Heads criticise National Challenge scheme to help failing secondary schools

Government plans to improve more than 600 under-performing secondary schools have backfired, say headteachers. In his budget this March, the chancellor Alistair Darling threatened 638 secondaries with closure unless at least 30% of their pupils achieved five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, by 2011. Darling pledged an extra £200m to help the schools recruit the best teachers and turn around their results in time. But headteachers of the struggling schools say the scheme, called the National Challenge, is having the opposite effect. Parents now see the schools as 'failures' and in some schools up to half those who would normally have applied for a place at the schools have not done so. Joan McVittie, head of Woodside School in Wood Green, north London, told the Times Educational Supplement that she had been caught in... [read full story]