Tackling educational inequality - CentreForum

Tackling educational inequality
Primary school problems understated
Furthermore, these figures significantly understate the number of poorly
performing primary schools. In 2005, 402 schools (53 secondary and
349 primary schools) were deemed “low attaining”. To be classified as
low attaining, secondary schools need only miss the government floor
target of 25 per cent of pupils achieving five or more ‘good’ GCSEs for
a single year. Primary schools are classified as low attaining only if they
miss their floor target (65 per cent of pupils reaching level 4 in English
and maths) for four years in a row. The National Audit Office (NAO) use
the different measure to avoid the sensitivity of primary school data to
small pupil numbers. 4 If we use the same benchmark for primary as for
secondary schools, the number of primary schools where less than 65
per cent of pupils reached level 4 in 2005 rises to 1,870 for English,
and to 2,797 for maths – a big jump from the 402 schools that appear
in the official statistics.
In addition, the total number of poorly performing schools includes
‘underperforming’ schools – a category that only applies to secondary
schools. This is a category based on value added to the school intake,
which is currently unavailable for primary schools (as measured by CVA
scores). 5 The education department promised equivalent primary school
data by September 2006, but nothing has yet been forthcoming. The
figures above, therefore, do not include those primary schools that are
not performing as well as they should be, given their circumstances.
In summary: 1,557 schools were defined as underperforming in 2005.
They educated roughly 980,000 pupils and represent 4.1 per cent of
primary schools, 23 per cent of secondary schools and 3 per cent of
‘other’ schools. 6 If the same performance criteria for primary schools is
employed as those that apply to secondary schools, the total rises to
5,878 schools (20.5 per cent of all primary schools), affecting a total
of 1.6 million pupils. This still ignores primary schools that would be
defined as underperforming in relation to value added criteria. This is an
unacceptable level of underperformance.
The Fat Tail of School Underperformance
There is a further problem. In a genuinely non-selective, mixed ability
comprehensive system, performance of secondary and primary schools
would be normally distributed, with most schools clustered around the
mean. Instead, there exists what statisticians call a “fat tail” of schools
at secondary level (primary school level data is not available) which
significantly underperform relative to their peers.
Figure 10 shows the distribution of secondary school performance at
GCSE. It reveals two abnormalities: an unexpected number of extremely
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