This is going to be a bit of a weird post for someone who home edded. I have long said that our own experiences in schools are a big factor in our decision to facilitate our children's choice to go to school or not, and in theory to change their minds back and forth at any time. They didn't choose to go, so the complications in continuing to facilitate that decision once schooling was involved didn't arise. Sarada and I, of course, went to school.
My compulsory educational history involves an overcrowded village primary school, which was a fairly bad experience, a small village school, which was more positive, and a large but not overcrowded bilateral, which was both good and bad. This last was the Geoffrey Chaucer School, and was at the time probably the closest thing Kent had to a state comprehensive school.
As of this July, the school I know as the Geoffrey Chaucer School has closed down due to "poor performance". If you are going to buy completely into the concept of the quality of education being measurable by the methods Ofsted uses, this is probably entirely valid and the surprising things about it were that it wasn't closed down earlier and that it didn't seem to improve. I only have the two data points, or rather the line followed by the point, of my time at the school and the fact of its closure.
My experience of the school was mixed. In terms of exam results, it was not good. My grade C at A-level RE was the highest grade anyone had ever achieved in that subject. The majority of pupils entered for O-level German didn't even get grades, let alone pass. There was also a major issue with the gender mix. At the time, since Kent still had the 11+, but girls who passed went to a different school. On the other hand, girls and boys who failed could go to the Chaucer non-selective stream but boys who passed went into the selective stream (oh, and so did I but that's another story), which to my mind seems to be a social experiment designed to see how thoroughly inter-gender relations can be messed with. It's quite a bit more than bad. It is in fact thoroughly appalling, but at least it's come to an end now. Presumably it stopped years ago, but if it didn't the closure of the school will have brought it to an end, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, if that is what's happened, it's a mere side-effect, which brings me to my point.
I enjoyed my time at the Chaucer. I can't say I found it educational in terms of the explicit curriculum, but one thing my experience did not include much of was bullying. In general, it was a friendly, genial place, doubtless helped by the affluence of its intake, but it was nonetheless so and just because of the crapulence of other places, there's no need for me to feel bad about my privilege if that privilege is just how it should be for everyone. Again, this is my personal experience. Other people's time there was doubtless less positive than mine.
I've noticed how much bullying seems to be part of many adults' past and of their children's present and although there was a lot of bad behaviour towards me back then, most of it doesn't fit the model of bullying. There was very little of that at the Chaucer. People were friendly to each other, there were good relationships between staff and pupils and social activities were inclusive. Some of that might be nostalgia, so anyone else who has experience could chip in.
Unfortunately, none of that seems to have been taken into consideration in the closure of the school. I may be wrong, but I find it hard to imagine a school with a major bullying problem but "good" exam results being closed down for that reason. The other way round is easy to imagine, and in fact I imagine it's relatively common.
All this is presumption of course. However, a school out of which people tend to emerge emotionally messed up in any way is going to damage the prospects of its pupils just as much as one with a culture of exam-based underachievement. My school did in fact have some issues there due to the gender mix, and it had terrible exam results, but in relative terms it was a social success judging by the people I still know who went there. Clearly my hostility to schooling per se is not going to lead me to do more than damn with faint praise, but even so, the Chaucer was, at least for me and in my experience when I was there, a good school in terms of me being happy, having friends and generally having as good an experience as I could under the circumstances, even though I came out with pretty poor exam results, and in that sense it was by no means a failure.
I just wonder to what extent good schools with bad exam results get closed down and bad school with good exam results stay open, and what the consequences are for people who have attended them.
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