Agenda item

Scrutiny of school performance at key stage 4. 

The chief officer for education provided a short introduction to the report, advising that there is a significant amount of data analysis that takes place before presenting such a report to the committee.  Progress at key stage 4 has been an area of particular focus for a number of years. The committee heard that the reporting framework. Has changed and that an explanation of the new reporting framework had been discussed at the previous committee meeting. 

The EAS explained that this report was timely in view of the new curriculum.   The EAS presented their report, taking members through a detailed explanation of the data and the findings.  Members heard that data can only tell part of the story and that the quality of teaching is critical.  The chief officer for education explained that data training for governors has been revised and there is now an opportunity to think about our expectations, which are for the secondaries to do better than they are currently and to not to see the tailing off after primary school.  He presented the challenge as how schools compare against their family of schools, in order to gauge a meaningful comparison and advised that it’s an ongoing dialogue with secondary schools to understand the progress they are making and the changes they will make to secure those outcomes.

Challenge:

• I have concerns about the Free School Meal (FSM) cohort and the range of difficulties that these children face and my concern is how the council addresses poverty.  We have pockets of severe poverty in this county, so it’s not just about narrowing the gap in educational attainment, it’s about how we address the much wider picture and the impact of poverty.  I would welcome hearing from King Henry School how they address this.  The school should be looking at the small number of very vulnerable children and looking at how they can support each one. Recognising that the EAS will be looking at this, I would like to suggest that we invite King Henry and look at the wider reasons why these young people don’t fulfil their potential.

I recognise your points on this and in my last two chief officer reports, I attempted to explain to members the level of complexity around this and to explain the consequence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) and the impact on learners. It’s important that we move beyond knowing who these children are an actually put in interventions to help them. We need to take account of our full vulnerable population and by this I mean those children with additional learning needs as well as those in children in receipt of free school meals.

EAS ~ Every secondary school has a ‘vulnerable learner lead’ funded by the EAS and they work together to look at best practice and we intend to bring a report to a future meeting of this committee on this.   We have looked at individual pupil data, but the question is where we go from here.

Chief Officer ~ This is the first year of this kind of reporting and this does not show aggregated data across other councils. We are towards the top third, but I fully accept that we should be at the top of the table.

Chairs conclusion:

We have fully scrutinised this and we have agreed to invite King Henry VIII Comprehensive to a future meeting and we will await a further report on the plans for children in receipt of Free School Meals.