hopdad123

LondonMix, thanks again. Bornagain, I think you are reading too much into my post. For my part, if I have written anything that you find offensive then I apologise. I am just trying to educate myself a bit on how the system works (both getting in and then getting on) and how the various measures that are used actually work. All I want is to do the best for my daughter, an aim that I am sure you have for yours. I was educated both in a homogenous English (school) and international (university) environment and now work in a very international environment. The latter was much better. For a school to have an mix of children from different backgrounds is a great thing and certainly something that I would consider to be a huge advantage for any child's continuing education and subsequent life. My only concern (and this is based purely on assumption) is that if you have a class of 30 young kids (which seems to be normal now) and one teacher then it must be the case that if there isn't a relatively high degree of fluency in English for a substantial portion of the class that the pace of that class slows for all. In an ideal world the class sizes would be much much smaller and would allow all of the kids to get the level of personal attention that they need but I cannot see how that can be the case with class sizes as they are. I may be completely wrong, I suppose I am just trying to think about what I would do if I were a teacher faced with such a challenge! My focus would be to ensure that all kids were brought up to the average standard to allow them to go onto secondary school rather than have a few stars at the expense of the others. As for social problems, I'm talking about the problems that go hand in hand with living in a city: crime, poverty and lack of social engagement.

I hadn't realised that the schools were hitting these levels, that's an incredible achievement indeed (wherever a school is based but especially in London). This is really helpful so thanks for posting. While not detracting at all from these result I wonder what the level 5+ results are like. I'm only now getting up to speed on all of this but it seems that level 4 is the base benchmark for all primary schools (much like the 5 A-C at GCSE for secondaries) and is how they are judged by their local communities and authorities. So, from an attainment point of view it seems that the local schools provide a near guarantee for reaching the national average (which is obviously very good) but I wonder whether this means that the resources are perhaps spent on bringing up the less able kids at the expense of not pushing the able kids onwards and upwards? I guess that's the point you made in your first post and maybe one of the problems with the SATs system in that it creates an incentive for schools to not focus on the bottom and not the top.

Thanks, this is very helpful. I have also seen the press about London schools (on average) out performing schools outside of London and that is certainly great news. Whether they out perform schools in the home counties though might be a more relevant comparison for us all as the wider UK pool will obviously take in large parts of the rest of the UK where the schooling may otherwise be of quite a poor standard (i.e. other dense, inner city areas). To answer your questions, the reason why I would have been surprised with so many outstanding schools in our area if the gradings were done on an objective and neutral basis solely linked to academic attainment rather than improvement is simply that the schools around here seem to be stretched to bursting point (which must inevitably have a negative impact on academic attainment) plus there are also lots of kids who do not necessarily have English as a first language (which, although enriching in other ways may also be a drag on the kids who do). Let's also not forget that (although I absolutely love our area) we are in south east London which does have its own set of social problems which must manifest themselves in our local schools to some degree. We're a few years away from schooling and starting to think about state/private schools and ultimately whether when the time comes it might be time to move out of London... I must admit, the school lottery, talk of bulge classes etc. does not fill me with confidence. I'm obviously very interested to hear any other views.

Does anyone know whether OFSTED reports are nationally consistent? By that I mean, is an "outstanding" primary school in inner London comparable to an outstanding primary school in, lets say a small Cumbrian village or do their ratings take into account local factors (i.e. the school is outstanding considering that a proportion of the children dont have English as their first language to take an obvious example). The reason for the question is simple, there seems to be more good/outstanding schools in HOP/FH//East Dulwich than I would reasonably expect and wondered whether the OFSTED grades were adjusted for local factors...