The Sunday Times in Britain published its latest league table for post-primary schools earlier this month. The top 50 schools in the ‘Parent Power’ list included five schools from the north of Ireland. The rankings are based exclusively upon A-Level and GCSE grade performance of students.
Stephen Nolan took up the story on his morning programme last week, congratulating one of the schools and proceeding to have a conversation about whether single sex schools are better than co-educational schools, a segment avoiding the most important issue arising from the conception and publication of the list.
At the start, let me be clear that the five local schools referenced in the report are clearly excellent schools, and everyone in those school communities will feel a sense of affirmation from hearing their school being ranked so highly when compared with others. It is only human to appreciate being praised.
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The difficulty is that the means of assessing performance is fixed so that some will never hear their school being held up in such a manner. Our rigged system guarantees they can never be recognised as a ‘top’ school.
According to the Department of Education’s own data, one of the five schools has just 40 children entitled to free school meals (a proxy measure for poor) amongst its enrolment of more than 1,000 pupils, ranking third lowest in terms of percentage of ‘poor’ children of all our post-primary schools. There are primary and post-primary schools across the north of Ireland which have many more ‘poor’ pupils in just two classrooms.
The fact the top three local schools were deemed eligible for underachievement funding courtesy of the DUP education minister’s discredited criteria for the new ‘Raise’ programme betrays something about the ignorant dismissal of the consequences of academic selection for our school system.
The latest Statistical Bulletin looking at examination performance was published by the Department of Education (DE) last week. It makes for sobering reading.
The headline figures highlight that 58.4% of non-grammar students achieved 5 ‘good’ GCSEs (meaning maths and English included) whilst the figure for grammar schools was 94.2%. The DE report talks about a ‘performance gap’ between pupils in grammar and non-grammar schools, with a line graph illustrating the differential outcomes over many years.
Yet our school system was designed to ensure this gap can never be closed.
A full 11% of Year 12 students in non-grammar schools are deemed ineligible for inclusion in the statistics every year for one reason or another. Their inclusion would only serve to further widen the ‘performance gap’.
Keeping them out helps the politicians and education officials whilst making it a bit fairer for many in our most hard-pressed non-grammar schools who know that society will unfairly judge them by crude league table results which tell absolutely nothing about what happens each and every day in their school.
But it doesn’t make the kids disappear, as the persistently high number of ‘Neets’ - young people not in employment, education or training - testifies to each year.
The very phrase ‘performance gap’ is deeply misleading, misrepresenting the value of the educational experience afforded to children in our schools.
The heavy lifters in our education system are the teachers, classroom assistants and school leaders in the non-grammar sector who daily work with children experiencing academic, social, emotional and behavioural problems whilst striving to ensure all in these school settings can still aspire to and realise their life goals.
Understanding the reality of the differing school enrolment profiles is essential to recognising the full extent of their accomplishments.
Some 87% of all newcomer children are enrolled in non-grammar schools, who welcome children with limited or no English with open arms.
The picture is strikingly similar for our Looked After Children, of whom 89% are to be found in non-grammar schools.
Think about that for a minute.
We have designed an education system which sends all of the children performing below a threshold in maths and literacy into one sector, which we then almost exclusively call upon to meet the needs and challenges posed by the arrival of newcomer children and those kids living in care.
It gets worse.
Over the last few years, the education authorities have struggled to respond to the crisis caused by the burgeoning number of SEN pupils incapable of being taught in mainstream classrooms.
Read more: Paul Givan: System struggling to keep pace with increased demand for SEN places
Without sufficient special school places - another planning failure - they have called upon mainstream school communities to shoulder the burden by effectively becoming hybrid mainstream-special schools, adding considerable workload to the school leadership, special needs coordinators and broader staff community necessitating that these school leaders and teachers sacrifice other elements of their roles to make space and time to meet the acute needs of these pupils.
In education, the immediate comes before the important.
It should come as no surprise to hear that all 2,300 pupils being taught in these special needs classes at post-primary level are in non-grammar schools. It should also come as no surprise that the Education Authority has not opened a single special needs class in a primary school with less than 10% of its pupils entitled to free school meals.
Through years of strategic planning failures, a crisis management approach to SEN and a stubborn adherence to a grammar sector-first mindset, the education bureaucracy is ensuring that the inappropriately phrased ‘performance gap’ will only get worse in years to come, with our poorest and most vulnerable destined to be the losers.
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