In a world awash with data, exam league tables are eagerly analysed, but need to be treated with caution. Of far greater importance is the ‘value added’ provided by the teaching and learning at a particular school, and whether a result means that a pupil is progressing further or faster than we might reasonably expect.

GDST schools evaluate pupil progress carefully, using formal assessment tools more than many independent schools, partly because parents appreciate the progress reports, and also to benchmark and measure ‘value-added’.

These benchmark assessments measure attainment and value-added, but more important, and indeed playing a part in the value that’s actually being added, are teachers’ daily informal assessments. Testing, marking, and intelligent questioning shape teaching, lesson by lesson, and ensure that no pupil falls behind and the more able are suitably stretched.

When judging a school, value-added measures are only part of the picture, because education in GDST schools is about more than exam results. To succeed in further, higher study, students need to develop sustainable thinking skills, and not just learn how to pass exams. And of course, beyond that, a GDST education is about a great deal more than the formally academic.

All GDST schools share a vision for what they want their pupils to be, and to be able to do. Real value is added when girls leave school with attributes like these:

• Confident: Secure in her knowledge, and unwilling to take things for granted. Motivated by a spirit of enquiry, seeking to explore and evaluate ideas and arguments in a generous, critical and constructive way. Able to reflect on, communicate and defend her own views, and respectful of the views of others. Equipped to grapple with big ideas and make connections.

• Courageous: Welcomes new challenges, and meets them with resourcefulness and resilience. Enterprising and adventurous, willing to take the initiative, and not afraid to aim at tough targets. Can apply her knowledge and skills in unfamiliar contexts, and adapts to situations requiring new ways of thinking. Experience of and aptitude for leadership.

• Composed: Intrinsically motivated, self-directing, and taking responsibility for her own learning. Values fairness and acts with integrity, aware of herself and her impact, and aware of and respectful towards others. Sensitive to and appreciative of culture, context and community. Collaborative and supportive in team situations.

• Committed: Values connectivity – creating and sharing knowledge. Receptive to new ideas and to learning new things and new skills. Participates critically, considerately and constructively in her community, society and environment. Tends to engage in life-enriching interests and activities, and shows a determination to see things through.

These qualities characterising young women leaving a GDST school can’t be measured, but can definitely be noticed. When our alumnae tell us ‘they can always tell when someone they meet was a GDST girl’, it’s a testament to the real success of our schools.

The experience of implementing the creative curriculum in many of our junior schools shows that integrating different subjects in project-based activities inspires pupils and encourages them to become more confident and independent learners.

It is easy to see how cross-curricular work can underpin and accelerate progress in literacy and in creative writing. The next step is to inject maths teaching and learning with the same sense of exploration and excitement, and in many cases, a sense of confidence in dealing with maths.

All our junior and prep schools are taking part in a project, starting in September 2012, but involving a great deal of behind-the-scenes work beforehand, which aims to develop new horizons in maths. A package of teaching strategies has been identified, which provide additional support for pupils who find maths more difficult and increase the sense of challenge for those who take to maths in a big way. The comparison with the creative curriculum is instructive here: experts recommend that one of the best ways to raise the bar in maths is to teach it as a more open-ended process of investigation, rather than as a series of closed questions with relatively straightforward answers, and a pre-ordained set of steps towards achieving them.

Part of the excitement with this cross-GDST project lies in getting teachers together to discuss and disseminate best practice, and to encourage the growth of a community of best practice.Statistics show that pupils in GDST junior schools outperform girls in the independent sector as a whole, in mathematics as well as in reading. But there was a general feeling that maths should be as exciting, as challenging, and as rewarding as other curriculum areas. The ‘Maths in Junior Schools’ project aims to ensure girls leaving our junior and prep schools find maths just as stimulating and creative as the other subjects they know and love.

If you would like to know more about this, please watch the Maths in junior schools video on the GDST You Tube channel.

Failure, resilience and risk taking

For students today, high levels of competition for university places and the pressure to ensure that one is getting the most out of Higher Education in the light of increased fees, has led to young people having to make crucial decisions over their lives at an earlier stage. Taking hard knocks can be a regular part of education and working life, and the need for resilience has never been greater.

It may therefore seem a little strange that one of our schools, Wimbledon High, recently ran an initiative actively focussing on failure and the positive aspects of risk-taking.  ‘Failure Week’ was led by the head, Heather Hanbury, to encourage pupils at both the senior and junior schools to take risks and not worry about making mistakes. The aim, as Heather discussed on Women’s Hour today, was to show the girls that it is fine to try – and fail – and then pick yourself up and try again.

Whilst there is little point taking risks just for the sake of it, young people mustn’t be hampered in their development, or from expressing themselves, by a fear of failure. A pupil who is prepared to have a go at a new activity or be the one who asks a simple question or answers a difficult one is the sort of individual who will get the most out of life at school and beyond.

As we are seeing now all across Europe, in working life, things happen that are not ‘fair’ – companies merge, economies crash, strategies change – and a young employee can find his or her career hits the wall, through no fault of their own. And this is where resilience is so important in working life,  any successful woman or man will be able to look back at challenging times in their career and remember how they took disappointments onboard, regrouped, and moved on to better things.

One of the key messages that ‘Failure Week’ highlighted with the girls was not to take it personally – and I have said this to so many colleagues at distressing or difficult times in their careers. It rarely is personal – often the grinding of tectonic plates miles below the surface can destabilise your role in a corporate environment. Develop depths of self confidence and fightback from whatever corporate life throws at you.

Events outside an individual’s control can derail the most promising career – I often think of all those bright graduate trainees who joined big banks in September 2008, only to be out of a job six weeks later when the big banking crisis hit. In my career I have been fired once, was MD of a company that was sold, and worked for some wonderful bosses, but also some monsters.  If you talk to any CEO in a corporation, they will tell you about the setbacks and disasters in their career path to the top. So resilience – which is a quality we work very hard at GDST to inculcate in girls – becomes incredibly important in the unsteady economic times we now live in. 

When I meet the girls who come out of GDST schools, I see a confidence – a confidence without arrogance – that seems to me the hallmark of a GDST education. I hope that what our girls are finding, whether in the classroom, or on the playing field, or in the orchestra pit – is the ability to absorb the setbacks, the mistakes, the disappointments and reach inside themselves for resilience and recovery. That ability to bounce back – a smiling acceptance of whatever life throws at you, ‘don’t dwell on it, move on’ – is what we want to see in our girls, from reception to Year 13.  Whether they learn it on the hockey field or in the maths lesson, in leadership positions or not, it will be a priceless habit on their career journey.

An article on the Daily Telegraph website today (‘Schools held back by university demands, says Eton head’) are being “stifled” by a lack of autonomy over the curriculum and qualifications.

He makes the crucial point that schools preparing pupils for entry to academic courses in higher education are stymied by universities’ admissions requirements, amounting to an obsessive quest to collect as many qualifications as possible, threatening the broader and deeper education offered by great schools, both independent and state-maintained.

But it’s important to identify precisely where this stranglehold of qualifications applies. The bottleneck comes with GCSE, where the pressure is on to amass a teetering pile of certificates at top grades. This affects teaching and learning in a negative way, and really just serves to help university administrators to sift applicants, even before they start to look in detail at their individual merits.

The fundamental question that Tony Little’s intervention begs is this: why do we need to subject academically able pupils to a battery of high-stakes tests at 16, when these pupils are not leaving school, and indeed are going on to study several of their subjects at a higher level at school and beyond?

Such questions are at the centre of ‘Failure Week’, running this week at Wimbledon High School GDST. Whilst the initiative may sound unusual for a top performing girls’ independent school, the idea is to demystify the word and encourage the girls to put ‘failure’ into context and encourage them to face it head on and learn from it - hence calling it what it is and not dressing it up.

Spanning the Junior and Senior Schools, involving students from four to 18, Failure Week includes:

• Assemblies and tutorials focussing on the subject of failure, with examples of successful people, including famous names and teachers, who have ‘failed’ along the way and discussing how they came through it

• Activities designed to assess how students feel about failure, including discussing the topic with their parents

• Explorations of the negative side of ‘not failing’; the importance of having a go and risking failure

• Emphasis on the pastoral network of support that underpins school life and can help when things go wrong

The Headmistress of Wimbledon High, Heather Hanbury, came to teaching after a successful career in Management Consultancy and is adamant that success and satisfaction in life can come from ‘daring to fail and daring to get it wrong’:

“My message to girls is that it is better to lead a life replete with disappointment than one where you constantly wonder ‘if only…..’. The examples I use include: ‘If only I’d tried out for the first team, I might have been selected’ or ‘If only I’d applied for that job, I might have been successful’. I want to suggest to girls that it is acceptable and completely normal, not to succeed at times in life.

“‘Failure Week’ complements what we do throughout the school, which is to encourage our girls to be courageous and to take calculated risks. We give our students plenty of support and opportunities to try new things in and outside the classroom.

“For high achieving girls especially, where the fear of failure can be crippling, this intellectual resilience and robustness is vitally important. Successful people learn from failure, pick themselves up and move on. Something going wrong may even have been the best thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance - even if it felt like a disaster at the time.”

Wimbledon High is part of the GDST (Girls’ Day School Trust) network of 24 schools and two academies across the UK. Chief Executive, Helen Fraser, is adamant that the initiative will be invaluable for the girls.

“Resilience is so important in working life nowadays” says Helen. “Things happen that are not ‘fair’ – companies merge, economies crash, strategies change – and a young employee can find his or her career hits the wall, through no fault of their own.

“Wimbledon High School are helping to build vital resilience in girls; by showing how making mistakes is not necessarily a bad thing, that it is fine to try and fail – and then pick yourself up and try again – or as Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail better’.

“Any successful woman or man will be able to look back at bad times in their career and remember how they regrouped, and moved on to better things.”

For a long time now teachers have had to accept that a lot of important information is conveyed not in official documents, but at these sorts of seminars, and in the off-the-cuff remarks of examiners and other insiders. Occasionally examiners get carried away and go beyond their brief. For the most part, it can’t really be called cheating, but it does create a fog around the exam system that undermines attempts at transparency.

The real scandal is not that examiners are telling people about how the exams work - it’s the fact that what they are saying is true, and that forces teachers to teach even more narrowly to the test. So the far more insidious story here is about how exams have come in recent years to dominate and distort teaching and learning. As Thomas Huxley said 150 years ago, “students learn to pass, not to know. They do pass, and they don’t know.”

Dr Kevin Stannard

Director of Innovation and Learning 

The coalition government’s precipitate introduction of much higher fees for university tuition has led to a great deal of re-thinking by prospective students about not just the cost of going to university, but about the value of higher education itself. This tends to happen when something one takes for granted is suddenly withdrawn – or has new and very thick strings attached to it. One by-product of such a re-appraisal might be that it helps to clarify the very purposes of, and alternatives to, the well-trodden routes through English higher education.

It isn’t just prospective students who have been forced to re-appraise their intentions and assumptions. The fees hike has helped to shine a light on the practices of employers, schools and the universities themselves.

The first thing to get out of the way is any idea that the changes clear the way for a freer ‘market’ in which the consumer (the student, the parent?) is king. This is clearly not the case when most universities defaulted at the drop of a mortar board to the highest fee that can be charged. Degrees are not all the same: courses and universities vary in quality, even among so-called selecting universities – so why are the fees the same? Not only are fees the same across a range of institutions of very different standing, but so are, increasingly, the conditional offers being made to applicants. This is an imperfect market – an oligopoly that reflects the structural deficit of supply over demand. Price, it would appear, has little to do with quality.

In such a situation, students are right to start looking more carefully at what they get for their money. And they are increasingly looking beyond England, to universities overseas. US universities have for a long time looked at the UK as a fertile recruitment ground for the best students – but they are becoming increasingly active on this side of the Atlantic. Fees may be high, but bursaries and scholarships (and in some cases a needs-blind admissions policy) start to look very attractive. The options are many and varied – with universities such as NYU opening campuses in Dubai and Shanghai, and beginning to make higher education look truly global. And for the cost-conscious, as English universities mark their prices up, continental European models of higher education begin to look attractive and (given that an increasing number now teach in English) attainable.

In the new climate, employers have an opportunity – which some are beginning to grasp – to attract school-leavers of the highest calibre, through well-structured and attractive development programmes. The skills and dispositions they say they are looking for may well already be evident in school-leavers, without the benefit of at least three years of higher study in a rarefied academic environment. And if some form of (relevant) higher study is felt desirable, some employers are showing willingness to sponsor school-leavers through the courses, as a means of attracting and keeping hold of real talent.

There are some dangers here. Employers are quick to complain about the quality of recent recruits, but tend to be slower on the uptake in offering convincing accounts of the desired skills – let alone programmes to help instil them. The highly generic list of ‘soft skills’ being promoted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, for instance, is described as  being particularly relevant to CEOs, funeral directors and receptionists. Brilliant.

The opportunity and the imperative for re-appraisal extend also to schools. If we can no longer assume that the vast majority of our pupils will go seamlessly on to academic courses at selective English universities, it gives us a mandate to think carefully and more holistically about how we are equipping our pupils – seeing the sixth form as a more genuinely terminal point, rather than a purely and narrowly pre-university step on the escalator to academe.

Our schools become freer to reconceptualise the sixth form as a broad and balanced whole, rather than a lego-like programme in which pupils select three or four related academic disciplines, in preparation for even greater specialisation at university. This is the opportunity to reinstate at the core of the sixth form curriculum the development of those skills and dispositions that will serve young people well in further study and in work – including critical and creative thinking, research, reflection, communication and collaboration.

This is written in sorrow rather than anger. For members of the generation that took ‘free’ university education for granted, there is a real sense of loss here. A university education remains, for the vast majority, the best route, involving the opportunity to widen academic as well as social and personal horizons, and the best English universities still have something humane and liberal to offer. But if the fees increase offers anything positive, it is an opportunity to re-appraise the value of university, the alternatives, and the very nature of the offer that is being put in front of our pupils, at school and beyond.

Dr Kevin Stannard

Director of Innovation and Learning

GDST

School years are the most important years of a child’s life in terms of shaping who they are, maximising their life chances and their all round development.  The choice of school for a child is one no parent makes lightly, and while affordability will be a major factor, so too is be the ethos of the school and how much it will suit their daughter or son.  Parents will want to be sure the school is a good match for their child academically, physically, creatively and personally.

If you are looking into private schools for your son or daughter, there are a number of issues to bear in mind, and value for money is without doubt an important consideration. There are certainly plenty of independent schools to choose from across the country, both prep and senior schools, and a number of ways to ensure you get the best return on your investment in your child’s education.

First of all, independent schools usually give bursaries and scholarships.  The former are likely to be means-tested so that they go to really deserving families. Even if you are not entitled to a bursary now, many schools have schemes to provide short-term help if something goes wrong in the future.  Scholarships are likely to be awarded on merit and are often very competitive, and can vary in value a great deal. Even if your child is not ‘top of the class‘ in English or maths, ask if your favoured school offers scholarships in Music, Sport or Art  – many do!

If your children are still quite young, you have time to start some financial planning.  Most people seek professional advice for buying a home or making a will, so why not do so in order to plan for future school fees?  By starting to plan early, you can spread the cost of fees, arrange funds to fall back on and even protect school fees in the event of illness, death or unemployment.  It is surprising how few parents take up this option, yet a few minutes on the internet searching for ‘school fees planning’ will be time well spent.

It is also advisable to speak to the schools that interest you and find out exactly what is, and is not, included in the fees. Extra costs can be surprising and some schools may charge for a range of necessary items, including books, lunches, exam fees, school trips, specific uniform and sporting equipment, and musical tuition. Make sure you know what each year is likely to cost before making your decision. 

There are also a number of schools and educational organisations that are more affordable than others. The GDST (Girls’ Day School Trust) is an excellent example of how a top quality education does not necessarily mean paying the highest fees.  GDST schools offer excellent facilities, talented staff and very high academic achievement, but are on average 13.3% less expensive than other independent day schools. 

Lower fees, however, absolutely do not mean a lower standard of education.  The vast majority of GDST sixth formers go on to their choice of university, with over 60% going to Russell Group universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.  Many of our girls also defy gender stereotypes, with twice as many going on to study engineering or physical sciences as the national average for girls, and five times as many going on to study medicine (and over 40% of our sixth formers do a science or maths A Level.)  But a GDST education is emphatically not just about academic study – we offer a rich and well rounded education to all our girls, with a typical week including music, sport, drama, art, debating societies and a strong ‘house’ culture.

Widening access is core to the GDST ethos and we are committed through bursaries to offering our education to a growing number of girls whose families would not be able to afford the fees.  In the last year nearly one fifth of our students received some financial support, a total of £8 million.

As you can see, an excellent educational experience is not always directly linked to the size of the fees, and early preparation and further investigating local options can help save significant amounts from the cost of your child’s private education.

Tom Beardmore-Gray

Director of Finance and Operations

The Girls’ Day School Trust

Commenting on today’s speech by Michael Gove calling for changes to IT and computing teaching in schools, the GDST’s Director of Innovation and Learning, Kevin Stannard said:

“Michael Gove has picked up on something that educationalists have been pointing out for some time – that schools are not well served by existing qualifications and curricula in ICT. All pupils are entitled to an education in the uses of ICT, but competencies in this area are currently too narrow and too shallow to be useful. Pupils often teach themselves how to use software, but they may need to be taught how to use it constructively, safely and critically. Schools are increasingly embedding these competencies into the whole curriculum, making it unnecessary to offer ICT as a separate subject – certainly beyond age 14.

“But beware: it may not be necessary to teach ICT separately, but the teaching of ICT skills, and especially of critical digital literacy, is crucial – indeed it should be an entitlement for pupils. And this is the crucial difference between ICT and Computer Science: everyone needs to know how to operate in a digital world, but not everyone needs to know precisely how computers work. ICT (in some form and not necessarily stand-alone) is a universal requirement; Computer Science would be appropriate to a smaller (but still significant) sub-group of pupils. Let’s not conflate the two.”

For any further comment or information please contact Chris Mounsey-Thear on 020 7393 6604 or c.mounsey-thear@wes.gdst.net

Let’s be clear about what the real scandal is here. Examination boards offer seminars and give feedback on exam performance, and insights into how the exams work, and even entice delegates with pastries and jammie dodgers. So much could be in the pursuit of transparency – a commendable aim. But for a long time now teachers have had to accept that a lot of important information is conveyed not in official documents, but at these sorts of meetings, and in the off-the-cuff remarks of examiners and other insiders. Occasionally examiners get carried away and go beyond their brief, and exam boards need to be vigilant in their quality control. For the most part, it can’t really be called cheating, but it does create a fog around the exam system that undermines attempts at transparency.

The real scandal is not that examiners are telling people about how the exams work (except where they stray way over the line) – it’s the fact that what they are saying is true – and it forces teachers to teach even more narrowly to the test, rather than expansively and in the pursuit of learning.

So the far more insidious story here is about how exams – and the hoops they create – have come in recent years to dominate and distort teaching and learning. If a syllabus requires the study of ten poems, but you really only need to cover three, the fact that exam grades count for so much – to the pupil, the teacher and the school – means that there will be immense pressure to teach narrowly to the test, rehearsing the answers to a limited number of likely questions until they’re word perfect, and all love of the subject has been destroyed.

As Thomas Huxley said 150 years ago, ‘students learn to pass, not to know. They do pass, and they don’t know.’ He also said, presciently, that ‘examinations make good servants, and poor masters’. Discuss.

Dr Kevin Stannard

Director, Innovation and Learning

GDST (The Girls’ Day School Trust)