In England, we are supposed to have choice in the type of school our children will attend for their secondary education. In reality, though, meaningful choice doesn’t really exist. Because most schools are pretty much the same.

Guided by the flame of Progress 8, most schools make broadly the same decisions about curriculum, timetabling, operations and so on. Most schools have a similar aim for the pupils they teach. 
 
Search 100 school websites and you’ll see more or less identical vision and value statements on each of them. You could swap two students’ timetables from rural Somerset and the centre of Newcastle, and they probably wouldn’t notice. 

GCSEs and Progress 8

Whether teachers working in schools like it or not, they are mostly acting only in line with what will get them the best exam results and, as a result, the best Progress 8 score. 
 
That’s having a damaging effect on education. 
 
A number of levers place Progress 8 as the ultimate arbiter of whether or not schools are successful. And some schools seem to have cracked the recipe of how to maximise this number. 

A blend of strong discipline, emphasis on academic subjects, knowledge-rich curricula and high expectations have emerged as the common denominators of the schools that populate the top of the league tables each year.
 
Thus far, these schools haven’t managed to scale the achievement. So the refrain, “If only all schools were like this” feels a little empty - as they demonstrably aren’t all able to be. 

Perhaps the reason they can’t scale is that those schools happen to be hiring the most talented teachers, with fewer responsibilities outside of work. Perhaps the cohort they take has a part in the success. Whatever the reason, we don’t seem to be able to isolate and replicate it. 

Exams-led model

Most schools attempting to do so, though, are creating a huge challenge. For many children and parents, the “top Progress 8 approach” isn’t aligned with their own wishes. Increasingly, we are seeing young people vote with their feet as the growing crisis around attendance, persistent absence and in-school truancy demonstrates. It would be overly simplistic to suggest that what most schools currently prioritise is the only cause of this mini exodus, but churlish to refuse to accept that it has anything to do with it. 
 
Why might that disconnect be occurring? Let’s use an extreme example. 
 
Academy X places an emphasis on the personal, social and emotional development of its pupils. There are lots of trips, real-world projects, collaborative opportunities and enrichment activities. The exam results are so-so, but that’s not really what the school is all about. They don’t agree with hot-housing children and would rather they left school with a broader set of skills, character traits and experiences, regardless of whether these are recognised during inspections and in league tables.
 
Academy Y puts a premium on traditional academic subjects. They double the amount of instruction time for English and maths, hand out lots of homework and induct pupils into the “canon” of highly-regarded culture. They don’t really have any sports facilities and there aren’t loads of opportunities for children to pursue their own interests, but the exam results for almost every child are astronomical.
 
There will be children who fit into the latter and children who fit into the former. Why can’t a school merge both, to meet the needs of all? Schools, like all institutions, have finite resources. There’s only so much budget, so many members of staff, so many hours in the day, and so much space in the grounds. 

You can’t build a big new science lab and kit out the drama studio with new lighting. If you hire a music therapist, a teaching assistant or two might have to go. You have to make your choices. And right now, Progress 8 skews those choices to the Academy Y model. 

Celebrate diverse approaches

A few schools are bucking the trend. They are choosing to take a hit on the wheel of Progress 8 to provide what they see as a richer school experience for their pupils. For the most part, they are not explicit about this, but I wonder about the wider impact on the system if they did decide to be more open. 
 
If we were laying our cards on the table, we might offer this as an explicit deal: a grade or two worse in each GSCE in exchange for more residentials, more group work in class and more opportunities to socially interact during lessons.
 
For many parents, and perhaps some young people, this wouldn’t be a deal worth taking. Certainly, for children on the 4/5 borderline in their GCSEs, the stakes might feel too high. But for some, it might be a price worth paying for an education that feels more aligned with what they value, and that would begin to change the conversation around education dramatically. 
 
For schools to offer this deal takes extraordinary courage, as they reject the status quo and design a school that is likely to be frowned upon by current accountability measures. But if we do want choice in our system, we need many more of these schools. 
 
Just as during the first free school wave, many schools rejected the received wisdom of what had been done before, we should welcome schools offering something different. Even if we wouldn’t opt for it for ourselves, we should ensure others have the opportunity to make a different choice.

Jon Hutchinson is director of training and development at the Reach Foundation