Essential viewing.  Dispatches: the children left behind

With up to 300,000 young people leaving secondary schools in England each year with less than five GCSES, Dispatches investigates whether the size, design and organisation of comprehensive schools is a key factor in how pupils fare. James Wetz, author of the film, is a former head teacher at two large comprehensive schools and now an education researcher at Bristol University.

Channel 4 Monday 11 February 8.00pm

With up to 300,000 young people leaving secondary schools in England each year with less than five GCSES (grades A*-C, including English and Maths).

Dispatches investigates whether the size, design and organisation of comprehensive schools is a key factor in how pupils fare.

James Wetz, author of the film, is a former head teacher at two large comprehensive schools and now an education researcher at Bristol University. He believes many school-children struggle in large comprehensives and are failed by the current system – despite the best efforts of teachers.

Research carried out in Bristol by Wetz uncovered the fact that many of the children who left school with no qualifications were doing well in their education at the age of 10 or 11 - the turning point came as they joined their secondary schools. He asks if the giant new schools now being built all over Britain, in the biggest school building programme since Victorian times, are the best way to engage these disaffected pupils, to improve standards and reduce truancy and exclusion rates.

Examining alternative models of schooling in the UK and the USA, Dispatches reveals how they attempt to address the needs of pupils by providing features such as smaller schools within schools, consistent contact with the same teachers, constant monitoring and a more nurturing approach. Instead of having one school for 1200 students, many pioneering schools in the USA are creating smaller teaching groups, consisting of just 300 children. These groups are achieving much better results, with happier and more engaged pupils.

Featuring interviews with young people who left school with few if any qualifications, Dispatches hears their views on why secondary school proved difficult for them.

Wetz visits the highly successful small ‘pilot’ schools in Boston, in the US and discovers that there are now long waiting-lists for these schools even though they are situated in socially-deprived areas. He also meets the advocates of smaller schools known as ‘Urban Academies’ in New York and talks to Professor Tony Wagner of Harvard, a driving force and leading voice for the small schools model in America and recent schools advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lessons from the small school movement in the US are now beginning to make inroads in the UK. Wetz visits new schools in the south of Bristol which are putting pioneering ideas into practice to combat truancy and exclusion rates which have, until recently, been amongst the highest in Britain. One of these schools, Brislington Enterprise College, still under construction at a cost of £30 million – will replace a large dilapidated comprehensive – but under the new plans will house five smaller schools within a school.

Wetz also investigates the economic viability of the smaller schools - meeting leading school architect Peter Clegg whose practice has designed many new academies and is now costing James Wetz’s idea of an ‘urban village school’ for areas of urban deprivation in Britain, to find out if such small schools can make economic sense.

The Children Left Behind also includes an interview with Professor Rod Morgan, former chair of the Youth Justice Board on the real cost to British society of creating an underclass of young people, who feel they have no stake in society because they left secondary school with no qualifications.

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