The success of a London school... and of the English system as a whole

LondonAt Walthamstow School for Girls (WSG), a public community school for girls aged 11 to 16 in northeast London, students are not allowed to wear false nails, those extensions that, whether you like it or not, make handwriting or even typing on a laptop difficult. Nor can they be painted with certain designs. It is one more measure, among others, that the management agreed upon in 2023 with the students. It was also agreed which hair dye is acceptable and which is not. Or which jewelry or nose piercings can be worn and what makeup is allowed and what is not.

The school, however, is not particularly restrictive or much stricter than the rest in the neighborhood: “There are others with a much more military spirit where the uniform must be buttoned up to the top, for example; in this one [WSG] everything is usually agreed upon between the management, the teaching staff, and the girls,” comments to ARA a member of the board of governors, who prefers to identify herself publicly only by her initials, M.P.B. The board of governors is a body very distantly similar to the school council of an educational center in Catalonia; it has a lot of power in non-educational management and financial control.

As mentioned, the school is public, receives funding from the state – and from the Waltham Forest district – for each student who studies there – an extra if she has special educational needs – and has been considered, by the latest random pedagogical quality review (Ofsted) of 2024, an “outstanding” level school, the highest qualification. A test, Ofsted, which the teaching staff considers “very stressful,” says the governor, and which has no equivalent of any kind in Catalonia. Evaluations that, unlike the famous PISA report tests, are not announced in advance for a specific date, although each school knows that it must pass them every four years, more or less.

Even so, the WSG is not exempt from problems, not only related to its linguistic diversity, which is very high. At the school, more than half of the students, 53%, have a language other than English as their first language. 35 different ones are spoken there, a reality that reflects the enormous diverse composition of the Walthamstow neighborhood.

Another of the problems is the funding deficit of 383,419 pounds in the 2024-25 fiscal year, the last one for which there is a record, as stated in the available information. The accumulated total is just over 119,000 pounds, a figure that for an institution of about nine hundred students is objectively not a drama. The school's finance chief, moreover, has launched a three-year plan to wipe out the deficit. If they were to fail to wipe it out, or if the deficit were to increase above a certain level, the Waltham Forest education authority would take control of it.

The way in which a school's finances are managed –in this case a secondary school, although the method is extensible to any public center, including primary ones– is one of the most relevant differences in relation to the public school management model in Catalonia.

Historical reasons

There is a historical reason that explains it. In England and Wales, for practically the entire 20th century, the LEAs (local education authorities) were the administrative entities responsible for managing public education. They controlled the budgets, the teaching staff, and the maintenance of infrastructure in each district. But with the reforms initiated in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher and, above all, with the expansion of the so-called academies (2000s), they lost these powers. The centers became independent of local governments.

During the Labour period of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010), the first academies were conceived primarily to replace schools with poor results. They usually had an external sponsor. The sponsors could be charities, foundations, universities, companies, or other entities. The goal was not for them to obtain profits from the management of the center. Over the years, the system gradually generalized, and the academies stopped being an exception aimed mainly at schools with difficulties to become a central piece of the organization of English secondary education.

Subsequent Conservative governments (2010-2024) deepened the model. Unlike schools maintained directly by local authorities, such as the WSG, the academies are managed by academy trusts, independent, non-profit entities that receive public funding also based on the number of students. The center, or the trust it depends on, manages everything from hiring staff to cleaning and maintenance services and, with more or less leeway, the salary conditions of the teachers. The system has shifted a significant part of the decisions that previously belonged to the local administration to the centers themselves and, above all, to the academy trusts.

If the funding system is different from the Catalan one, so is the curriculum. England has a national one, but schools have considerable leeway to organize it, especially the academies. In secondary school, students study a wide range of subjects until the age of 14. From then on, they begin to choose the subjects they will take for their GCSEs, the exams they take at age 16, which are key to their academic future if they continue beyond compulsory education, as are the A levels, which they will take two years later and which determine their university prospects. Unlike in Catalonia or Spain, in the United Kingdom there is no test similar to the university entrance exam.

At the Walthamstow School for Girls, to return to the specific case, all students take English, English literature, mathematics, science, and religious studies, and four more subjects of their personal choice. In total, nine GCSE subjects. The core subjects are English, mathematics, and science, and the student can complete their education with history, geography, languages, art, music, or other subjects. There are already specialized schools for 14-year-old students, where they can delve into subjects such as drama or audiovisual specialization.

And if they fail, what happens? It is not common to repeat a year. Students move on to the next year and the big filter comes at age 16, with the GCSEs. Grades range from 9 to 1, and a 4 is generally considered a pass. But if this is not achieved in English or mathematics, it is necessary to continue studying these core subjects after the age of 16. It is required to get a minimum of 4.

However, the English education system has a problem that, for the moment, no curriculum is able to solve. There is a shortage of teachers, especially in mathematics and science. 45% of the centers consulted by the Department of Education had difficulties last year in hiring mathematics and physics teachers; for chemistry, 40%. The government has announced 6,500 new teachers and incentives of up to 6,000 pounds for some specialties. The big challenge will be to find them. Because, even though salaries have risen and this September the starting salary already exceeds 34,000 pounds per year outside of London, in the capital the cost of housing is much higher and science graduates have many much better-paid professional opportunities.

And despite all the difficulties inherent in the school's challenges, academic results continue to be reasonable. PISA data (2025) has offered an optimistic picture. England is situated above the average of the participating countries: 497 points in reading comprehension, 492 in mathematics, and 516 in science, compared to the 461, 463, and 482 average, respectively. Also, 67% of the GCSE grades from the last academic year, published in August, were 4 or higher. In English, however, the National Reference Test points to a slight decline compared to a decade ago: 66.1% of students would have achieved at least a 4, compared to the 69.9% estimated in 2017. In mathematics, on the other hand, according to this test, the level has risen slightly, from 70.7% to 71.6%. At the highest levels, the trend is better: those obtaining a 7 or higher in mathematics have gone from 19.9% to 23.9%.