A Son of the Rock

I heard on the radio this morning that the gap in examination results between Public (aka private) school pupils in England and those in state schools had widened. As you would expect the Labour Party had apparently bemoaned this difference.

A BBC reporter then relayed the UK Government gloss on it, to the effect that when you “drilled down” into the results then those from selective schools and “academies” showed the same trend as private schools.

How convenient I thought, that this information mirrored what their adherents would have the general public believe about the effectiveness of such schools.

Then it occurred to me, that in a system now solely dependent on teacher assessment this increase is entirely what you would expect from institutions more likely to suffer parental pressure – or employer pressure on teachers – than the average state school. Because what exactly are parents of private school pupils paying for? (Better results certainly, as well as access to old boy networks.) A similar expectation no doubt exists for selective schools and the so-called academies.

Another explanation than the effectiveness of individual schools presents itself. That the results from “normal” state schools are more likely to be genuine and the teachers in those schools less likely to have bent to any pressure from parents, or their employers, than those whose jobs are perhaps less secure.