Coastal Schools

Massive investment in London has led to its rise as an education superpower, succeeding despite high levels of deprivation. Coastal schools, however (here defined within 5.5km of the coast of England) appear to face continuing challenges that impact on performance (Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2015). There were signs that in 2012 the Coalition government had begun to recognise the poverty in coastal regions:

‘Many seaside towns and villages have suffered decades of economic decline. Many young people, for example, have moved away from coastal areas due to a lack of job opportunities. We need to invest in coastal towns to help their economies grow and reduce unemployment and deprivation’ (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012).

 The schools’ performance watchdog Ofsted (Ofsted, 2013; see also Weale, 2014) identified a link between student performance and ‘deprived coastal towns’, with a realisation that these areas have ‘felt little impact from national initiatives designed to drive up the standards for the poorest children’ (Ofsted, 2013). Yet recent reports by the current government (DfE, 2016) have rejected claims that socio-economically deprived coastal regions face specific challenges in education because of their geography, economies and social contexts. It is therefore reassuring that Ofsted’s Annual Report 2016 identified issues for schools in isolated and deprived areas:

‘There is also considerable evidence that it is schools in isolated and deprived areas where educational standards are low that are losing out in the recruitment stakes for both leaders and teachers’ (Ofsted, 2016).

The way in which the current government has categorised and reported data on coastal schools makes these isolated schools (and isolation is not only about geography; it can include isolation from other schools, economic opportunities and wider social experiences) appear to have similar outcomes to other schools (Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2016). In government data coastal schools as established as a category and compared to the category ‘all other inland schools’, which includes rural and urban schools. When rural schools are taken out of the category ‘all other inland schools’, the remaining schools’ data suggests a difference when compared to coastal schools’ data (DfE, 2016). There are similarities in the issues reported on coastal and rural schools:

‘In terms of intake and performance, coastal schools appear to face comparable challenges to other schools that are similarly isolated and deprived’ (Centre Forum, 2016).

Teacher recruitment and retention was a key challenge in the coastal schools studied.

Recruitment:

• Limited employment prospects for partners of teachers, school leaders
• Those (typically young and NQTs) not in relationships wanted a wide range of social opportunities not available

Retention:

• Lack of ‘churn’ in long serving teachers (low house prices disabling opportunities to move to more expensive/affluent areas; low school to school professional mobility due to absence of closely located schools)
• Higher attrition of early career teachers (low social, cultural opportunities

They said:

‘Our location … is rural and coastal, so you've got a limited pool of people to pull from’ (School Leader).

‘We're actually finding that now it's not only the STEM subjects, but it's the other subjects across the board that we're finding difficulty in recruiting. … I need, desperately need a Learning Director for English because my current one is going to be retiring at the end of the year; I've advertised twice now and I've got not a single bite’ (School Leader).

Educational isolation was characterised by:

• No/or limited access to a local university (in all but one case)
• Struggling or ‘coasting’ schools in same locality, with reduced access to high performing schools

‘There is no outstanding secondary school, whereas if you went to a metropolitan area we would see the outstanding secondary schools. They've been loaded, they've had designations such as National Support Schools, the National Leaders of Education and they, in many instances, are the local hubs in school improvement’. (School Leader)

• Absence of school improvement initiatives
• Inward-looking nature of school improvement

‘Some of the initiatives which I've been used to in city areas weren't immediately apparent here. And so the really strong, sharply-focused school improvement initiatives which were spawned out of first National Strategies and then the City Challenges, they were conspicuous in their absence’ (School Leader) 

‘What you don’t get is a lot of refresh. So in big cities and conurbations, you get movement in and out … [Here, schools] tend to look inwards for their solutions and for school improvement. I think that’s a massive risk’ (School Leader)

The DfE (2016: 52) stated that ‘there does not appear to be much difference between coastal and inland schools’ (p. 52), but disaggregated DfE (2016) data shows:

• Fewer teachers move to other schools from coastal and rural schools compared with inland urban schools
• Fewer new entrants to coastal and rural than all inland schools
• Fewer NQTs in coastal and rural than all inland schools

This is supported by Social Mobility Commission data reported in the State of the Nation Report 2017: 39:

 ‘The most deprived coastal rural areas have one and half times the proportion of unqualified teachers that the least deprived inland rural areas have…Schools in densely populated urban areas benefit from support from nearby ‘outstanding’ schools but schools in rural and coastal areas are isolated and unable to tap into partnership infrastructure for support’.

The Class of 2010: A seven year study of a coastal academy in England

“In common with other coastal schools, this academy is located in an area of high socio-economic deprivation, with multi-generational low and/or unemployment, and local parents/carers who had often had poor experiences of education. There are very high levels of students recorded as pupil premium/ever 6 free school meals, demonstrating persistent disadvantage as the common denominator for students in the school. The socio-economic position of the community in which this coastal school is located clearly has an impact on senior leaders, teachers, students and parents.” (Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2017: 29)

From 2010 - 2017, Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Rowena Passy followed the journey of a coastal school that was in the ‘first wave’ of schools required (due to ‘national challenge’ circumstances of underperformance) to convert to academy status with the support of sponsors. The challenges faced by the school due to its coastal and socio-economical disadvantaged location and its new independent status, together with the wide-reaching ambitions of the academy leaders, offered a unique opportunity to document and explore the changes, challenges and successes for students, staff and the school. How would the new academy develop? What challenges would the new leaders face? How would changes be received and experienced by staff and students? Would the curriculum support and engage students? Would being an academy improve school performance?

Academy leaders and sponsors agreed to a seven-year longitudinal study that would include exploring the secondary educational experience of the Year 7 cohort, the Class of 2010, the first students to enter the new academy.

The aims of the study were to:

• explore the senior leadership aims and priorities, and how these might change and develop over time.
• investigate teachers’ perceptions of teaching, learning and assessment within the academy.
• monitor the academic progress of the student cohort that entered the academy as Year 7 in 2010
• understand the educational journey of a sample of 15 Year 7 students.

Each year we visited the academy and interviewed the principal and/or a senior leader, four different teachers of the Class of 2010 and the Class of 2010 students. We also studied the academy’s publicly-available data, examined academy documents and collected the anonymised student cohort data on levels of progress and attainment.

We anticipated that the Class of 2010 project would yield detailed understanding of the development of the academy as a new institution, of the progress and outcomes for this cohort of students, and of staff and student views on the impact of the education offered by the academy. We were interested in the additional challenges schools in areas of socio-economic disadvantage appeared to face and in particular those in coastal regions (see Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2015 report on coastal academies). Annual reporting of this information to the academy would help to raise the profile of the student and teacher voice, offer the opportunity to report on different strategies and developments, with findings offering the potential to be used to shape internal decisions. In addition, we intended that national and international dissemination of the findings could help to influence thinking on the challenges for other coastal schools and consequential strategic, operational or policy decisions.

Something we did not anticipate, however, was that fundamental changes within the academy would coincide with far-reaching and rapid changes within English secondary education. Two different government administrations and a series of policy directives placed new pressures on the school at a time in which leaders were already implementing extensive changes aimed at the primary measure of school accountability – student performance in formal examinations. This makes the study particularly valuable as a means of illustrating policy impacts at a challenging time in English education.