Rough schools and the attainment gap

I go to the roughest school in my city. Just down the road is a much better academically performing school, with only 10% from the poorest areas and 70% achieving 5 or more Highers. Then a mile up the road is my school, the comprehensive school, with 60% from the poorest areas and only 30% achieving 5 or more Highers. No other local school has a large enough special ed unit so even if a student is eligible to go to the better-performing school, if they have any form of learning difficulty then they get told they must go to the rougher school for support. The head of SFL told me that more than half the school had some form of learning difficulty which is abnormally high for a school. Many Ukrainian and Nigerian refugees got placed in the school despite there being a much closer one to them. They were dumped into random classrooms with zero help or translation. I had to help translate work for them, some would cry in class. Most of them went back to their home countries or college.

Firealarms go off constantly and there are fights in the corridors daily. Juniors have no manners, it feels like a glorified nursery since they kick doors down during exams. The school is a dumping ground for the catchment areas and students no other school wants to take. Every time I go to college and tell people the school I go to, they all say “ew” or “that’s sad”, it shouldn’t be this way.

The school itself is falling to bits, it's full of RAAC concrete and asbestos. Looks more like a brutalist soviet block than it does a school. The classrooms are freezing corridors with no heating. The pipes always burst so the entire bottom floor flooded, the halls still reeking of mould and urine. Half the teachers are temporary substitutes who are not qualified to teach and some subjects aren't even sitting a prelim exam. We're told that education is an equal human right yet those more affluent have an unfair advantage with access to far better learning resources and a better environment just by being born to wealthy parents.

How do they expect the attainment gap to lower when this is the **** we have to put up with? Finland abolished private education and has the best academic performance in the world. Schools shouldn’t be socially segregated by postcodes and income. It’s like saying rich kids should be allowed access to cleaner water that poor people can’t because it’s the parents choice. Makes zero sense.

Reply 1

ReeseJamPiece

I'm not trying to push this as some socialist thing either, this should be the standard regardless of your political beliefs. A basic human right such as education should not be lessened or bettered by social class. There should be no such thing as a comprehensive, a charter, a grammar, an academy - just. a. school. Or better yet, homeschool! I don't understand why this hasn't caught on in Britain as it has in the US. State schools clearly can't provide us with the education needed to function in the modern world given most juniors can barely read or write and parents have gotten used to helping their kids with school work over covid lockdowns. Homeschooling was once the norm for education, where parents would arrange groups and private tutors. On average, homeschooled kids are much happier and perform far better academically than someone state-school-educated.

I understand that some parents may not have the time but what's the alternative? Send them to a rough decaying state school where they will receive a subpar education while rich Eton snobs get handed an Oxbridge or Ivy League uni placement on a silver platter using daddy's money? Eton's private school tuition fees are 50k A YEAR!!! That's almost double the average salary here in Scotland. We used to have the best education system in the world, at a minimum you would receive a tertiary education for trades and even that's gone. Working-class kids are being demonstrably failed and that will bite our government in the ass once they realize that they are the future workers, only to find they don't have the skills needed to replace the retirees. Gen Alpha is going to be in poverty, hopelessly addicted to the internet, and the dumbest generation to date.