National data sets on school performance should be viewed with “a great deal of caution” as they come without any national moderation.
The Children’s Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee was told on Monday (21 March) that without national data on school performance it is very difficult to draw comparisons between schools.
Ben Pearson, the council’s chief education officer, said: “Writing a reflective report and providing comparisons when we don’t have anything to compare against is quite challenging.
“What we’ve tried to do in the report is provide information where we have it, but be very clear about the fact that some of the numbers in there are not verified.
“But we provided everything we can in the most up to date information that’s available to the council,” he said.
Judith Lovely, manager for school improvement, said: “Any primary data that we have is only bespoke to those individual schools, and we are looking forward to the more normal situation where this time next year I will be able to update you with our usual data-focused reports for primary, because the accountability measures will be back, SATs will be taken, etcetera, etcetera.
“There are national data sets, however, they should be viewed with a great deal of caution, because there were no national moderation opportunities.
“It was down to individual schools to determine how they were going to provide specific data sets for individual children and cohorts.
“What that means is it is not really possible, with any accuracy, to draw out any conclusions and to actually measure school by school, cohort by cohort, or local authority by local authority.
Councillor Jane Walker (Conservative, Clapham Ward) said: “You say there’s no comparisons with other areas, but we have got a comparison for the secondary schools there [in the report], and we’re very low on all but one of the measures.”
“I just wanted to understand a little bit more about why that is. Is it because we’ve got certain big schools pulling the overall scores down? What is it that is actually causing us to be so low?” she asked.
Ms Lovely replied that last year each school decided how they were going to interpret the teacher assessed data. Some decided to go on old GCSE papers, while others took a hybrid approach based on where children were in previous years on a subject.
“It could be that in Bedford borough our expectations of children and what they can do are higher than other local authorities,” she said.
“The government was very clear that the data set should not be used to determine stats in that way because it was teacher assessed.
“We will have a much more accurate picture at the end of this year when we are back to the actual GCSE and A level results.
“This data was only for the schools to support their children in the next steps to learning, rather than to use for Ofsted or local authorities in terms of benchmarking,” she said.
“Why we have got this then?” Councillor Walker asked.
“This presumably has gone somewhere, not just for us. So on the basis of that, we look really weak.
“So I don’t understand why we’ve got this, if we’re not comparing area by area.”
Ms Lovely replied that this is the situation that the DofE has stated.
“I share your concern, Councillor Walker around the data, and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when we first found out that we wouldn’t have that second year of SATs cohort,” she said.
“Because I knew all the evidence was telling me that we would have had much-improved data outcomes and could have proven all of the work that everybody has been doing to ensure that those outcomes were improved.
“So it was a real disappointment we couldn’t prove it,” she said.
Committee chair, councillor Hilde Hendrickx (LibDems, Newnham Ward) said: “We could also say that if we just look at the trend from the previous years, the data isn’t out of sorts, to be perfectly honest.
“We were lagging behind the previous years as well, so perhaps the more conservative kind of decision we could take is that nothing much, perhaps, has changed.”
by John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
