Bullshit
You want better grades, you need better teachers.

Better teachers are attracted to the places where they get paid better (and don't have to deal with unruly kids with no discipline whose parents don't encourage good behaviour), just like people in any other profession.

The public schools have funding and therefore pay considerably more than the state schools, so get the best teachers.

There is no 'playing the system' or similar here, its basic capitalism in action.

You want to fix this issue, get the government to pay teachers properly, not treat them like street cleaners (I like street cleaners but they aren't considered skilled), allow some proper power to discipline the ill behaved little shits and get the value of education understood by the masses.

Edit: Also almost everyone can now go to university and get a valueless degree if they do a tiny modicum of work at school, so essentially we now have equality - Everyones degree is useless.
( DinivanX Has stinging piss after drinking Pact Coffee, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 12:15, 2 replies)

Thank you
For supporting my point, which is that the higher grades received do not reflect greater innate ability.

Incidentally, there is a lot of duff teaching in private schools, particularly the third rate ones with no great academic aspirations. That's where the weak teachers who can't control classes in the state sector end up.
(ubergeekian, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 14:37, closed)

Yes,
Public Schools aren't subjected to OFSTED, so they can harbour some right incompetents.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 16:00, closed)

I would agree with
"higher grades received do not always reflect greater innate ability."
( DinivanX Has stinging piss after drinking Pact Coffee, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 16:28, closed)

Oh I don't know.
Higher grades do reflect some kind of ability, even if it is only an ability to pass exams, or your parents' ability to choose and pay for a good private tutor.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 20:31, closed)

For many years (certainly, to my knowledge, into the 1990s)...
...public schools did not require teachers to have obtained a PGCE or to have any relevant teaching experience. A couple of years of TEFL in Zimbabwe gave me possible the worst biology and physics teacher ever to walk the cloisters.

I would have done better if I'd gone to the local comp with my mates rather than gone along with my dad's fantasies of social mobility (they had a higher Oxbridge entrance rate for my age group than my school did) but I was a good little boy who knew no different.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Thu 31 Jan 2013, 16:17, closed)

Would you consider...
..becoming Secretary of State for Education? Please?
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Wed 30 Jan 2013, 17:12, closed)

If the goverment needs someone to draw penises on cabinet meeting notes
I'm their man.
( DinivanX Has stinging piss after drinking Pact Coffee, Wed 30 Jan 2013, 17:15, closed)