Introduction
An analysis of the 2025 GCSE results suggests Havering’s academies have reinvented a two-tier school system. The tiers are wealth related. Disadvantaged Students1 did badly in their examinations. Under-achievement isn’t caused by poverty but is correlated with poverty. Under-achievement is well understood. Numerous strategies have been developed which are effective and could be employed. Not using them makes schools culpable.
The ‘Attainment Gap’2 has been studied for decades. Havering’s attainment gaps are between schools and within schools. Disadvantaged Students might as well be in a different school to their peers despite sharing the same building, lessons and teachers. GCSE grades 5-9 in English and Maths, which are the gateway to post-16 opportunities, is separately identified in the government’s statistical summary (see Appendix). These grades are so important that they have life-long implications
The government publishes statistics identifying GCSE outcomes for both categories of students, Disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged. The implication is that these categories of students live in a parallel universe and need to be accounted for separately. This binary secondary school system is tacitly acknowledged as a fact of life by governments, despite being abolished fifty plus years ago.3 Havering’s academies are rolling the years back for Disadvantaged Students. Secondary Modern schools have been recreated. They provided a world of low expectations and aspirations, which is why they were abolished. Social injustice has been recreated.
Apart from the social injustice of a two-tier system, there is significant impact on the economy. Semi-literate and semi-numerate students destroy the possibility of a skilled and professional workforce This in turn damages the economy, reducing productivity and national wealth. The attainment gap is a personal, social and economic disaster.
Does Havering have two-tier secondary schools?
No school knowingly sets out to organise a two-tier school. The notion that they plan academic apartheid is nonsense. However, schools have drifted into a situation which mirrors that outcome.
Havering’s schools have adopted machismo ‘zero tolerance’ policies. This is especially alienating when applied to school uniform. Infractions can be punished by internal exclusion where a student is isolated from their peer group for a day or more.4 This quote is from Redden Court’s website and is typical,
Students who flout the rules regarding uniform will be kept in isolation, or sent home to change appearance/uniform item…. Persistent offenders will be given an automatic after school detention and an exclusion may be applied. (my emphasis)
Redden Court had abysmal outcomes for their Disadvantaged Students in 2025. They entered 43 Disadvantaged Students for English and Mathematics with an 18.6% Grade 5-9 pass rate.5 This translates into only eight students passing through the post 16+ gateway of opportunity. Thirty-five students didn’t achieve the coveted grades.
Non-disadvantaged students at Redden Court, with the same teachers and sitting the same examination, achieved a 48.6% pass rate. There is a 30 percentage point differential between the two groups. That differential is a prima facie example of two-tier schooling. The results were abysmal for Disadvantaged Students when compared to their peers who were wealthier. They were also abysmal compared to some schools in Havering (see Appendix). Redden Court’s 2025 Disadvantaged Students are victims of social injustice.
The best performing Havering school for Disadvantaged Students in 2025 was Royal Liberty. Interestingly the two schools have similar intakes. Royal Liberty doesn’t have a privileged intake.6 Redden Court had 20.9% Disadvantaged Students for the 2025 examinations and Royal Liberty’s figure was 18.75%. This is an insignificant difference.
A hypothetical question is: would Redden Court’s students have done better at Royal Liberty? Belonging to the category ‘Disadvantaged’ is a legal category.1 It means there is a level playing field when making comparisons. A Disadvantaged Student at Royal Liberty is the same as one at Redden Court. The schools face the same challenge of the endemic under-achievement of Disadvantaged Students in the examination system.7
Redden Court’s 2025 cohort of Disadvantaged Students achieved an 18.6% Grade 5-9 pass rate for English and Mathematics. Eight students achieved success but how many could have achieved that grade if they’d been in Royal Liberty? Disadvantaged Students in Royal Liberty achieved 51.9% Grade 5-9 GCSE English and Mathematics in 2025. This translates into an additional 14 Grade 5-9 passes for Redden Court students. Or, to put it another way, instead of eight students achieving a life-enhancing boost it would have been 22.
Six more schools are in the same territory as Redden Court. Seven Havering schools had a failure rate of 80%+ for Disadvantaged Students who had been failed by their school. At least seven of Havering’s academies operate two-tier schools.
The Expectation Gap
Government statistics can be used diagnostically. The discussion about Grade 5-9 GCSE English and Mathematics reveals significant attainment gap outcomes within schools and between schools. There is a further gap.
Royal Liberty school has been highlighted because it has levelled-up better than any other school in Havering. A consideration of the number of Grade 4-9 outcomes indicates how this was achieved. Royal Liberty converted more Grade 4-9 students into the coveted Grade 5-9 category. The thesis here is that Royal Liberty have superior expectations for those who are predicted Grade 4 than other schools. Three schools illustrate this point powerfully:
Royal Liberty Grade 5-9 – 51.9%; Grade 4–9 – 63% Expectation gap 11.1%
Sanders Draper Grade 5-9 – 13%; Grade 4–9 – 43.5% Expectation gap 30.5%
Redden Court Grade 5-9 – 18.6%; Grade 4–9 – 39.5% Expectation gap 20.9%
Coopers Coburn Grade 5-9 – 44.4%; Grade 4–9 – 61.1% Expectation gap 16.7%
If these schools (which are typical – see Appendix) implemented positive expectations in a meaningful way, they could achieve Royal Liberty’s results. The impact would be enormous.
Like everything associated with the attainment gap of Disadvantaged Students, the challenge has been long identified. Off-the-peg strategies rarely work. Schools must embrace and take ownership of the techniques to migrate under-achieving youngsters upwards. First and foremost, capable youngsters have to be identified as *candidates* as it were. Schools must put their own spin on the successes of other schools. Here the government has been very proactive. They recognise that having a cohort of semi-literate, semi-numerate 16+ students leaving school is corrosive socially, and, at a macro-economic level, for national productivity.
The Pupil Premium
The Coalition government of 2010-15 created the Pupil Premium. This funded Disadvantaged Students on a per capita basis. The money followed the student. Each school received the funding with the instruction to spend it for the benefit of the Disadvantaged. There was no attempt to micro-manage the funding, which was given to school leaders to use appropriately for the unique needs of their Disadvantaged Students. OFSTED reports don’t analyse how well the funding was spent nor do their reports comment on outcomes for Disadvantaged Students. There is an extraordinary level of trust involved with Pupil Premium funding. Is that trust well placed?
Royal Liberty £154,8808
Sanders Draper £212,5219
Redden Court £191,100 10
Coopers Coburn £107,29711
School leaders decide how the funding is spent and set out the principal objectives to achieve the government’s objectives, which is to level-up. Questions an observer can ask is: are there robust procedures for assessing the effectiveness of the chosen strategies? And: how frequently is the chosen strategy reassessed?
Many schools, which have had Pupil Premium funds since 2012, continue to fail their Disadvantaged Students. After thirteen years, the strategies should have undergone several critical assessments. If a strategy fails, new assessments should have been undertaken. Possibly the strategy was sound but implementation was flawed. Or, the strategy was flawed. Or, the nature of the challenge hadn’t been analysed in a sufficiently thorough and sophisticated way.
Let’s consider this sentence.
Other schools have negative added value, including two who are ‘well below average’. They are The Brittons Academy and Sanders School.12
Politics in Havering published this sentence in 2019, which is a school generation ago. These schools are rooted to the bottom of the GCSE outcome tables. How can Pupil Premium funds be said to be have been spent wisely? It is unnecessary to drill down into their Pupil Premium programmes. Whatever they are doing is ineffective and should be changed.
The aggregated Pupil Premium funding for Sanders Draper is about £1m over a five-year generation of Disadvantaged Students. The government has done its part but hasn’t been rewarded. Plundering the Bible for a telling phrase we find,
By their fruits you shall know them Matthew 7: 16-20
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the depth of ignorance of Disadvantaged Students. Schools were closed and Zoom lessons began. Government and schools discovered uncomfortable truths about poverty. A third of pupils couldn’t access Zoom lessons because they didn’t have access to the necessary technology at home. A panic-stricken sourcing of laptops followed,
More than one million laptops and tablets have now been delivered to the most disadvantaged children across the country, as part of a £400 million government investment that will support schools and young people for years to come.13
Meanwhile, students in 2025 are punished for not having full school uniform.14 The micro-management of appearance goes to ludicrous extremes. Brittons school, who are in receipt of £292,000 of Pupil Premium funding with 40% of their intake being Disadvantaged, have been rooted to the bottom of the GCSE outcome table for years declare that,
“No Vans, trainers or pumps, plain black Kickers with no colour stitching or laces are allowed.”
[A breach that] cannot be rectified immediately, internal isolation may be imposed for the remainder of that school day or break and lunchtime, or until the student has a break in which they can safely return home to rectify the breach. (my emphasis)
Brittons is part of an Education Trust: Empower. Their website says,
Our vibrant, caring and innovative learning environment is underpinned by high expectations and high aspirations where every child has the right to learn in a safe environment.15 (my emphasis)
The Trust and school use rhetorical flourishes to show they know what is needed for success at GCSE. What they don’t know is how to translate that knowledge into actuality. High-flown aspirations sit uncomfortably alongside ferocious authoritarian enforcement of petty rules on school uniform. The two positions are incompatible. They know how to enforce petty rules but the core educational activity of inspiring Disadvantaged Students escapes them.
The government trusts school leaders to know and understand the challenges that Disadvantaged Students suffer. Yet most schools have policies which are designed to alienate. Perhaps the government was delusional?
Lies, dammed lies and statistics
This post isn’t a quasi-OFSTED analysis. It hasn’t conducted any site visits. There were no interviews with school leaders, teachers, students or parent/guardians. No lessons were observed. Assessment procedures haven’t been critically analysed. The educational infrastructure hasn’t been examined so there are no comments about IT, text-books, or the state of the buildings.
This post is reductionist.
It is focused on a single key aspect of the school: its performance in GCSE English and Mathematics examinations. Coopers Coburn and Sacred Heart of Mary have so few Disadvantaged Students that their statistics are meaningless (see Appendix). A single student can skew their figures. Nonetheless their outcomes are not outliers. An outlier outcome would be if their Disadvantaged Students achieved higher grades than the non-disadvantaged or, plunged to the low single percentage figures.
Despite being reductionist, insights can be gleaned from critiquing statistics. Brittons school receives nearly £300K in additional funding for Disadvantaged Students. The funding is meant to level-up. Brittons’ funding is a futile gesture. What would constitute a denial of that judgement by school leaders? What key metric could be highlighted? The 2022 OFSTED report said Brittons was ‘Good’16. What did they mean? They reached that bizarre assessment by not critiquing Pupil Premium funding or any analysis of the effectiveness of that funding. Compare this sentence from the OFSTED report with the statistical actuality,
“Leaders have high expectations for pupils’ academic achievements.”17
Brittons 2022 OFSTED report is not worth the paper it is written on.
Conclusion
Astonishingly, schools need to become learning organisations. They aren’t sufficiently confident to ditch failing policies. They don’t critique their own performance robustly. And if their policies are unsuccessful, they should address the problem by keeping their principal objective in mind, constantly. The transition of Grade 4-9 students into the coveted Grade 5-9 bracket is the centrepiece of five years of compulsory education. School leaders must be willing, and eager, to reach out for expertise wherever it might be. Successive governments have funded Disadvantaged Students to enhance social justice and that funding has failed. Poverty is correlated with under-achievement but poverty isn’t a cause of under-achievement. Under-achievement isn’t intractable. Schools can, and do, make a decisive difference. And that difference changes lives.Schools can create social justice and social mobility but too many are buried in corrosive defeatism.
Schools must not be wedded to shibboleths.18 Anything that stands in the path of social justice for Disadvantaged Student should be overcome.
Appendix: Havering’s GCSE Grade 5-9 in English and Mathematics, 2025
| Academy | %Grade GCSE 5-9 English and Maths by school | %Disadvantaged Students in each school | %Disadvantaged students GCSE Grade 5-9 English and Maths |
| Coopers Coburn | 70.8% | 8.6% (18 students) | 44.4% |
| Sacred Heart of Mary | 70% | 9.1% (11) | 36.4% |
| Royal Liberty | 64.6% | 18.75% (27) | 51.9% |
| Campions | 62.3% | 11.9% (18) | 33.3% |
| Hornchurch High | 61.4% | 28.8% (38) | 44.7% |
| Gaynes | 58.8% | 22% (15) | 40% |
| Havering Average (non-disadvantaged students) | 54.2% | ||
| Hall Mead | 51% | 16.2% (34) | 38.2% |
| Harris Academy Rainham | 50.3% | 26.6% (46) | 28.3% |
| Redden Court | 48.6% | 20.9% (43) | 18.6% |
| St Edwards | 48.6% | 32.6% (34) | 35.3% |
| Frances Bardsley | 45.7% | 22% (51) | 19.6% |
| National Average | 45.2% | ||
| Abbs Cross | 45.1% | 29.1% (51) | 31.4% |
| Emerson Park | 43.5% | 18.8% (39) | 25.6% |
| Drapers | 34.6% | 40.8% (78) | 19.2% |
| Marshalls Park | 32.7% | 31% (70) | 18.6% |
| Bower Park | 31.4% | 30.3% (58) | 17.2% |
| Sanders Draper | 30.7% | 20.2% (23) | 13% |
| Brittons | 27.1% | 50% (70) | 17.1% |
Research Note: Government statistics
The principal government website is Compare the performance of schools and colleges in England – GOV.UK
Like all websites this isn’t readily understandable but once access is established then it is a goldmine. For data, at a glance, see the Appendix below.
Let take Coopers Coburn, which is the elite school in Havering.
Every school has the same format so once you do one you can access them all. To understand the depth of government analysis go to,
This analyses outcomes for Disadvantaged Students in ten categories. For the sake of brevity, the post has used two categories, which are the outcome for Grades 5-9 GCSE English and Maths and Grade 4-9 GCSE English and Maths. Coopers is effectively a Grammar School. This means it is covertly selective. Coopers had the smallest percentage of Disadvantaged Students for the 2025 GCSE examinations in Havering. Their Disadvantaged candidates were just under 9% whereas Brittons had 50%.
Their non-disadvantaged students did well and was the ‘best’ school in Havering with a 70.4% success rate. Disadvantaged Students did markedly less well with a 44.4% success rate. The 26 percentage point difference is a chasm.
Notes
1 The legal definition of a ‘disadvantaged student’ is one who is receipt of free school meals and/or is ‘Looked After’.
2 The attainment gap is the difference between the two categories. The 1967 film To Sir, With Love starring Sidney Poitier touched on this very subject.
3 These were the principal categories of school but there were others which were peripheral. See Thatcherism and Education in England : A One-way Street ?
4 School Ties – A Tax on Learning? – Politics in Havering see also BEHAVIOUR POLICY April 2023 – Google Docs
7 Education: inequalities and attainment gaps – POST Interestingly this highlights the challenges schools in remote areas have such as on the coast.
8 The Royal Liberty School – Pupil Premium There is a very interesting statement on this website page
9 Sanders Draper Pupil Premium Strategy 2025_26.docx.pdf – Google Drive It was remarkably difficult to access this document
10 Pupil premium strategy statement OCT24 – Google Docs
11 2025-2026 PP Strategy Document (BTE).docx
12 Havering’s Academies: The Added Value Audit, 2019 – Politics in Havering
13 Government delivers more than one million devices to disadvantaged pupils – GOV.UK
14 School Ties – A Tax on Learning? – Politics in Havering and Our Academies – Empower Learning Academy Trust Empower accounts reveal that at least three staff are paid £100+ but there are a further three in the £90-100K bracket and so the figure might be more. A10-Acccounts-Full-2024-Signed.pdf p45
15 Havering’s Academies: School Shoes and Shoe Laces – Politics in Havering
16 50199946
17 loc.cit. p2
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