Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/World Class Schools Quality Mark


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. The one "keep" !vote is not policy-based. Randykitty (talk) 14:31, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

World Class Schools Quality Mark

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The article is about a UK charity, which awards the title of "World Class School" to UK schools that meet their requirements, but I don't believe that the subject of the article passes WP:NCORP. The article is currently supported entirely by the charity's listing in the UK Charity Commission register (primary), and the charity's website (affiliated). I searched for better sourcing, but found nothing that was independent, secondary and reliable. There are lots of hits from websites that have been awarded its 'World Class School' status (affiliated), and lots of obvious press releases in the local newspapers covering the fact that a local school has been awarded the status (affiliated), but that's about it. The best I found was this article, which is published by a magazine which describes itself as being "written by teachers, for teachers", and is distributed free to secondary schools in the UK (unreliable). Note that searching for sources is somewhat tricky: the phrase "world class schools" is very generic, and comes up in all sorts of obviously reliable scholarly sources; none of them, as far as I can tell, are about this particular entity, they are all about the much more general concept of a world class school. Girth Summit  (blether) 18:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  18:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  18:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  18:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Reason for Creation
I created this article solely because of a number of articles about schools which claimed this award, and thought that Wikipedia would want to know more about it. I have created a number of articles on this basis. The award of the mark to an individual school is reported in many local newspapers, but I do not think they give any more information than that provided by the charity itself. However if a reader of such a paper wonders what the mark is, then they might turn to Wikipedia. At least they will find it is legitimate in the sense of being a registered UK charity, which submits annual reports and accounts. I have no particular brief or personal knowledge of the organisation. Chemical Engineer (talk) 22:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * To respond to this, without wanting to cast any shade on Chemical Engineer, who I am sure was acting in good faith: simply existing and being mentioned in existing articles is not enough to warrant an article. I've spent quite a bit of time looking for proper coverage of this scheme, and I've come to the conclusion that it's nothing more than a marketing badge. A school applies for the award when they meet the criteria; the charity gives the school the award; the school puts out a press release; and that's it. Unless anyone can dig up any decent sources giving the scheme significant coverage, I think that what we need to be doing is removing mention of it from our articles about British schools, rather than amplifying their PR push. Girth Summit  (blether)  23:56, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete From what I can tell this a fake award being used by schools as a paid for PR tool. There assessment criteria for who qualifies for their "award" are obviously crap that any school can easily meet. Same goes for the horrible state of available (or really non-existent) references. I totally agree with Girth Summit that the proper thing to do, instead of having an article about this, is to remove mentions of it from articles about British schools. Although, I don't put that on the article creator. I probably would have rolled the dice and created an article for it myself. Since sometimes you can't really tell what works or doesn't on here until after the fact and sometimes it makes sense at the time to create articles about things that are mentioned a lot in other articles. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:01, 26 June 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.