Prior Attainment

Many teachers believe that low attaining students make much slower progress, once they arrive at secondary school. Well, that must be true on average. But that might just be because we expect it to happen, in the same way that we expect fat people to be unfit, and Chinese students to be good at maths. But what if there are 100 secondary schools in England where their progress is exceptional (showing higher progress than the top 20% of schools for all students)? What if there were 200? In fact, there are 248! Is that a big enough sample for you to consider thinking again?

It ought to be. Let’s take Britains gold standard of olympic sport, rowing. With over 200,000 people rowing in the UK, how many make it to an elite squad? Call it 100. That’s about 0.0005%! The olympic equivalent in our schools are those where students entering at level 3 make as much progress as the best 8% of schools for all students. There are an astonishing 248 schools where level 3 students make at least P8 of 0.5, or 8% – 1600 times more than rowing.

What these schools are doing is therefore both amazing and replicable, because so many of them are succeeding. This high number strongly suggests that their poor progress in many other schools is not due to prior attainment per se, but to factors within our control.

Progress from low Attaining Students (Entering at Level 3)

There are 243 schools where students coming in as low attainers (level 3) make progress at P8 0.5 or above. That’s 8% of schools nationally, an unexpectedly high figure perhaps. 21 of these had large such cohorts of these, with 50 or more. This is my gut reaction of a cohort size big enough to be a real effect. That’s still 0.007% of the 3000, and 14 times greater than the percentage of elite rowers.

Here they are:

Some Thoughts

It seems very significant that these schools are nearly all outside London. This suggests that what they are doing is not connected to funding, or to use of Pupil Premium money. It is very likely that this success is achieved through teaching and learning, and other strategies which will be replicable in schools without that extra funding.

Virtually all of these are in cities, rather than rural schools. Why do city schools do so much better with this kind of student?

Given this is the case, and the huge success of London schools with students of most categories, what are London schools not doing which they should?

I’ve given you the names of the schools and their phone numbers to encourage a visit – how many of us would need to travel to one before we had crowd sourced a road map for success with low attaining students?

Which of these schools is nearest to you, and worth a visit?

Better still, if you teach in one of these schools, please consider sharing your thoughts in the comments below.