Fixing British education

MY PRINT column this week is based on reporting visits I recently made to an inner London secondary school. I found the experience hugely encouraging. It's a great school, in a tough neighbourhood. That begs the next question. If it can be done here, why can't it be done everywhere? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but offer this as a snapshot of one successful school, doing a lot of things right.

Here's the column:

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an “unstructured” place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs—the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was “not inspired,” Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.

As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley’s school was turned into an academy—a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.

Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half come from homes poor enough to earn free school meals and more than three-quarters do not speak English as a first language, making its intake exceptionally “challenging”, in Whitehall jargon.

Now when Mr Riley meets teenage students they seek advice about university. His dream is to return to Paddington Academy to teach full-time. It is easy to see why. The school is a success, recently earning an “Outstanding” grade from Ofsted school inspectors. It is, more subjectively, an impressive place. It feels calm and academically ambitious. It hums with optimism.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has put great faith in school autonomy: there are now 1,500 academies in England. A single column cannot pretend to prove that faith right or wrong. Bagehot spent time at Paddington last month with a more modest goal, to look at one successful school and try to discern what makes it different. Two big lessons jumped out.

First, Paddington is built around remarkable people. An unusually high proportion of staff come from Teach First, a programme that sends highly-qualified graduates into challenging schools for at least two years. Staff stay late for homework clubs that run until ten at night (many pupils come from crowded homes) and volunteer for weekend workshops. A teacher guiding 15-year-olds through a thoughtful debate on British manufacturing was a Treasury economist before switching career. His economics GCSE class is an experiment, part of a policy of promoting more academic subjects. Maths is the most popular subject for the oldest, sixth-form pupils, followed by sciences. Create an expectation that students can take hard subjects, and they will demand them, the teacher says. Thanks to pupil lobbying, the school now offers the astronomy GCSE.

The students’ families—from Africa, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kosovo and the Caribbean in the main—are remarkable, too. Many went through “trials and tribulations” to reach Britain, explains a 15-year-old girl who plans to be a doctor, so “we like a challenge”.

Second, Paddington uses distinctive methods. A motto is: “the street stops at the gates”. There is a strict uniform code, and pupils must remove hooded tops and caps as they arrive. Pupils are educated for the professional world, says a teacher: if they call a boss “Bruv”, value judgments will be made about them. Pupils agree. Using street slang would be an easy option in school, says a teenage boy. Alas, the world “out there” will not be easy.

Competition is embraced. Pupils are ranked on progress against individual targets every six weeks, with results posted publicly on a board. A difficult home life triggers support but not excuses. Some pupils arrive speaking no English: they are offered up to four years’ specialist help, but expectations are not lowered.

Staff enforce the small details of behaviour ceaselessly, with meaningful looks, a warning finger briefly held up, or a word of praise every few seconds. The goal is not Gradgrindian discipline, but the avoidance of bigger confrontations. Good deeds are consistently rewarded, lapses always have consequences. Pupils’ blazer lapels sag with enamel badges for choir, language-learning, mentoring younger pupils and so on. When the school gained its “Outstanding” grade, pupils were crestfallen to hear that this did not bring a badge. The school’s excellent and tireless principal, Oli Tomlinson, finally had “Outstanding” badges made in blue and gold enamel, bearing the Ofsted logo.

No excuses, no barriers

A common charge from academy critics—notably teachers’ unions—is that they practise selection on the sly by excluding difficult pupils. Early on, Paddington did expel some pupils from the old school, but now takes hard cases itself. At a morning meeting, staff discussed the progress of a new pupil rejected by all neighbouring schools: it went well, they agreed, considering it was his first day out of prison. Yet students feel safe. It’s better than primary school here, says a 12 year old: “People respect you.”

Paddington Academy is a brilliant school. That is great for its 1,200 pupils. But for others to benefit, Paddington’s strengths—its remarkable people and methods—must be echoed elsewhere. Methods can be copied. It helps that Paddington is part of a chain of academies sponsored by a charity, the United Learning Trust, driving the spread of good ideas. It also helps that school league tables are being beefed up with much more data, making Paddington’s success more visible. Remarkable people are harder to reproduce. Yet Paddington’s dynamic young teachers talk of their luck at working at a school which transforms lives. Mr Riley, fresh from university, longs to join them. The country needs more Mr Rileys. Schools as inspiring as Paddington are a good first step.