Lessons to be learned from best comprehensive schools

IT IS IMPORTANT to understand the relevance of The Cotswold School to the future of secondary education in Guernsey and in contributing to that understanding I need to correct some inaccuracies in your correspondent’s reference to that outstanding English comprehensive school.

Neither I nor any of my ESC colleagues have ever suggested establishing colleges here that are clones of schools elsewhere. What I have pointed out, both in the States and elsewhere, is that The Cotswold School is one of countless English comprehensive schools which, by their consistent record of attainment, offer a clear example of the unequivocal superiority of 11-18 schools with their own integral sixth forms over 11-16 schools that lose all their students once they have taken their GCSEs. I could just as easily have offered the example of any of the other three large English comprehensive schools visited by some of my colleagues and I. Two of these were in challenging areas of inner city London, while a third was in a relatively deprived area near Hounslow. As typical examples of successful 11-18 schools, all four schools had the following characteristics in common: a proven record of consistently high educational attainment; breadth of curriculum; well-behaved, polite students, whatever their social background; successful recruitment of good teachers; and efficient use of space.

What made The Cotswold School particularly relevant to Guernsey is that its student body, this year totalling 1,420, is close to Guernsey’s in terms of its social and cultural make-up. It is also the product of amalgamating a grammar school with a secondary modern school, the current head teacher having been a classroom teacher at the time of the amalgamation. Your correspondent implies that The Cotswold School is in the Cheltenham catchment area and that it comprises students of parents who have moved to the area in order to qualify for entrance to an outstanding school. The head teacher himself confirms to me that neither implication is correct. The school’s catchment area does not include prosperous Cheltenham. Within clear sight of the school lies the third most deprived council estate in the entire county of Gloucestershire. More than half the school’s Year 7 intake have average or below average records of prior attainment at their primary schools. In any one year’s cohort of 250, between 10% and 15% of students will have a record of entitlement to free school meals, while between 10% and 20% will be on the SEND register. Nor is the school without strong competition: this comes in abundance from an equally successful comprehensive school, Balcarras (barely 12 miles distant), from three nearby grammar schools and from a plethora of good private schools. In these circumstances, it does an injustice to The Cotswold School to imply that its success is due in any way to having a comfortable catchment area from which it can take its pick of students.

Your correspondent also suggests that the outstanding success of The Cotswold School’s sixth form is attributable to two factors: that it sets exceptionally high standards of entry and then only maintains the viability of its sixth form by recruiting extra students from elsewhere. The head teacher wishes to point out that both suggestions are misleading. Whilst it is correct that their entry standards for such subjects as the sciences and modern languages are set relatively high by Guernsey standards (but not remarkably so by English standards), the purpose is not to make the school’s record look good, but is much more about ensuring that students hoping to study those demanding subjects are well aware of what will be expected of them and will not be outfaced. In practice, it is rare for candidates to be refused entry to The Cotswold School’s sixth form to study their first-choice subjects. More typically, a small minority of students will be encouraged to choose an alternative subject for which they have demonstrated more aptitude. As for the viability of the sixth form, it most certainly does not depend on recruiting students from outside. There is simply no need to do so, because even with its high entry standards 70% of Year 11 students graduate from GCSEs into the school’s sixth form, a higher rate than we are accustomed to in Guernsey. Just as in Guernsey we experience an annual trickle into our Sixth Form Centre of students who were not previously at either of our four States secondary schools, so too does The Cotswold School accept students who gained their GCSEs elsewhere, but the head teacher informs me that such students comprise no more than 5% of the school’s sixth form and are not crucial to the viability of the sixth form.

I did indeed comment in the States that one could be in The Cotswold School and have no sense that there were some 1,400 students in it, but your correspondent is wholly wrong in attributing that experience to the generous outdoor spaces enjoyed by the school. On the day of my visit to The Cotswold School, the weather was inclement and for much of my visit the whole school was at study within the school building. The amount of external space was irrelevant. I witnessed a typical lunch session where a single cafeteria catered easily for so many students by the simple method of having one session for all year 7 and 8 students, a second session for students in years 9 and 10, and the ability of students in years 11, 12 and 13 to drift into the cafeteria when it best suited their study times. The head teacher confirms that although the school enjoys an allocation of open fields that would be the envy of any school anywhere, its actual building space conforms to the Building Bulletin standards applied to English state secondary schools, with the exception of science rooms and external hard-standing areas, for which the school falls below those standards. Both de Saumarez College and Victor Hugo College will be built to provide more internal per-pupil space than that experienced at The Cotswold School.

Your correspondent also omits to mention that The Cotswold School shares its site with a busy civic leisure centre and a combined primary school and pre-school with some 350 pupils. It is interesting and relevant to note the 112 car parking spaces that The Cotswold School has to share with its co-located leisure centre and compare that number with the spaces allocated on the planning applications for our new colleges: 140 for Victor Hugo College; 69 for Le Murier School; and 118 at de Saumarez College in addition to those which will be provided when the Delisles Church car park is developed.

The correspondent holds an interesting interpretation of the Traffic Impact Assessment. ARUP are leading national experts in traffic management and have been working with Guernsey for a number of years. They know and understand the island well and, in fact, what the Traffic Impact Assessment reveals is that it is possible to manage the traffic for both colleges so that there is minimal impact for local residents. However, there will need to be a review of the bus service in order to facilitate this and the committee will also be working with the Health Improvement Commission to encourage more active travel to school. It is not possible to state that the extensions at each site will reduce exercise, as there will still be ample space in which to participate in sports and the plans for enrichment will increase the available opportunities for all students.

It is of further interest to note that The Cotswold School achieves its academic, cultural and sporting success at an annual cost per pupil that is only just a shade over half the equivalent cost of educating a secondary school student in Guernsey. So it is not a case of money buying success. Furthermore, its average class size is 30 students, compared with Guernsey’s class size policy based on an average of 24 students per class.

Also worthy of note is that The Cotswold School, in conjunction with Bristol University, gives school-based and school-led training to trainee teachers under the School Direct teacher training scheme. The head teacher would welcome some form of ‘partnering’ with our new Lisia School in due course, one of the potential benefits of which could be in the area of our ability to recruit good teachers. That said, the head teacher advises me that he doubts that any of the teachers who pass through his school, particularly teachers of mathematics, physics and chemistry, would wish to teach in Guernsey unless they could teach to A-level standard in an 11-18 school.

Your correspondent is also mistaken in suggesting that it is easier to get students and staff to and from The Cotswold School than it will be to our two colleges. Cotswold students live up to 12 miles from their school, some of the teachers even further. Many of the students have to catch the morning school bus as early as 7.30am. The site is in a busy village of 3,300 residents accessed by narrow roads. Each morning, some 1,770 pupils and around 200 staff arrive at the part of the village shared by the comprehensive school and its neighbouring primary school and pre-school. All concerned simply get on with it without fuss.

Finally, your correspondent is also wrong to suggest that Guernsey parents will be disadvantaged compared to their Cotswold counterparts. Both sets of parents will have call on the comprehensive school serving their catchment area and for those with the ability to pay there will be a choice of private schools, although the fees for those in Gloucestershire are far higher than those for Guernsey’s grant-aided colleges.

Both de Saumarez College and Victor Hugo College will each establish their own culture and identity and there is no suggestion on my part that we should seek to reproduce an identikit copy of The Cotswold School here. However, I make no apology for quoting that school as one amongst literally hundreds of examples of large comprehensive schools that have set – and successfully met – high bench marks in terms of academic attainment, student behaviour and teacher recruitment. How unwise we would be, when designing the future model of our own secondary education, to ignore the lessons offered by the best comprehensive schools elsewhere. To suggest that the ‘Guernsey factor’ somehow places the high standards achieved by the best English comprehensive schools such as The Cotswold School beyond the reach of our future colleges reveals a lack of ambition, even a defeatism, that neither I nor any of my ESC colleagues share.