Reviewing the Way Schools Are Organised in Suffolk

REVIEWING THE WAY SCHOOLS ARE ORGANISED IN SUFFOLK

- A response by St Felix CEVC Middle School Governors

We must have learned something from 40 years of experience in middle schools. I am not precious about their retention in the future but I am passionate about retaining the undoubted strengths that middle schools have in terms of overall child development.

Tim Young, Headteacher, St Felix CEVC Middle School, 1982-2005

As Chairman of Governors at St FelixCEVC Middle School in Newmarket I am sending you our response to the consultation in Suffolk about the future of education in the County.

We are concerned that a good system, which has worked well for many years, risks being changed for no good purpose. We are uncertain whether the justification for the change is financial, political or educational targets, but we are continually assured that no final decision has been taken and that there is a genuine process of consultation taking place. In that spirit we are seeking to promote a discussion amongst us all and an impetus to engage with the process.

We think that the documents that have so far gone out are not sufficiently self-explanatory. We are alarmed that many parents and members of the public in the western area of Suffolk have no idea of the potential implications of the consultation and do not, in many cases, realise that schools could close, rural areas may require yet more bussing of children, sixth forms may be under threat and small first schools risk closure.

As a governor of a middle school I am passionate about the importance of middle schools. It seems a shame that Suffolk should be considering losing middle schools at a time when internationally (eg in Australia and Scandinavia) the three tier system is spreading. The fact that 45% of the A grades at A level are achieved by private schools (who educate 7% of the children and effectively have a three-tier system) puts paid to the idea that it is the number of transitions a child makes but rather the age at which they are made.

We are hoping by sending you our response to the consultation, to help governing bodies make sense of some of the data and to encourage schools to inform their parents.

Susannah Burn

St Felix CEVC MiddlePage 109/20/2018

Executive Summary

1. There are flaws in the quality and design of the review process, some of them serious, and the closing date should be extended to 30th October 2006.
2. Reviewing the way schools are organised in Suffolk (Suffolk County Council, 2006c) contains bias, always to the detriment of the three-tier system. The questionnaire is particularly poor.
3. School Organisation Review: Pupil Performance: Research Findings (Suffolk County Council, 2006d) shows that middle school pupils in other three-tier authorities do better than in Suffolk at Key Stage 2 but that pupils in the Suffolk three-tier system do better than pupils in all other three-tier authorities at Key Stage 3. This comparison of three-tier systems (paragraph 84) shows that our own three-tier system must be capable of further improvement without the need for radical change.
4. Given the position at Key Stages 2 and 3, the key indicator is performance at GCSE. Suffolk County Council, 2006d (paragraphs 42-44 and Chart 10) shows that the three-tier system is marginally more inclusive than the two-tier system but that the two-tier system does better with the most able. However, it is important to recognise how small the difference is, about 130pupils achieving one grade better in one GCSE.
5. A range of process improvements, such as the two-year Key Stage 3, could transform pupil performance in the three-tier system.
6. No data about personal and social development is made available, Suffolk County Council, 2006c claiming that we cannot measure it. This is not true as a variety of measures such as pupil motivation, anxiety and attitude to school can be developed which will stand as proxy for personal and social development.
7. Both our own research and national studies, for example, show that pupil anxiety at transfer and attitude to school in the year after transfer are markedly more positive at Year 5 into middle school than Year 7 into secondary.
8. The experience of Years 7 and 8, especially Year 8, the neglected year in the two-tier system, is more positive in the three-tier system and is characterised by greater pupil responsibility.
9. The use of the ACORN classifications in Suffolk County Council (2006d) again shows that the three-tier system is more inclusive than the two-tier but this is not brought out in the commentary
10. The three-tier system is ideally suited to meet the five key objectives of Every Child Matters.
11. The distinctive ethos of St Felix Middle School, which promotes Christian caring principles and the development of the whole child as an individual and a social being, is strongly ingrained in a culture which has developed over thirty-five years.
12. Our strong culture of performance in Music, Dance and Drama enables our children to thrive and rapidly to become confident young people.
13. Suffolk county Council (2006c) implies that teacher supply is a problem to the three-tier system but a number of universities offer Key Stage 2/Key Stage 3 courses, including the prestigious University of Cambridge Faculty of Education.
14. Suffolk is a county of small towns and large villages and the three-tier system suits the pattern of population settlement in much of the county.
15. Reorganisation of the Northern and Western Areas into a two-tier system would not only mean the closure of middle schools but would result in many villages losing their primary schools while some small to medium sized towns such as Haverhill and Newmarket could lose their Sixth Form provision, leading to more children being bussed to school.
16. What Suffolk County Council (2006c) calls a two-tier system in its fourth option on page 8 is in fact another three-tier system masquerading under a false name.
17. Major reorganisation will disrupt the education of a ‘lost generation’ of young people at school or about to start their school lives. The uncertainty caused could lead to pupil migration, difficulty in staff recruitment, loss of staff morale and a lowering of standards. This would be too high a price to pay.
18. Suffolk has a good reputation for its educational provision and for working with its schools not against them.
19. Suffolk’s stock of mainly custom-built schools is in relatively good condition.
20. If Suffolk moved away from the three-tier system, it would be bucking international trends. New provision in Australia, North America and, closer to home, in Clacton, Essex, all demonstrate the value to children’s learning and their social and personal development of the smaller schools which the three-tier system is well equipped to deliver.
21. Raising standards of pupil performance beyond the plateau they have reached means empowering schools at the most local level possible.
22. Suffolk should support the locality proposals reported in Expanding Horizons 14-19: Vision into Reality (Suffolk County Council, 2006a) rather than embark on wholesale and disruptive change.

Reviewing the way schools are organised in Suffolk

A response by St Felix CEVC Middle School Governors

The Quality of the Review

The quality of the review has already revealed some flaws in the process and its design, both minor and major:

The Have Your Say leaflet (Suffolk County Council, 2006b) is not clearly worded and would be unlikely to alert anyone not already in the education bureaucracy to the significance of the review and the importance of having their say!

In particular, there has been confusion over the dates and places of the Select Panel meetings. In Newmarket, first we were told that ScaltbackMiddle School would be the venue for Select Panel meetings on 8th June, then St Felix was booked for 19th June, but apparently for a different kind of meeting with governors only. When Have Your Say was published, it mentioned no Newmarket venue. When we enquired, first we were told that ‘Mildenhall’ meant the Mildenhall, Newmarket and Brandon cluster of schools not the place, then that it did indeed mean the place and that the Select Panel meeting would take place at Mildenhall College on 8th June after all. At the time of writing, a month into the review process, we have still received no written clarification of where meetings will take place and what their different purposes are. Meanwhile, the closing date to book a personal consultation, 12th May, has long since passed. Although we understand that the date has been extended, this information has not been published in writing to parents or households.

At the time of writing, copies of the full review document, Reviewing the way schools are organised in Suffolk (Suffolk County Council, 2006c), have still not been received in all, if any, Suffolk households.

Plans to ensure that out-of-county households of children who attend Suffolk schools receive a copy of the review documents have been communicated to schools only recently and rely on the good offices of schools to distribute them. That these households are included matters all along the county’s long boundaries with Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex but is perhaps particularly important in areas like Newmarket and Haverhill where cross-boundary school attendance is common.

At 15 minutes over 3 hours in each of 7 venues, the number of personal consultations possible if there were only one Select Panel convened on each occasion would be 84. Even allowing for the possibility that more than one Select Panel will be convened on each occasion, this is a miniscule number of possible personal consultation opportunities compared to the size of the population of Suffolk.

When our Chairman and Headteacher did indeed manage to attend a Select Panel meeting, they were told that the take-up of places at these meetings was disappointing. Given the failure of Have Your Say to make clear in plain English the significance of the consultation and the confusion over dates, places and purposes of meetings, we are not in the least surprised that the take-up is not greater. Only when people are clear what is at stake and are clear about how to make their response will the local authority be able to judge their level of concern.

The way that Suffolk County Council (2006c) summarises both School Organisation Review: Pupil Performance: Research Findings (Suffolk County Council, 2006d) on page 6 and the options available (see page 8) introduces bias, always to the detriment of the three-tier system. It also contains a number of other inaccuracies, again to the detriment of the three-tier system. These will be dealt with separately below.

The questionnaire at the back of Suffolk County Council (2006c) is poorly designed to gain any information that would not conform to a predetermined view and is almost laughably brief. Are there not enough studies to show that parents want their children to be happy and then to do well, in that order? How many care about ‘managing population changes’? ‘Pupil Achievement’ might stand for ‘do well’ but where is happiness? Is it ‘Personal and Social Development’, down at lowly box 10? The ‘Your views’ options is a bureaucrats’ tick list. Anyone who ticks ‘Pupil Achievement’ would be assumed to be voting against the threetier system, were voting allowed. No valid information is likely to be gained from the use of this questionnaire.

While using a range of different data gathering and analysis techniques to ‘triangulate’ responses is a laudable research aim, taken together, these flaws in the process suggest that the outcomes will mean just whatever senior officers and leading members want them to mean.

Nowhere in either Suffolk County Council 2006b or 2006c does it say that parents, teachers, governors or any other interested – or, indeed, disinterested – party can simply write into the review team and give their views in their own words other than on the questionnaire itself!

While the website contains the documents which have been published so far in the main only to schools, it is not informative on the above communication issues.

In the circumstances, we believe that the review period must be extended. Since extending it by the one month which has already been lost would simply take up the summer holiday period, we believe that the new closing date should be the Monday after the autumn half-term holiday, 30th October 2006.

Bias in Reviewing the way schools are organised in Suffolk

Two key points of bias are as follows:

1. Page 6, second bullet point, summarises Suffolk County Council (2006d) that ‘from ages 7-14 children in two-tier schools make nearly a term better progress overall’, omitting to say that while performance at Key Stage 2 is lower in the three-tier system than the two-tier system, performance at Key Stage 3 is higher. The summary seems justifiable because performance in the three-tier system is said not to catch up entirely with that in the two-tier system. However, Suffolk County Council (2006d) also compares the three-tier system in Suffolk with three-tier systems in other authorities, albeit briefly. It says (paragraph 84):

Pupils in the 3-tier system in Suffolk make less progress than those assessed at the end of Key Stage 2 in middle schools elsewhere. … However, value-added progress from Key Stage 2 to 3 (age 11 to 14) and within the system overall with 2transfer points from Key Stage 1 to 3 (ages 7 to 14) is significantly better than that found in 3-tier systems in all similar schools nationally

This shows that the three-tier system can do better at Key Stage 2 than we do in Suffolk because schools in other authorities do in fact do better. It ought to raise the question of how we in Suffolk can improve our performance at Key Stage 2 in the three-tier system while maintaining our excellent performance at Key Stage 3. Page 6 of Suffolk County Council (2006c) does give a ‘have done’ list of things that have been tried since 1999, a relatively short period of time, but page 8 does not offer a ‘can do’ option, even though Suffolk County Council (2006d) shows that it can be done without the need for radical change. Indeed, Suffolk County Council (2006d) makes this very point in its ‘Summary of the main issues arising from the evidence’ (paragraph 124):

There is no doubt that if Key Stage 2 standards were raised and good value added progress in the secondary phase was maintained, Suffolk 3 tier schools would be performing significantly above the national average and in line with our aspirations as a local authority.

1. Of the six options listed on page 8, two of the three most favourable to the three-tier system, Keeping things as they are and All three-tier systems across the county have no explanatory gloss accompanying them, while the third, Different systems in different parts of the county, is accompanied by a gloss which is hardly encouraging and contains no information not in the heading: ‘this could mean having a lot of different systems in different parts of the county’. The three options least favourable to the three-tier system, on the other hand, are all accompanied by an encouraging and informative gloss. The way that the options are glossed could be considered a steering of the responses, even if this was not intended.

School Organisation Review: Pupil Performance: Research findings

This research was conducted by county officers but peer reviewed by, among others, Professors Maurice Galton and John Gray of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, two of the co-authors of Galton, Gray and Rudduck, 1999. Professor Galton’s major area of expertise is in pupil transitions and transfers. Short of examining the raw data for ourselves, it is difficult to contest, though it is possible to find minor quibbles. For example, the table of Ofsted Inspection Grades 2004 to 2005 on Page 28 shows that for five of the seven Ofsted areas of focus, middle schools outperform both two-tier and three-tier secondary schools. However, paragraphs 88 to 92, which gloss this chart, do not give middle schools the credit the chart suggests is due.

Given that progress at Key Stage 2 is less good in the Suffolk threetier system than in either our own two-tier system or other authorities with three-tier systems, but out-performs them all at Key Stage 3, the crucial issue is standards at GCSE. This is particularly important because there continue to be doubts about the validity and reliability of national curriculum tests, whereas there have been no such doubts over GCSEs, only over a possible decline in standards over time.

Paragraphs 43 and 44 show that there is little difference between the two systems in the percentage of students achieving passes at A*-G grades. Indeed, the three-tier system does marginally better, by 1%, a measure which shows its greater inclusiveness. However, the proportion of students gaining the higher grades A*-C is greater in the two-tier system by 4%. Chart 10 on page 13 sets this information out. Referring to earlier research by Suffolk County Council, paragraph 42 suggests that a 3% difference between the systems ‘equates to about 130 students a year performing less well in the three-tier system … For example a student gaining 7 B grades in the two-tier system might gain 6 B grades and one C grade in the threetier system’. While these differences are not acceptable, it is important to understand how small they are in real terms.