What is the real secret of a good school?

16-2-2010

What is the real secret of a good school?

How do you turn a sink school into one of the country's best state academies? We meet the head who made it happen

Catherine Myers is very proud of her chairs. Myers is proud of everything and everyone in her amazingly successful state school but the new chairs, they sort of sum it up. They are from Sweden (where Myers has drawn so much inspiration for her vision), double-padded for comfort (the last detail in encouraging children to enjoy lessons) and designed with a funky slot to hook them on the desks after each class (high expectations of respect).

What makes a school good? We all know it when we see it but teachers and politicians have found it confoundingly hard to reproduce. It starts with a good head teacher — but what is it that he or she does? And it demands excellent facilities — but what should they be? And the ethos, that’s important — but a dizzying array of fashions, from strict to creative, have come and gone.

In a debate last night at the British Library, Dr Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, called for an end to “formulaic and mechanised” education at “large and anonymised” schools. Myers would beg to differ: her buzzword is “personalised” learning, even on such a busy city campus. Be you male, female, arty, practical or academic, she believes that technology enables teachers to fashion a learning plan for each individual.

The Times set out to plot how Myers transformed a sink school in the most deprived borough in England into a gleaming £32 million campus that has one of the poorest intakes and best outcomes in the country. It is a story of a woman who looked at the privilege that the independent sector offered and decided that she wanted better than that for her children in Tower Hamlets, East London. She travelled to a dozen countries and built a institution whose architecture was inspired by Reims Cathedral and whose vocational work echoes that of the Volvo high schools in Sweden. It is a story of a woman unafraid to think big and different — for example, to separate girls and boys for both learning and play. And it is a story about chairs.

As Myers, who can spot a contraband hat on a 13-year-old boy as easily as his slipped grade, says in her soft Scottish brogue, “it is all about the details”.

Myers’s grandmotherly appearance and personal modesty are deceptive. Warning: do not get in the way of what this woman wants. She was born into a working-class family in Glasgow, and doing well at school was her way out. She knew that was what she wanted to give others: after a degree in physics and a break to have her three children, she determined to run her own school that could transform the lives of the poorest.

In 1992, she found it. Bishop Challoner had been founded in the 19th century by the Sisters of Mercy nuns to save East End girls from prostitution and drink. But by the time Myers found it, the girls’ state secondary was hardly doing that. She tested the 11-year-olds and found that the highest reading age was that of an average nine-year-old. Less than a fifth of them were leaving with five GCSEs at grades A-C.

To those educationists who disapprove of testing, let Myers be a lesson to you, and to me, as I sit down in her new office (passing five girls waiting nervously outside the door). She gives all new pupils a cognitive ability test (CAT) and retests them every year. The CAT is also used to help in choosing subjects and careers. Each student is given an ambitious performance target.

Although this approach is now catching on, 18 years ago Myers was the pioneer. She can produce for me spreadsheets of each child’s progress; if pupils fall behind, she and the teachers ask them why.

“We ask children, how do you like to learn? Aside from the core subjects, there is no reason why they can’t like to learn and learn what they like.”

It also meant that Myers could test her initiatives. Did her “book box”, which got every child to review a book each week, work? Yes, she had the evidence that literacy levels were rising.

“We worked our socks off,” says Myers, who puts in a regular 16-hour day. Sure enough, now nearly 90 per cent of girls obtain five GCSEs at grades A-C, and Bishop Challoner is in the top 2 per cent of state secondaries even though more than half the pupils receive free school meals, 27 per cent have special needs, and they speak a total of 73 mother tongues.

In 2001 the local boys’ Catholic secondary failed its inspections so abysmally that it was closed down. Its head teachers were leaving every six months. Myers pushed to take it over — but on her terms. In what was then an unprecedented move, she brokered a deal with the Government to become head of Britain’s first federated school.

“It took lateral thinking. But we were doing well for the girls and I wanted to do the same for the boys, but without compromising what the girls were achieving.”

Myers is executive head of the girls’ school, the boys’ school, the sixth-form college and the community programmes, with 1,700 pupils and 354 staff. In effect, she formed a system that the Government now uses to save failing schools.

“It is like running a medium-sized public limited company,” she says, adding unnecessarily that it is “run tightly” because when we set off on a tour the corridors are eerily quiet. When she walks into a room, a deeper hush falls.

One cheeky boy dares to ask “Anything I can do for you, Miss?” and is answered with whispered menace, “Yes, see me in my office in half an hour.” He looks scared. With Myers about there is no need for the bouncers you find in some inner-city schools. Yet she gets angry about the type of elitist grammar school head who nurtures his bright pupils and punishes the rest: “I know there’s a Victorian ideal that is popular with many but it’s not what happens here.”

Myers has spent holidays doggedly visiting schools all over the world. She was shopping for buildings, equipment and ideas, because by then she had even bigger plans. America’s poorest schools were “an eye-opener”: she visited one next to a prison that seemed to have no aspirations higher than its neighbour. She didn’t like the way that some business-sponsored schools in France had teachers dipping in and out, but the buildings were lovely.

Sweden and Denmark served as her closest educational model. “We liked what we saw in their applied and vocational learning,” she says. “I started that here. Everybody is qualified for something.”

In Sweden she found none of the British snobbery between the academic elite and people who prefer hands-on work. She visited Volvo high schools, part-owned by the car company, which educate children who want to be theoretical engineers and to go to university and beyond, alongside the technicians essential to car production.

By the time the land from the former boys’ school was sold off, she had both the funds and the Scandinavian-style plans for her new school. When it opened last month, after four years of construction and a decade of hard campaigning, she received an award from the Pope. Myers was also voted head teacher of the year last year, for achieving excellence for some of the most deprived children in Western Europe.

The newly minted music department is a case in point. We find a music teacher, Dr Chris Maxim, there, practising with children on the traditional organ.

“It is very easy not to have aspiration for children from an area like this,” says Myers. “Part of our vision is that kids in the East End get what kids in independent schools get. Better, in some ways — what we have here is as good as a university music department.”

There are eight beautiful practice rooms and each child receives one-to-one instrumental tuition, free. There are 12 upright pianos “but I didn’t want them just to have scrappy old uprights,” says Dr Maxim. “We have a very fine East German grand piano, so they can experience that.”

They also have a recording studio, to help pupils to gain vocational qualifications in the music industry.

Last summer the teachers took a class to Pizza Express to celebrate their GCSEs and some boys walked over to the piano and began playing jazz. “It was a fantastic moment,” says Phil Leyland, head of the boys’ school. “These boys hadn’t had that in their lives. It doesn’t matter where you came from or if you want to go back, we’d given them that informed decision.”

While teachers flit between the boys’ and girls’ wings, the pupils are rigorously separated. At break time the screaming gaggles are walled apart; the girls lunch in fifth period, the boys in sixth.

Although most studies suggest that boys do better in mixed-sex environments, the boys’ department is outperforming that of the girls. It’s an extension of personalised learning, says Myers, teaching in ways that boys like.

As we walk around, more of her innovations are revealed. Students open doors for us as we pass. The school has housekeepers instead of cleaners (“if a girl is being sick in the toilets, they’ll know about it”). There are colour-coded shirts for each year group; small classes for the lower sets.

As a Roman Catholic organisation, the school receives about 10 per cent of capital costs from the Church. Tower Hamlets is the most Muslim borough in Britain, a third of its population consisting of Bangladeshi Muslims. But as the school is oversubscribed and Catholics are given priority, “it means that we have very few Asian kids”.

The effect is a bit jarring: when I arrive the police are stopping and searching all-Asian groups of boys from rival secondary schools. Bishop Challoner’s pupils are increasingly white Eastern European — the latest immigrants to the area. I ask Myers if she would let a girl wear a headscarf. She purses her lips. “I don’t think so.”

She retires this summer, her life’s work done, her legacy in thousands of young lives. The staff are worried. What makes a good school? Perhaps it is just a good head, after all. One teacher whispers to me as I leave: “It’s all her, you know. Her vision. I don’t know anyone else who could have achieved all this. Down to the last tile.”

Anyone can nominate an outstanding head teacher, staff team, teacher, teaching assistant or governor for a Teaching Award. There are 11 other award categories, and the deadline for nominations for the 2010 awards is March 1. Visit teachingawards.com

Catherine Myers’s formula for educating teenagers successfully:

1. Educate girls and boys separately. It’s not just girls that do better in single-sex schools. “That’s an assumption that is generally made, but if boys have teaching geared towards them, they will achieve.”

2. Let them do it their own way, as long as they do it. Encourage pupils to analyse and develop their own style of learning (eg, last-minute, in groups). “Children should learn what they like and like what they learn,” says Myers.

3. Don’t see vocational subjects as second best — they are not. Think beyond the British school tradition, to the more vocational Scandinavian model. “As a mother I know that if you spend half your life making them do what they don’t want to do, you only make your life difficult. Everyone should leave school qualified for something.”

4. Set targets. Try not to compare your child to others — but set individual targets that will stretch his or her particular abilities. Respond quickly and collaboratively if the targets are not being met.

5. Get respect by giving it. “You have to like children and believe that they can achieve”. (Times)