A new term in Britain’s forgotten schools
Luke Mintz meets the head teacher tasked with turning around one of the UK’s worst schools
Lesley Welsh was two weeks into her new job when she received a thank-you card from a Year 11 pupil. A French and German teacher for nearly two decades, Welsh had just taken the reins as principal at George Pindar School in Scarborough, which was, until very recently, among the worst in the country. The pupil, who had been panicking about her exams, had written: “You noticed me.”
“She thought enough of being noticed to send me a card; that’s really powerful,” Welsh tells me from her office, where the card sits proudly atop a shelf. “It’s absolutely palpable, the difference you can make to a young person’s life simply by being interested and taking the time to listen.”
When Welsh took up her post in April, she was under no illusions about the school’s manifold challenges. Ranked “inadequate” in almost every area by Ofsted in 2017, 98 pupils (more than 15 per cent of the student body) were excluded for bad behaviour the year before, and police were forced to dispatch officers to restrain violent pupils once a year between 2013 and 2018.
The Eastfield ward in which the school sits is within the most deprived one per cent in England. Last summer, just 29 per cent of students achieved the government benchmark of a “strong pass” (grade 5) in GCSE English and maths – the national average is 43.5 per cent.
On Tuesday, the school’s 645 pupils will have noticed little difference when they returned for the first day of the academic year. But Pindar, and hundreds of struggling schools like it across the country, are in the crosshairs of the Department for Education, which has announced a raft of new measures to tackle underperformance.
Speaking this summer, Damian Hinds, the former education secretary, warned that the new geographical divide was not between north and south, but cities and cut-off coastal areas, where poorer pupils achieve around three grades lower at GCSE.
Decades ago, it was the words “inner-city comprehensive” that prompted shivers of dread in parents. Now, after years of investment and attention, the situation has largely flipped on its head, with the deprived inner-London boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham some of the top social mobility hotspots in the country.
By contrast, the 2017 State of the Nation report warned Scarborough was in danger of becoming an “entrenched social mobility cold spot”, along with towns like
Blackpool, Great Yarmouth and Hastings.
As I walk through George Pindar’s low-ceilinged corridors for our interview, it certainly doesn’t feel like a place where aspiration is encouraged to flourish. Sitting just over a mile from the North Sea, the Fifties building is not fit for a 21st-century school, Welsh complains; classrooms are freezing in winter, and students often have to walk through the lavatories to get to lessons thanks to the building’s mazelike design.
Teachers are desperate for a new site: “That would make [pupils] proud to be Pindar, it really would,” says Welsh, who is joined by Helen Dowds, an executive at the Hope Learning Trust, a Yorkshire academy chain which took the struggling school under its wing in March.
Together, Dowds and Welsh have already implemented a number of changes they hope will drag the school from the doldrums, designing a new uniform and implementing a strict behaviour policy which “takes out the wriggle room” for disruptive pupils.
An obvious problem faced by schools in more unglamorous areas is the difficulty in attracting talented teachers. Pindar has traditionally struggled to fill vacancies before the start of the school year, but thanks to the reputation of the academy chain it is fully staffed this September. “Touch wood,” adds Welsh. “It hasn’t always been easy to bring in new blood.”
By contrast, schools in the capital typically teem with enthusiastic graduates from top universities. Brampton Manor Academy in east London made headlines earlier this year when 41 of its sixth-formers received Oxbridge offers, despite two thirds of its students qualifying for free school meals.
When I interviewed headmaster, Dr Dayo Olukoshi, at the time, he said one of his secrets is to deliberately overstaff in a number of curriculum areas, “to make sure our students are constantly being taught by high-quality graduates”.
This feat would be impossible in cut-off coastal communities like Scarborough, often also plagued by low aspiration. “One of the challenges is getting parents to buy into the school and want to be part of [it],” says Dowds.
“Some of the parents, not all, have had a bad experience of education themselves, some of them may have even come here, and they need some convincing… It’s changing those hearts and minds, because they didn’t get a lot of out of it.”
In 2016, in a bid to tackle chronic tardiness, the school tried to ban students from local shops after 8.30am. A group of outraged parents complained to the local paper that their children’s freedom was being curtailed. More recently, Dowds has been struck by the number who take their children out of school during term time.
“It’s just considered to be the norm,” she says. “You can tie that up to deprivation – ‘If I’m on a low salary and can’t afford a holiday, then going in term time gives me a much greater opportunity’. That’s also going to be typical of all coastal areas: ‘The seasonal work comes on in summer, so I want to go on holiday in March or April’.”
Pindar had a “persistent absence” rate of 24.5 per cent in 2017-18 – almost double the England average. Dowds and Welsh have become more aggressive in chasing truants, sending staff to knock on their door on the second or third day of absence, which has already resulted in an increase in attendance.
To address the school’s chronic behaviour issue, they have adopted something of a softly, softly approach, moving away from exclusion as the de facto weapon against recalcitrant pupils, dozens of whom were kicked out of Pindar each year and sent to controversial pupil referral units, or “sin bins”.
Now a special area of the school is a designated “midway” point, where rebellious pupils can receive special help from teachers and anger management therapists, working on a four-to-one ratio. Last term, their exclusion rate was already falling.
‘It’s palpable, the difference you can make by taking the time to listen’
‘I often think about what I could do if I had another £2,000 per child’
Funding disparities play their part in explaining the school’s woes, says Dowds: “North Yorkshire and York sit in the bottom 10 for funding. I often think about what I could do if had another £2,000 per child. We’re not on a level playing field.”
Nearly every student at Pindar comes from a white workingclass background, and it is this demographic, particularly boys, struggling most in British schools. The Sutton Trust has pointed to a “strong cultural appreciation of education” among some ethnic groups to explain the difference.
Indeed, London’s high immigrant population could go some way to explaining why schools in the capital have improved so much faster than the rest of the country in recent decades.
Others have suggested that white working-class children have been overlooked by equality drives. “It’s definitely about aspiration for me,” says Welsh, who recently sent all of Year 9 to York St John and Hull universities. “Exposing them to as many opportunities, ideas, and successful role models as possible is really important.”
The school bell rings, and pupils begin to file rambunctiously from their lessons. Welsh, though burdened by challenges, is optimistic about the year ahead: “My dad’s a JCB driver, and even now he says, ‘Oh, look at you, with your highpowered job’.
“All that happened was that he believed in me. And if every child has an adult who believes in them, then that can make a difference, can’t it?”