The truth about Waltham Forest’s schools

Every parent wants to know that their child will have access to a good school and that the people running those schools take their job seriously. This is the common-sense anxiety on which the current government has mercilessly and shamelessly played in order to stoke up demand for ‘Free Schools’.

This is not to say that nothing about our school system needs improvement – of course it does, but the drive to create demand for Free Schools depended on establishing that there was something fundamentally rotten about comprehensive schools. If current trends are anything to go by, the truth appears to be almost the reverse. As proportionately more Free Schools are falling foul of Ofsted, it appears that there is something fundamentally wrong with the new kids on the block.

Tackling the legacy of this fear-mongering is difficult because there are huge problems in our education system, many of which are nothing to do with our schools. For example, can any form of school offset the effects of 30 years in which social and economic inequality has got worse? But as the unfolding policy disaster that is the Free Schools project shows, fear-mongering only worsens the situation.

It's disappointing then, to find a recent local Liberal Democrat party election leaflet making some deeply unfair claims about the performance of our schools based on distorted statistics. The leaflet claimed that Waltham Forest’s schools have the lowest percentage of pupils passing 5 GCSE’s at A-C grade including English and Maths in London and that  in Key Stage 2 exams (11 tests of 11 year olds), Waltham Forest is the lowest performing borough in London. This is, they claim, a damning indictment of our schools under the current council. “It’s a competitive world out there” one Lib Dem Councillor is quoted as saying, while another claims to “see no reason why our children can’t be the best in London”.  Both quotes are in fact fairly meaningless but they seem calculated to play on anxieties that our schools are failing.

So what is the truth about Waltham Forest schools?

Firstly, we went back to the same statistics used by the Liberal Democrats to see what they told us. We looked at the most recent statistical reports on educational performance in Waltham Forest by the Council officers to the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny sub-committee (see the documents under item 45 in particular). What they show us, perhaps predictably, is that the truth is more complicated but it’s also much more encouraging. For example: 

• Our schools are meeting their improvement targets for Key Stage 1 reading and writing,
• While it’s true that Waltham Forest’s schools are currently running fairly consistently below the London average on most indices, the gap seems to be narrowing on most measures.
• At Key Stage 1 Reading, Writing and Maths our schools are meeting their improvement targets and the gap between them and the London average is almost non-existent.
• Waltham Forest’s schools are meeting their targets to reduce the gap between the levels of educational attainment of pupil premium pupils and their peers at Key Stages 2 and 4. 
• At Key Stage 2, Waltham Forest is below the London average but only by 4% and is equal to the National Average.
• At Key Stage 4, the percentage of pupils reaching 5 or more GCSEs with grades A to C is below the London average and the National Average but only by 2% and the gap is narrowing.
• Indeed, what’s most striking from the statistics is that the rate of improvement of Waltham Forest Schools over the last three years in particular is comparable with the London average in general,  often outstrips the rate of improvement of the National Average and sometimes outstrips the rate of improvement of the London average. At Key Stage 1 the rate of improvement is quite dramatic and is still impressive at Key Stage 2.

In short, Waltham Forest’s schools are still behind the London average but they are on a good trajectory, improving steadily across most measures and rapidly on many others. Certainly not the disaster narrative being fed by the local Liberal Democrats’ leaflet.

It’s also worth bearing in mind, that this isn’t some abstract race. Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived boroughs in the capital and the country as a whole. By the Council’s chosen index, Waltham Forest is the 6^th most deprived borough in London, while London’s Poverty Profile identifies Waltham Forest as one of the four most impoverished boroughs in the capital. Comparison of schools performance that are crudely indexed against Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster are not going to tell us that much. When the borough’s deprivation is taken into account the rate of improvement in Waltham Forest’s schools is more impressive.

Statistics should be used with great care. If you really wanted to know what was happening in Waltham Forest’s schools and wanted to draw meaningful comparisons, you would have to compare schools in boroughs with comparable socio-economic profiles and similar resources. And you’d have to agree in advance what the measure of a good school actually is.

The statistics show that our schools have room to improve in simple raw academic performance indicators but that’s not the only measure of a good school. The statistics also show that even measured on their simple academic performance, our schools are improving impressively in spite of the borough’s socio-economic profile and resource issues.

Our schools are doing well and they deserve – and need - our support.

Stop this chaotic and dysfunctional experiment now

The Free Schools experiment is descending into chaos. In the space of one week, it was revealed that one Free School in Derby was being threatened with having its funding cut off having been described as ‘chaotic and dysfunctional by Ofsted, while the headteacher of another ‘pioneering’ Free School in Crawley resigned from the school she and her husband set up after Ofsted condemned the school’s performance and then described the recovery plan as ‘not fit for purpose’. The Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt wrote to Michael Gove calling for greater accountability and transparency for Free Schools, and saying that ‘a dangerous ideological experiment has been allowed to run out of control’. Then, to cap it all off at the weekend, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said it ‘made no sense to him’ to allow Free Schools to employ unqualified teachers and be able to diverge from the national curriculum (as an aside, while we welcome Nick Clegg’s realisation that the policy he voted through is fundamentally flawed, it doesn’t say much for the Deputy Prime Minister’s judgment that it took till now for him to work this out).

So what’s going on? While the Conservative Party would like to dismiss this as a few duds, it is becoming clear that, as Laura McInerny argued recently, what’s taking place is the entirely predictable result of the ‘freedoms’ granted to Free Schools and the policy of railroading them through in defiance of any democratic process.

To understand why that’s the case, it’s worth looking at what happened with the Al-Madinah Free School in Derby in a bit more detail.

A case study in chaos

In September 2012, the Al-Madinah Free School opened in Derby and later that month the local press broke stories that non-Muslim teachers were being obliged to wear the hijab. By the end of the month, further allegations had resulted in the Department for Education conducting two separate investigations and Ofsted brought forward an inspection, on the first day of which the school was closed for ‘Health and Safety’ reasons when it was found that the school had failed to carry out adequate child protection checks on staff. In early October, Lord Nash, the minister for schools, wrote to the school threatening to terminate its funding agreement, effectively closing it, if it didn’t undertake immediate emergency measures.

The reports from the Department and Ofsted were devastating. On teaching standards, Ofsted said that the school was inadequate in every category and ‘dysfunctional’. Pupils were given the same work to do despite very different abilities, while classes were delivered by inexperienced teachers without proper training, sold to parents as ‘industry experts’. Almost all the Early Years Foundation stage teaching was found to be inadequate. The school was also unable to say how many special needs pupils it had in its intake.

The original investigations were launched as a result of allegations of that female teachers were obliged to wear the hijab and boys and girls were segregated in lessons and lunchtimes. Lord Nash’s letter to the governors made clear that staff were to be told that they did not have to cover their hair, and that the school had to cease any practices that had as their reason, cause or effect that women and girls were treated less favourably than men and boys.

Both Ofsted and The DfE identified the fact that the school was appallingly governed. Ofsted found that the school had ‘been set up by representatives of the community with limited knowledge and experience’. Inexperienced and untrained Governors had ‘failed to ensure children were safe in the school, failed to appoint properly qualified staff and as a result had been unable to monitor the school or hold it properly to account. The Governors, Ofsted said ‘had failed the parents of this community who have placed trust in them’.

On every count these are the consequences of the so-called freedoms of the Free School: the ‘right’ to hire unqualified teachers, the promotion of state-funded faith schools operating outside local authority regulation and most of all the flawed governance and the complete absence of democratic oversight.

How did the supporters of the Al-Madinah school ever get approval from the DfE? As we’ve pointed out repeatedly in relation to Oasis and Tauheedul’s applications, the process for getting approval to open a Free School is completely absurd and utterly opaque. There is no genuine, open local consultation, no real coordination with the Local Authority and the dealings between Free School promoters and the Department for Education are clouded in mystery. Once the promoters of the Al-Madinah school got approval from the DfE, there was no way for parents to hold their school to account. If local teachers hadn’t gone to the press, how long would children gone on being treated like this? Who was there to hold the governors to account on behalf of the children, the parents, the community and the parents?

It’s not just the Al-Madinah School either. A parent at the Discovery Free School in Crawley told the press “my children were not getting the teaching they deserved and that we were promised. On reflection I think one of the reasons was that the teachers were not trained. And you could not complain to anyone. It was all run by the same family.”

No one takes any pleasure in this. Reading through the Ofsted report on Al-Madinah, it’s impossible to feel anything but deeply sad and angry for the 400 children at this school and their parents. But the fact that the Education Secretary continues to drive forward this policy without regard for any warnings, either before or since this week’s revelations demonstrates just how dangerous he is.

What does all this mean for the people of Waltham Forest?

Education is a big issue in this borough. We know this from the fact that meetings on schools in Waltham Forest are getting bigger all the time. There are a lot of anxious parents out there.

If you are a parent and you are opposed to these schools, we would ask you to help us to build our petition in favour of a Local Authority led alternative involving our community schools. We know that they have a plan to provide a place for everyone who needs it in our community schools and to build a new school that would be accountable to our community.

If you are a parent who has actively supported one of the proposed Free Schools, we would beg you to think again. Everyone wants the best for their children but this is not necessary and it’s not the right way, either for your child or for the others who will be affected by a new Free School.

If you are a parent who is thinking about putting your child’s name down for one of the proposed Free Schools we would ask you a few questions:

· Are you confident that you really know about the people who are going to run this school?

· Are you confident that the proposed school has been subjected to proper independent oversight by the Department for Education? It certainly hasn’t been scrutinised by anyone else.

· Are you prepared to take the risk that your child will not be like the 400 children in Derby?

· Are you confident that you know how you will hold this school to account?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then sign our petition instead and join the campaign for good schools for all our children in Waltham Forest.

 

Stand up for schools

A blog from Our Community, Our Schools supporter and local parent and teacher Kiri Tunks, explaining why teachers in the North-West are taking industrial action on Thursday and why teachers are demonstrating in central London today:

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On June 27th teachers in the North West of England will be on strike. This strike will be the first of a series of joint NUT & NASUWT strike in defence of education and teachers’ pay and conditions. Strikes will follow in other regions (including the SE in the autumn).

Around the rest of the country, teachers in these unions are organising solidarity actions (demonstrations, parents meetings & stalls) to show support for colleagues taking the lead in the North West but also to try and communicate to people outside education just what this government’s education policy will mean for our young people and our communities.

To hear the Michaels Gove & Wilshaw, it would be easy to think that schools are terrible places where our young people are failed on a daily basis by their teaching and support staff, and where their promise is snuffed out by uncaring and unskilled educators.

To be a teacher means waking every morning to some new alleged horror or failure that must be accounted for. To be a parent, without experience or knowledge of schools, these stories bring fresh fears about the schools they will send their children to.

The government & OFSTED claim that schools are failing our young people yet, claiming that standards are too low, yet their evidence is widely disputed or taken out of context.

Gove & Wilshaw refuse to accept that factors outside the control of schools or teaching staff can impact on the achievement of young people, and yet all the evidence shows that they do. And, whilst berating schools for ‘failing’, they are guilty of removing strategies and structures that, properly supported, have been shown to make a difference.

Instead they have just attacked community schools at every level, moving the goal posts such as the changing of grade boundaries in GCSE exams last year after the exams had been taken or changing the OFSTED lesson criteria so that to be judged a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ teacher requires almost superhuman powers.

There are numerous examples to show that schools do well when working in partnership with their neighbouring schools, pooling resources and sharing expertise; when there are strong links with parents and the community; when teachers are given time and resources to plan, prepare and give feedback; when the obstacles children face in their lives are not ignored but dealt with by society and not just left for schools to sort out.

Despite the relentless rhetoric of this government, it is not teachers or schools who are the enemies of promise but this government.  Since coming to power they have been responsible for:

• Worsening ratios in nurseries; and no longer requiring schools to employ qualified teachers.
• Rushing through a new curriculum, without resources and against the advice of many teachers. Introducing expensive, unnecessary new tests for 5 and 11 year olds.
• Reducing young people's opportunities by trebling tuition fees and abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance.
• Wasting the Olympic legacy by undermining sport in schools.
• Building free schools for secondary age children in places where they are not needed (instead of primary schools which are needed) and paving the way for private companies to make a profit from running our schools.
• Making it illegal for your Council to build new schools where they are needed.
• Causing chaos in teachers' pay and pensions and making teaching a less attractive prospect for young people

These are some of the reasons that NUT & NASUWT members will begin a campaign of rolling strike action in the North West next week. Teachers know that unless we take a stand then the right to a free and fair education system for all will be severely undermined.

In London on June 25th, there will be a march to, and demonstration outside, the Department of Education under the banner ‘Stand up for Schools – march for education’ which hundreds of teachers, parents and children are expected to attend. This demonstration is a gesture of support for striking teachers in the North West, but also an appeal to the wider community to join our campaign to defend education.

Details of the demo are here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/570147083015703/?fref=ts