Many local parents are concerned with standards in the Isles of Scilly Secondary School, despite the LEA topping league tables which were released today.
Parents have expressed their concerns to Scilly News after poor teacher retention over the past five years has manifested in a the fact of the School having to re-shuffle most subjects this year. The teacher plan has changed extensively in the past year and has left some departments with staff shortages. This lack of continuity in the school can be seen in a recent case when a Science teacher came out of retirement in order to teach French.
School governors and council member are hoping that the federation of all the Island schools under one headship will cut costs. Students however are afraid that they will become disillusioned and detached from a head teacher that has to ply his trade over five schools on four different Islands.
Teacher retention has always been a problem for The Islands’ Secondary School because of the inadequate housing provisions. In one case, a year group over the five years of secondary school had seven different teachers for Religious Education and four teachers for History.
The Isles of Scilly LEA has once again topped the league table but as the Times supplement ‘Times2’ helpfully points out in it’s annual review of league tables “Disregarding the Isles of Scilly, which routinely heads the local authority league due to the efforts of its only secondary school…” meaning that the effort really wasn’t all that special. In fact, the Isles of Scilly LEA has topped the league table for as long as most teachers can remember.
Many individual schools have beaten the grades achieved by the Islands but the LEA tables have been brought down by under achieving schools in their area. More concerning in Scilly’s case is the fact that the number of passes at A to C grade has dropped by a whole six percentage points. The Average passes at A to C for 2000 were 77% while this year they have been 71%. One explanation for this could be that the 2001 year group had more students taking exams. On the plus side, no students received no GCSE passes and the truancy rate was uniquely recorded at 0.0%.
The Isles of Scilly School has a rocky road ahead of it and stability is needed if standard are to remain as high as expectations. The Council need to monitor the efforts of the School in order to ensure that it does not start to lose pupils to mainland boarding schools. Funding has always been a problem and always will be when resources are stretched in what is a literally isolated LEA. All eyes now will be on the new structures being implemented and the attempts to save the school, and more importantly it’s pupils, from further disappointments.