Correction: Urswick School stats

Richard Brown, headteacher at Urswick School just called to clear up a couple of problems with the teacher/pupil ratio statistics published in the previous post.

The figures were taken from the Department for Education website and show Urswick has a much higher pupil teacher ratio than other secondary schools in the borough (20 pupils to 1 teacher while at the other end of the scale City Academy and Mossbourne have near 10 pupils per teacher).

But Brown said this was because Urswick is the only school on the list that doesn't have a sixth form (although he said he was consulting about changing that). Sixth form students have different funding and much smaller class sizes of 12 or less which brings down the pupil/teacher ratio for a school.

This means that the teacher pupil ratio provided by the Department for Education will not reflect the situation at GCSE level or lower. Consequently Urswick is one of the few schools in the borough giving a real picture of the pupil teacher ratio at that level.

Brown said that Urswick never has class sizes of more than 25 adding that many of the maths classes were smaller. The school has an annual intake of around 150 which, in other schools, would generally mean 5 classes of 30.

Brown also pointed out that year groups at the school can have very different levels of ability and that this could cause some large fluctuations in the schools performance in terms of GCSE results. Academies do not have the same problem as they use the fair banding system which grades the ability of pupils across the borough into A, B and C ability and a school can take a third of their intake from each band.

All of this means that Hackney parents will have their work cut out for them if they want to assess the schools they are expected to send their children to.

Another moral of the story is that I should check the stats better. I did try. I sent this email to the Learning Trust on 27 September 2011:

"I was hoping to get a comment from the learning trust about the significance - if there is any - of all the borough's academies having average or above teacher:pupil ratios while all non academies have average or below average teacher:pupil ratios."

The request included reference to where the stats had come from http://www.education.gov.uk/establishments/urn/134693/mossbourne-community-academy and a spreadsheet with all the details and a version of a graphic used to illustrate the differences.

No reply came.

Response time from the Learing Trust had dwindled somewhat following requests for a copy of the "assessment framework" which seemed to cause such an uproar at Cardinal Pole school last term.

Education flagship, captain needed?

This post appeared on Stroppyblog before Christmas. It publishes a letter, apparently from Diane Abbott, calling for a bright Hackney schoolboy to take up a scholarship at the school she sent her son to. "Dear Friend, I am writing to you about a full fee scholarship for the Sixth Form of City of London Boys School http://www.clsb.org.uk. I have been asked to find applicants for this. City of London Boys School is one of the best boys schools in the UK. It has wonderful facilities and regularly comes near the top of the examination league tables. I can vouch for the school because I sent my own son there!"

The blogger says: "Frankly, I am appalled that a supposedly socialist MP is promoting a fee-paying private school. She would be better off fighting for more funding, places and accountability for Hackney's state schools so that all the borough's boys and girls can benefit, rather than offering one youngster a leg-up into privilege."

And she's not alone. Clearly people still get annoyed if education and Diane Abbott are mentioned in the same breath.

In August 2009, Luke Akehurst's blog was the arena for Diane bashing: "Anonymous said... If Hackney's schools are so terrific these days, why does Dianne Abbott choose to pay £15k a year to send her kid to the City of London. Terrific but not terrific enough for her son."
To which Luke Akehurst replied: "None of the academies were open when her son was 11 - though that doesn't excuse her decision."

So, what does Diane think? Like everyone else she supports successful Mossbourne but in a 2006 NASUWT-sponsored paper (Academy schools: case unproven) she said: "The trouble with the academies is that, popular as they are and supportive as I am of Mossbourne, there is a danger that they take us back to that past. All the research shows that if you introduce an element of selection, working-class children will lose out. If you have a borough like Hackney and have four academies and four wonderful heads there will still be a residue of children and I know what those children will look like... We know what parent power means in London. In practice, it means giving power to small groups of white middle-class parents, or if not to capture by one ethnic group as opposed to another, the best organised. Actually, if you want to empower the breadth of the parent body in inner-city areas you have to look to the local education authority."

Will she be on the invite list if Gordon drops in on Mossbourne?