Schools: In Middle England, middling results just aren't good enough
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Your support makes all the difference.Just outside Warwick's medieval city walls, sandwiched between green fields and a council estate, lies Aylesford school, recently the subject of a glowing Ofsted report: good school, many strengths, excellent leadership and management, waxed the inspectors.
And one can see why. The diminutive Lesley King, headteacher for nine years, whirls around her 900-pupil school like a dervish. She is a human dynamo, talking 19 to the dozen about what she and the staff have done to push up GCSE results. Results are not brilliant - 38 per cent achieved grades A to C last summer - but they have shown an upward trend, and Mrs King is confident they can go higher. The school's target is 40 per cent.
"We're not complacent about our results. We do think we can do better and we're trying to improve," she says.
By inner-city standards, Aylesford serves a reasonable catchment area - a mix of professional parents and those from the neighbouring Forbes council estate. Only 8.3 per cent of children are on free school meals (compared with 11 per cent for Warwickshire as a whole), but Mrs King says more children are entitled to free meals than actually claim them.
She also says that the school suffers from having local high-flyers creamed off by two independent schools and a local grant-maintained school, Myton, which is favoured by thrusting, savvy parents.
Aylesford's exam results are further depressed by having 5 per cent of children who are the subject of special needs statements (the local education authority average is 3 per cent) and a few students who have behaviour problems.
As part of its campaign to raise achievement, the school clamps down hard on truancy.
It uses a Durham University programme to track pupil progress. Children are set for ability in maths, and setting has also been introduced in English from Year 7 - 11 years and up.
As an experiment this year, the school is trying single-sex groups in English, with a "control" mixed group, to see who does best.
Students in the final year of GCSE are given weekly one-to-one sessions with a tutor. Those taking French are being asked to teach their subject to Year 7 - not as a way of improving year 7 so much as boosting the knowledge of Year 11.
Mrs King lists other initiatives. On 1 April, she is buying in a revision programme to cover A-level students and 70 GCSE pupils. Costing pounds 1,350 for the day, it will be worth the money if it pushes up those results.
"I would hope in two years' time we will be seeing some benefits from the work we're doing now," she says.
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