Latest news with #LondonChallenge
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Why are London schools outperforming the rest of England?
This year, A-level results in England reached a record high outside the pandemic era, However, the stark regional divide between London and the rest of the UK, particularly the north-east and East Midlands, has widened. But why are London schools outperforming all other regions? Here are some reasons: In 2003, the Blair government launched an initiative to transform schools in the capital. At the time, London schools were perceived to be some of the worst in the country. At its peak, the London Challenge had a budget of £40m a year, working with local authorities, investing in school leadership, building new secondary schools and sixth forms, as well as radically expanding the academisation of new and existing schools. There was also an incentive to build extended schools that offered services to students and their families outside the classroom. As a result, 30% of London schools were graded as outstanding in 2010 by Ofsted, compared with 17.5% nationally. Although the Schools Challenge was later stretched to Greater Manchester and the Black Country, London is considered to be the success story. Due to higher pay and cultural attractiveness, teachers are more inclined to train and work in the capital, therefore a higher level of teaching is arguably available to London students. The Teach First programme was a targeted intervention that started in 2002 with the aim of recruiting university graduates to train as teachers in challenging schools. The first cohort of trainees were placed exclusively in London secondary schools between 2003 and 2006. Although trainees are distributed across regions, London has the highest concentration, with more than a quarter of Teach First schools being in the capital in 2019. The changing class demographics in London have had a noticeable effect on the quality of schools in the city. In the past few decades, young families have chosen to remain in there rather than moving to suburban areas, as once was the norm. As a result, formerly impoverished boroughs such as Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Brixton have become more middle class and, over time, schools in the capital have received an increased number of pupils from families with higher levels of education, improving the schools' results. London remains the most ethnically diverse region in the country. Research shows that parents from migrant families often have higher ambitions of social mobility through educational means, known academically as the 'London effect'. In 2017, the former education secretary Michael Gove said 'there's lots of evidence that London having become more diverse has contributed to educational standards rising'. However, research from King's College London shows that, if only white London pupils are considered, London still outperforms all other regions in the UK. London contains a higher concentration of schools within one region. This gives families more choice to send their children to schools and sixth forms that align with their interests and academic progression. Additionally, students are able to commute across the capital, granting the opportunity to attend specialist schools that may have otherwise been out of reach.
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Sturgeon fails to be frank on education failures in new book
Over the past ten years, when I've been speaking about the state of Scottish education, or analysing the latest data on attainment or teacher numbers or classroom behaviour, lots of people have asked me variations of a simple question: how did we get here? Very often I have responded with the following explanation: Basically, Nicola Sturgeon was under pressure on education, and she went on a wee field trip to England, where people told her about a thing called the London Challenge. She listened, didn't understand, then came back up the road and decided we'd do the same things in Scotland. This, I should stress, was an obviously oversimplified explanation that I used to get a laugh from whatever room it was in, followed by a more detailed critique of the policy development process and the political implications. It was meant to be a joke. But it turns out that my depiction wasn't the caricature I thought it was – it seems instead to have been an exercise in unexpected realism. Read more: Keep up to date with our coverage on Nicola Sturgeon's memoir On page 255 of her new book, the former First Minister briefly deigns to address education issues when she tells us about visiting London in February 2015. This short visit to a single school, she explains, was 'instrumental' in the development of a policy direction that, by the end of the current parliament, will have wasted a full decade of potential progress at a cost of £1.75 billion of public money. Education pops up again a little later in the book during a section about getting 'Back on Track'. We are told about the decision to abandon a flagship Education Bill 'in favour of a non-statutory approach' to handing headteachers more autonomy. This was, allegedly, done because it would allow faster and more successful change, all without giving the opposition the chance to 'frustrate the legislation'. The reality from that time was that the government's own consultation on the Bill showed that there was little if any support for the changes the government wanted to impose. The decision to pull the Bill was, quite plainly, about avoiding a political humiliation. This thread, where everything would have been fine if it weren't for bad actors trying to stop her (because of course she couldn't possibly have just been wrong) continues when she discusses her decision to force standardised testing on schools. Read more Lessons to Learn: Once again, the reality is quite different from her presentation. As I proved at the time, the policy was based on almost no written evidence whatsoever – I fought a year-long FOI battle to force Sturgeon's government to release what material they had, and then discovered that it amounted to four unsolicited emails. What's more, although Sturgeon tries to present this policy as something that the other parties opposed, the truth is that both the Tories and Labour had been demanding the introduction of standardised testing, albeit for political reasons. When the policy was announced it was met with widespread opposition and condemnation from teachers and education experts – people who knew a lot more than Nicola Sturgeon and her circle of political advisers. Later, she frames the introduction of standardised testing as having been influenced by her 'sympathy' for the view that 'we had moved away from a rote approach'. The problem, if we're going to be speaking frankly, is that Nicola Sturgeon is a career politician who was a lawyer for five minutes in her twenties, so her views on the correct pedagogical approaches for literacy and numeracy are worth precisely nothing. And yet they set the direction of travel for the education policy of an entire nation. Unsurprisingly, the former First Minister declines to mention the specific and measurable targets for 'closing the attainment gap' that were included in the 2017 Programme for Government, which she says was the strongest of her period in office. There's a good reason for that: her government never, at any stage, even came close to achieving them. The closest that Sturgeon's book comes to offering an honest assessment of her education record is when she writes that her underlying problem was 'one of diagnosis' – even that isn't really true, because it still gives her too much credit. She didn't know enough to make any sort of diagnosis, and still doesn't seem to understand that fundamental point. At the launch of the book she went a little further, admitting that she didn't grasp the complexity of the issues she was tackling. But that's a cop out as well. Here's the truth: she had no idea what she was doing, and didn't even know enough to be able to recognise the things she didn't know, but dragged us along regardless. Acting from a position of ignorance, she pursued policies that have not only failed but have also been major contributors to the enormous problems currently facing schools, teachers, and pupils in this country. There are exceptions to these failures, the most notable of which is her decision to back the campaign for LGBT-inclusive education in Scottish schools. There are various other SNP politicians who might have been leader other than her, and without needing to name names I think we all know that many of them would have behaved very differently. Scotland became the first country on earth to introduce inclusive education and, as I have told her in person, Nicola Sturgeon should be proud of her role in that. But on the whole, and certainly with respect to the 'attainment gap', Nicola Sturgeon failed when it came to education. And now she has also failed to be frank about those failures. Having made this the central pillar of so much of her time and office, and promising that she would be judged on her record, Nicola Sturgeon's reflections on education are incredibly brief and a long way from honest. But what did you expect from a politician's memoir?
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Politics
- Scotsman
Sturgeon admits she made a 'mistake' over school attainment gap pledge
The former first minister said she did not appreciate the challenges involved Sign up to our Politics newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Nicola Sturgeon has admitted she made a 'mistake' by pledging to substantially eliminate the poverty-related attainment gap within a decade. The former first minister said she did not appreciate the challenges involved, and conceded it would take "longer than I appreciated". Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad She made the comments during the launch of her memoir at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she was interviewed on stage by broadcaster Kirsty Wark. Kirsty Wark and Nicola Sturgeon | PA The SNP's 2016 Holyrood election manifesto said the party's mission was to 'make significant progress in closing the gap within the next parliament and to substantially eliminate it within a decade'. Ms Sturgeon said her failure to close the gap was "possibly one of my biggest regrets", adding: "Not delivering it, but also at the time I made the promise of probably not appreciating as much as I quickly came to do the factors that would influence that, and that was not just about issues around the curriculum in schools, but what is the driving cause of the poverty-related attainment gap in our schools? "It's poverty, it's the conditions children grow up in outside school. Some of the things that I am proudest of are the Scottish Child Payment, the doubling of early years education, the baby box. These are the things that are lifting children out of poverty and I believe in time will make a difference." Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The former first minister insisted Scottish education is not in the 'terrible state' many critics allege. "We saw the exam results last week - the attainment gap is starting to close,' she said. "I'm not going to sit here, though, and say I don't regret that it didn't go further, that I didn't meet [the pledge]." She said she tried not to shy away from things she got wrong in her book. "On this particular issue, again I'm being frank about it, it was probably a lack of appreciation of what you had [to do],' she said. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad "I thought you go in, you have the London Challenge version [a school improvement programme launched by the UK Labour Government in 2003], you put money into school education - all of that is right. "But unless you're changing the conditions kids are growing up in, then you're not going to have the impact, and that's what I learned along the way." She added: "We need to do even more than we have done already to tackle the underlying poverty conditions too many kids are growing up in. "It will take longer than I appreciated, or allowed myself to appreciate at the time, and that is my mistake. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad "But it will work through the system. I absolutely believe that things like the Scottish Child Payment, if we're looking back a few years, 10 years from now, the benefits from that in school attainment, in the attainment gap, will be seen. "Which is why that policy is, without comparison, the one that I'm proudest of.
