Choosing a high school

Well, as my son is in his final year at junior school, our thoughts are turning to high schools.

We'll probably be rational about it and let him go to his local high school which, though it doesn't have the best results in the area, is improving year on year.

It's easy to get the wrong conclusion from results tables at a school. Near where we live, there are still some grammar schools around, which, on the face of it, do better.

However, it's easy to forget that they start off with cleverer kids because they have the filter of an 11 plus exam to rely on.

Figures from the Chicago Publc Schools Lottery analyis show that it really doesn't matter which school your child goes to, if they're clever they'll do well. However, those kids who were put into the lottery to get to a better school, whether they got into the chosen school or not, did do better than those kids who weren't put in.

The obvious conclusion is that pushy parents are the real indicator of how well you do, not the school you happen to go to.

This is generally the reason why faith schools appear to do better - the kids are self-selected - the parents of many of those children go to quite extraordinary lengths to get them into those schools, including moving house, changing jobs and even going to church for months - if not years - and doing voluntary work for churches in which they have no real faith. Needless to say, these parents are on the whole, middle-class and speak English as their first language,

Supposedly, faith schools are supposed to open up some places for children not of their faith, but in fact, very few of them reach the target, and they discriminate further in their selection of pupils by making demands on parents of huge donations to school funds and expensive uniforms. Faith schools on the whole have fewer pupils speaking English as second language and receiving free school meals than the average.

Given all these hoops to jump through and their filtering techniques, it's hardly surprising that their results are better. Although in all likelihood, no better than any school would do with the same pupils, with all the awkward ones filtered out.

This bias in selection is a well-known trap in scientific studies, and many drug companies try to get away with it to highlight a positive result.

While some schools are allowed to cherry-pick their pupils in the first place making them look better when results come out a few years later, the 'less attractive' schools miss out on all those high-achieving pupils and have to work so much harder to achieve good average results. Of course, there's a spiral in both cases, with better-achieving schools getting more good pupils to choose from, and worse-achieving schools getting less.

What headteachers of failing schools need to focus on then is not just achieving results, but good PR to get them more successful pupils in the first place. They need to be reaching middle-class parents and convincing them that their school is the place to send their kids.

Our local school has actually been very good at this - they have also improved results thanks to a new, dynamic headteacher - but starting courses in law and latin also helped, good sports results too, and seemingly a hotline to the local paper.

There are all sorts of fringe benefits to our children going to this local school too of course: It's 5 mins walk, not an hour's bus ride; 90% of their current schoolmates will be going there to; Friends they have there will be from our neighbourhood, which means they can play with them outside school.

If we wanted to be really cynical, we're also indirectly increasing the value of our house - if it does become a more popular school, house prices in our area will go up, as middle-class parents attempt to move into the catchment area.

The other indicator that a child will do well at school is involvement of the parents in the PTA. Again this is probably due to having pushy (or more kindly 'involved') parents, although I do think that there must be an element of teachers taking that bit much more time when dealing with children of people they know, not least involved with the school.

We've been heavily involved in the junior school PTA but the high school doesn't yet have one. We'll probably end up starting one, but actually, it's a quite a good social thing anyway, and gives me a chance to do some of my prize-winning baking, so I'm actually looking forward to that.