New plans to identify failing schools
The government has announced new proposals to help parents and headteachers identify under-performing teachers by publishing detailed records of how individual children perform in school.
The decision to order the annual the publication of “micro-level” performance data is part of the government’s continued drive to raise standards in under-performing schools.
The proposals, due to be outlined in a government white paper next month, will require schools to publish data measuring subject-by-subject achievements of classes and individual pupils, the Observer reports.
The detailed information, which will be collated by the schools inspectorate Ofsted, will be released to parents, who will be given powers to use the data as evidence to support the removal of inadequate teachers from schools.
Education secretary Ruth Kelly told the Observer that the new data would also help the government identify and take action over failing schools. Options would include requiring a struggling school to federate with a neighbouring, successful school, Ms Kelly told the newspaper.
The education secretary added that the detailed information would also allow staff to identify which teaching methods achieved the best results.
Ms Kelly also said the data would allow educationalists to study variations in achievements between boys and girls in different subjects and help address underperformance by different ethnic groups.
“It’s a completely new approach and we’ll be able to see precisely how schools are performing and which bits of schools are underperforming,” said Ms Kelly, commenting on the proposed new data.
“What we can’t have is where a child goes through a secondary school where the school is failing, or coasting, or underperforming.”
“Action needs to be taken,” she added.
General secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, John Dunford said he welcomed proposals to provide parents with more information because existing school league tables told “only half the story.”
But the National Union of Teachers (NUT) said the plan ignored the fact that pupils’ performance was affected by factors other than teachers.
“It’s a nonsense to believe that you can judge the performance of a teacher or a department from these records. A range of factors affect a pupil’s performance, not simply the teacher in front of that child,” an NUT spokeswoman is quoted as saying by the Press Association.
