How Would You Think Different ? Council To Plug £30mil Hole
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Posts
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@thewayneinspain 7111 wrote:
Alunh
Think you have misinterpreted what i’m trying to say.
I mean the kids aren’t getting enough feedback on day to day terms. They are told they are doing something wrong, but not enough of them are getting enough time to be told how to how to do something correctly.
i think my ilk are not to blame, because the first thing they would be saying is you need more teachers and more classroom assistants not ‘pupil centred learning’ i.e. here’s your textbook go and study at home.
Ok…..let’s presume that the kids aren’t getting enough feedback on a day to day basis. If that were true, then you have a badly run school…….but that isn’t the point here……
Nor is the point about more teachers, more money, more resources, smaller class sizes and so on.
All that I am focussing on is Mixed ability Comprehensives vs other forms of Secondary school organisation. Whilst the British Conservative party partly support Grammars and selection, the official line is in favour of non selective Secondaries including, for example Academies. Academies in England were very much a New Labour idea and New Labour supported schools with a slant vs Bog Standard Comps as well as Setting vs Mixed ability. Most front-rank New labour politicians have condemned Mixed ability.
In Wales, sadly, we still live in a strange form of ‘socialist’ mess where we still support bog standard comps (with no difference one to the other) and still persist with Mixed ability.
Wrexham, therefore, remains an epicentre of archaic can’t work, doesn’t work Mixed ability backward thinking……and we have tolerated it. It’s only now that Clywedog and Rhosnesni are actually understanding why they have failed and it’s only now (under the pressure of abject failure) that local dinosaur politicians have woken up to how bad this is
Sounds like the politicians need re-educating before presuming they know what’s best for the children.
As St David’s High School, the school were very highly thought of throughout the country for it’s musical ability. An ex headteacher from another school told me that it was the premier school in Wales for music. Flintshire appear now to have taken on that mantle.
Whatever they do or don’t do now, the children that have been in these badly run schools for the last few years have been let down. Some of them may never catch up.@zinger 7120 wrote:
Whatever they do or don’t do now, the children that have been in these badly run schools for the last few years have been let down. Some of them may never catch up.
Our daughter went to a secondary school in the Wrexham area for 11 weeks before we pulled her out and ended up transferring her to one in Cheshire where she has done fantastically well and is now looking to progress to university. Within those 11 weeks we saw our bright, intelligent child reduced to a flat wreck. Maybe some kids can just dig in and get on with it?, sadly she could not. School support was appalling and following a series of incidents we felt we were left with no other choice than to get her out of there. I’m not going to name this school as I believe things have improved since then but for our daughter pulling her out of there was the single best decision we ever made, which to this day we feel we shouldn’t have had to do.
Alunh;7115 wrote:Ok…..let’s presume that the kids aren’t getting enough feedback on a day to day basis. If that were true, then you have a badly run school…….but that isn’t the point here……Nor is the point about more teachers, more money, more resources, smaller class sizes and so on.
All that I am focussing on is Mixed ability Comprehensives vs other forms of Secondary school organisation. Whilst the British Conservative party partly support Grammars and selection, the official line is in favour of non selective Secondaries including, for example Academies. Academies in England were very much a New Labour idea and New Labour supported schools with a slant vs Bog Standard Comps as well as Setting vs Mixed ability. Most front-rank New labour politicians have condemned Mixed ability.
In Wales, sadly, we still live in a strange form of ‘socialist’ mess where we still support bog standard comps (with no difference one to the other) and still persist with Mixed ability.
Wrexham, therefore, remains an epicentre of archaic can’t work, doesn’t work Mixed ability backward thinking……and we have tolerated it. It’s only now that Clywedog and Rhosnesni are actually understanding why they have failed and it’s only now (under the pressure of abject failure) that local dinosaur politicians have woken up to how bad this is
We have two badly run super schools with too many pupils. The local politicians are to blame for this as they are supposed to scrutinise them. They always use the Welsh Assembly rulebook as an excuse for their failure or unpopular policies. That way they get voted in again.
I’m happy to change my view on setting v mixed ability if the empirical evidence states ‘setting’ works better than mixed ability. Certainly the school of psychology I am from could argue the case for both… peer to peer interactions helps children learn well. But for me both systems are still ‘old school’ because in my opinion both systems fail because classes are way too big and pupils aren’t getting enough attention to learn (and pass) effectively.
Really the message I get are that they are not just bad they are appalling. Metalhead is quite right & congratulations to him for making the right decision.
@zinger 7123 wrote:
Really the message I get are that they are not just bad they are appalling. Metalhead is quite right & congratulations to him for making the right decision.
Just to echo this sentiment. I so respect mums and dads who have the brass balls to put their kids first and make the effort to place them in the best possible place. It would be interesting to use Freedom of Information to find out how many Borough based post 11 pupils are actually educated outside the Borough. I gather that Bishop Heber in Malpas does a roaring trade in Wrexham kids as does Castell Alun. Of course, many use the faith based schools and language based schools to achieve the same.
But for me both systems are still ‘old school’ because in my opinion both systems fail because classes are way too big and pupils aren’t getting enough attention to learn (and pass) effectively.
I get this line Wayne but we have to build a system around the realities we face not some Utopian model that we are miles away from. Education budgets were not capable of delivering on your aspirations when times were good and Gordon Brown was doling out money like confetti.
It would be interesting also to find out how many children who live out of Borough are educated within the Borough of Wrexham & where.
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