Be Excellent To Each Other

These schools is the tits, sez gov.



Is yours on there? Mine wasn't. Disappointingly.

Hooray mine is. Although it was called Mereway Upper School at the time.

5th one down on the Northamptonshire county breakdown.

Yes! My school isn't on there, but Cheshire Oaks High School* is. Take that you idiots.


*the school formerly known as Stanney High School, or something. They sold half their land off to a company to build a massive sports complex on, then changed their name to that of the local shopping outlet, presumably for more money, or to attract more pupils, or something.

This is what I don't get about school ratings. There was nothing terrible special about my school. in maths, certainly, every less was just drawling through a textbook one page at a time, having things explained to the class without anything in the way of one-to-ones or anything. No fancy study guides, nothing mega special, yet I have a fairly nippy competance in maths, and so did everyone else in my class.

The area around where I lived wasn't particular deprived or anything, so while there were twatty troublemakers (who did poorly at all subjects) they were a minority.

What the hell is a school supposed to do if they're in a chavvy area full of twatbuckets? Are they magically supposed to combat 13 years or poor parenting with ENGLISH and MATHS lessons? Most chavvy twats will refuse to learn because they're chavvy twats, and not because the school is inherantly shit. Teachers aren't qualified or capable of 'reaching' an entire class full of arseholes, and I'm not sure why they're expected to.

As usual, I think the blame in cases like this is being misdirected. It's not like these schools are situated in places where people are wealthy and well-to-do, they're usually deprived areas where a lot of the kid are, well, chavvy twats. The threat of closure for the school isn't going to do much I reckon.

League tables are literally the worst damaging factor in our country's education system. They fuel everything else (with the possible exception of the reluctance to cut class sizes because it'd be too expensive).

50% of our nation's schools perform below average.

Disgusting.

Agreed. It's no surprise to me, as a local, that the only school in that list in Shropshire is The Grange, situated in one of the worst areas of Shrewsbury.

Are these schools the ones they are threatening to close if they don't improve? What exactly are they planning to do with the 30,000-odd pupils that would need rehousing?

Send 'em to faith schools - let God sort 'em out.

Faith schools are rather good at avoiding closures as they are part funded by their churches. Less of a burden on the taxpayers than those stupid little fuckers at the special schools underachieving and being a drain due to their need for more support staff. The CUNTS. /bitter rant

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/e ... 4_4067.stm

Oldershaw. The stupid school for the stupid people in the stupid area, is stupid. "gu4", etc.

The (education facility) that I contract for has just been through Ofsted inspection. We got top class marks in all areas except one - educational achievement, which was "satisfactory".

The rating was based on the number of A-level passes achieved by the students. Which the (education facility) had to argue was a teensy bit unfair, because they are a vocational college and don't offer A-level courses. The courses they do offer have an above average success rate despite taking in the pupils every other college don't want.

Not that this matters in the league tables, and we get a slightly worse rating than the local Beacon College, which only offer A-level courses and is about to go bankrupt.

These stories make me glad we live on a rock in the middle of the sea. We only have 5 secondary schools and 35 primary schools, the GCSE pass rate is around 98% and over 56% gain grade C or above, which I believe is quite good. The main benefit is the size of the schools, less than 1200 pupils in each of the secondary schools and because of the population spread, pupils from all backgrounds go to school together. There are housing estates in the UK bigger than most of the towns here.

The facilities are excellent, I have worked on a few new build projects for the Department of Education over here and the stuff these kids get is amazing. Our youngest son gets an apple laptop next year from his school. He's 5. What's more, the Government are more than willing to spend the money on improving the experience for the kids and giving them all the help they can. We don't have a university so the Governement pays all the fees for all the kids who want to go across (to the UK) plus a maintenance allowance for those who are less we off. It's pretty good and we're very lucky, I have no concerns about which school my boys will go to or the standard of education they will get.

Moral of the story is, move to the Isle of Man, we pay less tax and we have better schools! By far! The only downsides are crime, we've had 1 murder this year already and we don't have Burger King or Pizza Hut.

Someone went to a school that can't teach maths properly

My school isn't, but it was a selective school so I didn't really expect it.

MMM?

I wheeled out the statistic that 50% of schools are below average; claiming moral outrage and poor standards of education etc.

The joke being that with an average, 50% is always above, and 50% below. It was better in my head.

I laughed, Mr Russ, but I'm busy watching the Eagle Has Landed and didn't take the time to properly enunciate my appreciation of your japery. For which I apologise.

No problem. 50% of your ennunciation was below average.

Now that depends on the average used, dunnit?

Mean!=mode!=median

Er, no it isn't - hence what Dudley said

A "rival" school (Tardy counter! - no-one-will-get-that-ed) that my school used to play rugby with is on there, though - John Bunyan.

0% for science? How is that possible?

As for my own schooling, I was rubbish. I didn't get five GCSEs (although I did get an A* in maths), and had to resit the lower sixth. School and I didn't really get on.

Still, I'm now a corpwhore so it all worked out in the end

Also:

"The tits" would be very, very good - at least in Bedfordshire speak.

My school is there. I got Bs and Cs across the board. It always did have a bit of a reputation though. Bluecup went to the same school, and look how *he* turned out.

As Grim... has implied, it's not true. That's not what an average as commonly understood is. When people say average they mean the Artihmetic mean.

Allow me to demo.

We have 6 schools, here are their score.

100
90
80
70
10

The "average" here is 70. Only a single one of the 5 schools (or 20%) is below the average. 3 out of 5 are above.

The word you were looking for was "Median". In this case, 80. An equal number of schools got more and less.



Crikey, my school's score at last check was 99%.

Here's mine - less than ten miles from the school I was talking about above. Crazy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/e ... 5_4500.stm

That's mine.

Below average, mine. A bit.

My 6th form fares a bit better, but then they never shut the fuck up about exams, and practically threatened to expel anyone who didn't apply to university, whether they wanted to or not.

Well colour me corrected. It's true though, I only got a C at A level.

I got an E at A-Level maths.

But basic statistics is GCSE, where I got an A. Then the fuckers took away all the numbers and still claimed it was maths.

*palms the attack buttons*

KUROW! Interrupt that team attack!

I notice that my school has 30% special needs GCSE students compared to pretty much everyone else's 15%. Yet somehow my school is threatened with closure. If 30% of a group is "special needs", surely they are no longer that "special"?

In case you were wondering my school has* a quite good Special Needs class system with properly trained teachers and small classrooms etc.

*did have when I was there. I left in 2000.

My old secondary school's current GCSE pass rate is 63%. Obviously it dropped considerably when I left.

It is, you'd be thinking of arithmatic stuff.



100% Agreed.

My school : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/e ... 6_6014.stm

Has been going very much downhill since the headmaster went properly insane in the late 90s. Yes, it's selective, how could you guess.

(It is also, amusingly, a CoE faith school according to the government. The majority of pupils weren't, it certainly wasn't in the criteria for pupils)

LIES!

That's a sin.

Mine and Bobby's school has a 100% record for pupils getting 5 or more GCSEs at C or above (incl Maths and English), and generally appears to be rather good.

Looking back, I guess it was rather good, though of course it didn't feel like it at the time!

We should start a club for people who got E at Maths A-Level.

That wasn't even my worst mark - that honour falls upon my N in Geography.

I got an E at A-Level Further Maths, but this is well and truly blamed on my Further Maths teacher being an alcoholic who only occasionally showed up and mostly just rambled on incoherently. He's dead now, bless 'im.

I got an A at Maths. It would be my lowest A level grade.

A levels mean nothing.

My GCSEs were

A - Maths
B - English Language, English Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Business Studies / IT
C - French, Humanities, Biology
D - German.

My A-Levels were
B - Computer Science, General Studies
D - Economics
E - Maths

Burning Vigour attack FTW



I'm eligible

I got four As and 5 Bs at GCSE, one of the latter in maths (I went on to pass the extension thing mind, the supposed impossibility of which combination confused the fuck out of the hateful bitch I was "upgraded" to from the completely awesome guy who took the second set) and double science in the former.

I got a D (Chemistry), an E (Maths and Mechanics) and an N (Physics) at A Level and spent most of the two years contemplating suicide.

That school's in Wales, but I did the first 3 years of secondary school at what became Sale Grammar - I passed the 11 Plus to get there, go me.

I loved that game. I wrote a review of it, and everything.

[edit]ZOMG

A friend of mine had it, we played it loads, great game. Some of the mini games were a bit odd though, like the teacher-massage one. Never did quite figure out what was going on.

My favourite team was the goalie (roberto) and the baseball player (umm... I keep thinking Batsumoto but i doubt that's it. Will check later).

Was Rival Schools the one with the cheerleader that yelled 'wonderful, fantastic, exciting' during her combos? And the 'tough dude' that had a knife but fought with his hands in his pockets most of the time?

Shoma had the baseball bat. The speech in my version was in Japanese - was yours English?

I liked Shoma and Sakura (from SF2).

It was in Japanese (that's why we couldn't make sense of some of it) but there was a little bit of English (Engrish?) in places.

We always wanted to try out the sequal 'project justice' but never did get hold of it. This was all back in my first year at uni.

I didn't even know there was a sequel.
I want to play this now. Will it work on a PS3?

[edit]ZOMG PSP!

My GCSEs included three As, four Bs, some Cs, a D, a Q, and an X.

I was very pleased with the last two. The X was in Graphics; an exam I refused to work in as a protest at how monumentally awful and, for much of the year, absent, our teachers had been. I didn't bother going to the exam, and they tried to get me to sit it after another exam later in the week. I shrugged, flicked through the paper, saw that nothing on it bore any resemblance to what we'd been taught in the class (ie: nothing), signed it, and told one of the teachers on duty that I refused to do any more than that. Fortunately he was one of the few excellent teachers there (and, like all the others, left that year and hasn't been seen since), so simply looked quite surprised, then a little angry, then tried hard not to grin and let me go home, quite clearly planning to go immediately to the technology block and ask what the fuck was going on.

Incidentally, the piece of wood in my avatar is tied in with all this in a highly esoteric manner. Seriously. It is an icon of quiet, baffling rebellion.

A levels... er. I always forget, but B in Biology, either a B or C in history, and C and D in Spanish and Chemistry for AS levels. I had to do the spanish at a night class once a week in another college entirely (who tried to charge me £750 to do the course for some reason. After some haggling, they pulled this down to £125 or thereabouts. We couldn't afford that, and I'd be fucked if I was going to go entirely without, so we passed the bill onto the school and told them to deal with their mistake) because the school fucked up the timetable ("You won't be able to do those A levels!" said the teacher I explained the problem to, cheerfully. "Oh, that's brilliant! I'll just study something I don't give a toss about for two years instead. I never wanted to study Spanish anyway - that GCSE thing was just a bit of a laugh. Thanks!" I replied, equally cheerfully. Prick), although in their defence, this was largely the gubmint's fault for throwing together a shitty AS level scheme in a weekend before the start of the year so that they could say they were doing something in time for the election.

I did Physics for a while because I had to choose a fourth, and so managed to not only waste loads of my time but also distract the people who did want to learn Physics for several months. Eventually they let me drop it because I was irritating the teachers too much. Hey, they shouldn't have made me study it in the first place, nobs. It was either that or English, and I would rather eat my own face than be forced to study literature I'd otherwise have loved. Urgh. AS levels can fuck off, they were a joke then and they're not much better now.

Bah. I could go on, you know. Stupid country.