Education and Inspections Bill

I rise to speak to Amendment No. 185 in this group which seeks to remove paragraph (c) of Clause 53(3). The subsection states that the standards of performance of pupils at a school are low if they are low by reference to, "““(c) the standards attained by pupils at comparable schools””." I state at the outset that this is a probing amendment. I do not contest the claim that if pupils were performing poorly compared to pupils at comparable schools, this would be a clear cause for concern. I would, however, appreciate it if the Minister could expand slightly on what is meant by ““comparable””. There are a variety of factors by which a school could be compared. The most obvious of these is the prior attainment of pupils in the school which forms the basis for the value added measure. In addition to prior attainment, one could imagine a number of other factors such as ethnic minority background and the family income. In certain circumstances, there is no reason why each of these factors might not be considered an appropriate measure of comparability. However, there is a danger here that we risk perpetuating low expectations for certain groups. For example, the new contextual value added measure that the Government intend to use in future discriminates against some ethnic groups by insisting on higher levels of achievement from these groups to obtain the same value added score. Similarly, there are schools in deprived areas which achieve very good contextual value added results while disguising extremely low levels of absolute achievement. For example, the Times Educational Supplement for 9 June reported that in the fourth best school in the country, according to the contextual value added measure used by Ofsted, only 12 per cent of pupils achieved A* to C in English,13 per cent in maths and none in science. Of the top 20 schools in the contextual value added ratings, 11 had fewer than one-third of pupils achieving five Cs or better, including English and maths. Meanwhile, head teachers in prosperous areas can receive below average value-added scores simply because their pupils come from a more affluent background. If one measure of comparability can lead to such wide ranges of absolute attainment, it means that the Government will need to be very explicit about which factors are considered comparable and which are not. It is also very important that the choice of a factor by which the authority gauges comparability does not inadvertently discriminate or imply that the expectations of performance for one group are somehow lower than the other.