Make heads of schools accountable
ONE of the striking consequences of the debate about GCSE exam results has been the number of people in ordinary conversation who have been quick to say the secondary schools would have performed better were it not for the distortion caused by the colleges and the Grammar School.
ONE of the striking consequences of the debate about GCSE exam results has been the number of people in ordinary conversation who have been quick to say the secondary schools would have performed better were it not for the distortion caused by the colleges and the Grammar School.
Since the system is wrong, what else can you expect? Yet that approach rather misses the point – and gives the secondaries every excuse for not trying harder.
What consultants Frontier Economics and employers via the work carried out in preparing the island's skills strategy have highlighted is that the secondary schools are doing less well now than they have in the past.
Whatever benchmark is deemed appropriate – and there are others beyond GCSEs – parents would wish to see results consistently improving. In that case, what the non-secondary schools do is to a degree irrelevant. It is the success of the teaching-learning process in each individual school that matters.
Where critics of the system may have a point, however, is on the allocation of resources. Above average children do well by any standards, go on to university and may or may not come back here.
If that results in a net 'brain drain' then the island is more reliant on guest labour and – the undebated issue – those young adults who have not left the island.
Statistically, then, the greatest number of individuals who do less well at school stay here, raise families and pay their bills and find jobs in areas that do not require high fliers. For a community that makes its living largely in the financial services sector and wholly in a knowledge-based economy, that looks like a serious disconnect.
Certainly the skills strategy has spotted it and employers have, too.
Taking brighter pupils from other schools and putting them in the secondaries isn't the answer, because they will do well in any event.
The nub is improving performance at secondary level, which means giving the heads the responsibility, the authority and the funding required so they can recruit the teachers they need and then be accountable for the results achieved.
