, given the exceptional progress children make, it would seem that the school is doing an excellent job of making up, as far as possible, for failings in local nursery and primary education.

(NB I’m not suggesting it actually *is* failings in local nursery and primary education that are responsible for pupils’ low attainment, since I suspect it’s outside of the LEA’s control if children have Down’s Syndrome or spent their formative years in Rwanda. Just pointing out that even if you think none of that should make a difference to GCSE attainment, what you’re saying still doesn’t make any sense.)

As I said in my comment, Chestnut Grove is one of the top schools in the country for value added teaching, which is what the last two commentators are supporting. It gives all students a far better education than they would get at other schools whose only focus is top exam results and often leave the less capable floundering. It’s not all about exam results, although these are equally important to the school and these have improved massively in recent years. It is all about improving the standards of the individual students, and the teachers at the school work very hard at this. Also, a lot of the students took the short-lived BTec subjects, in which they got excellent results and those aren’t always included in the GCSE data.

@ 35 36 & 37 Jane & GO + Krisht

I think all this talk of asylum seekers and “social factors” is just more evidence of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Plenty of children whose parents were asylum seekers or economic migrants have gone on to universities as tough to get into as Oxford and Cambridge. Just assuming that black or brown pupil are not suited to academic success will not do.

I have neighbours with kids at Chestnut Grove and their accounts of the poor behaviour, truancy and theft and general flakiness of the place are not encouraging.

But anecdotalism aside – a school which leaves half its alumni more or less unemployable is just not good enough. Period.

@ flowerpower I think you’ll find that most inner city state schools and academies all have more than their fair share of problem children (even the top academic achieving ones) and CGS puts an inordinate amount of effort in dealing with them. The school does exceedingly well under the conditions, which aren’t likely to be helped by the Tory cuts.

A lot of local people clearly don’t share your opinion because the new intake is massively oversubscribed.

Article: “How a ‘free school’ will deliberately exclude poorer pupils”

I had assumed that was the whole point of free schools, and indeed why the whole idea is so popular. The one common thread between the types of schools which are popular with the right is that they all enable middle class children to go to schools which exclude poorer pupils.

It may not be very palatable, but it’s hardly surprising that in a society which increasingly holds the low paid and unemployed responsible for their own fate and widely demonises them as “scroungers”, “chavs” and “hoodies”, middle class parents fear their children venturing out of their middle class bubble.

If we want to sustainably address economic segregation in schools, the issue of economic segregation in wider society is pretty unavoidable.

Flowerpower. I do believe on balance you have lost this argument. Your “thoughts” anecdotes and neighbours kids are not very convincing arguments in comparison I’m afraid.

Flowerpower

“I think all this talk of asylum seekers and “social factors” is just more evidence of the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I notice you ignore the high proportion of children with learning difficulties and/or other disabilities. Could this be because it seems wildly implausible even to you that mere ‘soft bigotry’ is responsible for the expectation that children with learning difficulties and certain types of disability will, on average, do less well academically than children without such problems?

“Plenty of children whose parents were asylum seekers or economic migrants have gone on to universities as tough to get into as Oxford and Cambridge.”

Yes, and my friend’s friend’s grandad smoked 80 a day and lived to be 105. So what? It’s still the case that the average smoker faces more health problems than the average non-smoker, and it’s still the case that the average asylum seeker faces more problems doing well in school than the average non-asylum seeker.

Come on – how could it *possibly* make no difference to GCSE expectations whether you started school in the UK at 5 or 10, had to learn English or spoke it already, grew up in an African war zone or a affluent UK suburb, etc.? If the average asylum seeker were perfectly capable of getting 5 GCSE’s at A*-C, wouldn’t we expect the average native English-speaking child, born in the UK to English-speaking parents and educated in UK schools from the age of 5, to be capabe of doing somewhat better? If not – if starting school at 5 genuinely gives you no advantage over someone who starts at 10 – why on earth do we bother sending our children to school from the age of 5?

“anecdotalism aside”

God, yes please.

“a school which leaves half its alumni more or less unemployable is just not good enough. Period.”

Simple as that, eh? If 10% of children at that school have learning difficulties, or started school late, or have real problems at home, or grew up in a war zone – makes no difference. If it’s 20% – makes no difference. If it’s 30% – makes no difference. Just hit the f**king target.

Mossboourne Academy in Hackney has much worse social problems, asylum seekers, poverty etc but manages to get 85% pupils through 5 GCSEs including maths and english at grades A to C.

If a school in Hackney can do it, why not one in leafy Balham?

One of the reasons Chestnut Grove doesn’t get the high percentage of GSCEs with both maths and English is because it is an arts and languages specialist school, so a lot of the students do visual and performing arts rather than maths, and do exceedingly well at them. A good education cannot be quantified by academic results, something governments seem to forget (or simply don’t understand), when they just look at the numbers. Of course, if a school is seriously failing its students it is painfully obvious across the whole curriculum, and none of the LEA schools in Wandsworth are in that unenviable position at the moment.

Gove gets taken down a peg or two by someone talking common sense.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12171281

@28 Skooter,

“The bottom line with free schools it that it a way for the state to abrogate its responsibility in relation to education because its gives the funding and has no other involvement and it it fails it will just say it was all the schools fault and nothing to do with the state. ”

I truly hope that this is the case. Where you write ‘abrogate its responsibility’, I would put ‘cease its overbearing interference’. If such a school fails, yes indeed the responsibility will be with the school. That will be a great thing, responsibility resting with the people who are actually in charge of the thing.

“If it was truly interested in raising state education it would invest in state schools to make them better learning environments.”

Do you think this hasn’t been tried? (btw you should check the sports centre at Ernest Bevin School, which is also in Wandsworth I think)

“Anyone who says they are not idealogical is just kidding themselves.”

What, and state-run education isn’t ideological? Getting the state out of education is no more ideological than atheism is a religion.

krisht @ 44

One of the reasons Chestnut Grove doesn’t get the high percentage of GSCEs with both maths and English is because it is an arts and languages specialist school

You’d have thunk an arts-and-language-specialist-school would at least score on English, n’est-ce-pas?

@44 “A good education cannot be quantified by academic results, something governments seem to forget (or simply don’t understand), when they just look at the numbers”

Surely you mean “A good education cannot be quantified by academic results ALONE” (sorry for shouty caps, never worked out how to do italics, etc. on this site).
Academic results may not be the only important thing for a school to help pupils achieve but considering that they are supposed to be places of academic study they are pretty damn important.

Falco

Start italics is less-than symbol followed by little i followed by more-than symbol. To end italics do less-than symbol followed by backslash, followed by little i followed by more-than symbol.

@flowerpower
It does get good English results but the figures you mention are, if I’m not mistaken, for students who take both English and Maths, so if the creative students drop maths but still take English then they are not included in that calculation.

If students are not good at maths, and many artistic students aren’t (which is probably why so many artists are poor), why make them sit an exam they will fail or do badly in?

What if kids who are good at maths and science were made to do art, music or drama as an obligatory part of their GCSEs? That would also give skewed results. What we need is a system that allows students to develop their natural talents within a rounded education, and that has always been the strength of CGS, but it is not necessarily one this government wants to promote.

@Falco
Yes, you’re right, there should have been an “alone” in that sentence. It doesn’t much make sense without it.

Judging schools by the English Bac is rather like entering everyone into a 5000 meter race, getting them to train for it, running the race and then telling them that the winner is the one who ran the fastest first 100m.

I can imagine the meetings (just as with Blair’s strategy): “how are we going to show that schools are failing – so we can show we are improving education?” “I know, let’s alter the measures”. This is the fundamental problem with league tables – they show what the government what them to show, not how good a school is.

The other problem is that teachers try to do what they are told. Despite appearances, they need to be more rebellious and to stop playing these sorts of games. They should only entering students for the exams for which they are suited or in which they are interested and by focussing on all grades not just the C/D boundaries.

This is not an argument for giving schools more independence from Local Authority but for stopping central governments using education as a political football.

PS has anyone looked at the Department for Education website recently. Who says civil servants are politically neutral?

Anyone interested in education should watch this talk by Ken Robinson http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

I don’t have time to respond to everything here but just want to correct those implying that it is not true that Falconbrook is nearer than Wix. Go onto googlemaps and search walking distances from those 2 schools to SW11 6HN. You will find that Falconbrook is 0.1 miles nearer on that measure too.

Oh and as a final point, Chestnut Grove in Balham achieved higher contextual value add scores (1071.0) than Mossbourne Academy (1067.7) in the recently published league tables. It actually does better than that establishment in moving pupils on giving their starting points and backgrounds.

There are so many assumptions in this debate – the point is that Chestnut Grove is not filled with pupils from leafy Balham because many of them conveniently ignore its existence and claim they don’t have a local school!

This is not just an argument blindly against free schools in general. The key point is that if you have free schools, it is essential to put in place checks and balances to ensure that resources are allocated wisely and certain groups are not disadvantaged. The alternative way to ensure democracy in action is that we ask all parents in Wandsworth to group together to put together competing new school proposals in their very small local community and then we ask government to choose between these proposals to allocate resource – this is clearly not realistic or a sensible use of people’s time!