Public Accounts Committee calls for more schools data
The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee has called for school league tables to include more indicators in order to tell parents more about how their children’s schools are performing.
In its 19th Report, published today, the Public Accounts Committee argues that while many factors affecting educational attainment are within schools’ control, others are not, and parents should be given more information about these.
Factors of this sort include local levels of economic deprivation, numbers of pupils in receipt of free school meals, and even data about parents’ benefits, the Committee argues, following up a November 2003 National Audit Office report on the subject.
Committee chair Edward Leigh explained, “This enhanced information must be available to parents, so that they can take it into account in selecting schools, however limited the choices they have.”
The Committee’s call comes just a year after the Department for Education and Skills actually did amend statistics on schools in order to include “value-added” measures of the sort described.
Responding to this morning’s report, a spokesperson for the Department for Education and Skills confirmed that it does intend to include more such factors in future figures.
The Public Accounts Committee – whose principal role is to examine the effectiveness of Government spending – proposes in its report that school inspectors Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) publish “before and after” versions of schools’ performance ratings, when external factors are and are not taken into account.
In addition, the Committee is calling for schools’ funding to be simplified.
Mr Leigh warned, “The number and complexity of funding streams for schools is unacceptably high and a recipe for confusion.”
