The specialist schools programme has failed to deliver widespread improvements in standards, according to a report by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson from the University of Buckingham. So are the improvements just smoke and mirrors?
The study of ‘Specialist Science Schools’ claims that the government’s specialist schools policy is based on an illusion whereby they deprive other schools of the funding they need to improve by creaming off effective schools from poorer performing schools. It is therefore not surprising, says the report, that specialist schools should appear to do better.
The report concentrates on the impact of specialist science schools on physics – an area where the government has tried to increase participation by requiring all science schools to offer GCSE physics. However, while GCSE physics take-up has risen in the past decade, the authors of the new report suggest that teachers consider extra funding to be the main benefit of specialist status and say it has made little difference to grades in the particular subject. In fact, A-level grades have continued to fall.
They claim that it was this extra money from the government (plus £50,000 from the private sector), combined with their intake of pupils, that had the biggest impact on results.
As evidence of this, the report provides statistics showing how school names (the school’s specialism) did not mean very much when it came to performance. For instance, pupils at schools specialising in music were more likely to get A grades in physics A-level than those at science schools.