Top marks for ‘gromps’ – the state schools that behave like grammars

CHILDREN in comprehensives with a grammar school culture make the most academic progress, a study reveals.

It found that such schools – which it calls ‘gromps’ – have strict discipline, smart uniforms, longer school days, competitive sports, teach the classics and treat all three sciences as separate subjects.

But pupils fall behind in schools with a ‘progressive’ ethos – those that have a casual uniform policy or none at all. Other markers include a relaxed attitude to lowlevel classroom disruption, and lessons that are led by students rather than teachers.

The New Schools Network (NSN), a charity that helps to set up free schools, used official data of the academic progress children make between sitting national tests at 11 and taking eight GCSEs at 16.

The news comes as GCSE students await their results this week. They are the first pupils subjected to curriculum reforms intended to cut the number of teenagers who receive top grades.

Pupils in England who will take their exams this year will be the first to receive numerical GCSEs – from 9, the highest, down to 1 – instead of the traditional grades of A* to G.

The NSN identified 25 schools at the top and bottom of the academic progress tables, and analysed factors common to the cultures of both groups.

Director Toby Young told the Sunday Times: ‘We have called the most successful schools we have identified in England “gromps” because, with a truly comprehensive intake, they also have the ethos of our best grammar schools.’

According to the report, top-performing gromps include Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, east London, which sent ten pupils to Cambridge in one year.

This was even though about 40 per cent of its pupils were on free school meals – a marker used to gauge the socio-economic status of the catchment area.

Pupils stand up when teachers enter a room, have regulation haircuts and leave mobile phones at home.

Also in the top 25 is central London’s King Solomon Academy. Its school day runs from 7.55am to 4pm followed by two hours of homework or detention time.

Free ‘gromp’ schools could be built in poorer parts of England to boost social mobility, and could replace the new grammar schools proposed by Theresa May.

The study also found that by 16, poor children in England were academically more than 19 months behind wealthier ones.