Originally published @ 1:21 am, Fri 15th Jan 2010
Another year of progress for children taking GCSEs was confirmed in the official results published this week.
67.9% of pupils achieved 5 good GCSEs (A* to C) in Derbyshire in 2009, up nearly 5% in a year and up 22% since 1998.
Congratulations to everyone who worked to achieve the improvement.
Resources and reform have been key to the improvements.
There are approximately 120 extra secondary school teachers serving South Derbyshire children, 80 extra primary school teachers, 260 extra teaching assistants and 130 more support staff.
It is traditional for opposition parties to try to belittle progress, but the line taken by the Lib Dems – that the resources had gone to the cities - doesn’t seem to stack up given the increase in resources shown here.
As it happens Derby has improved by 28%, although has gone down in the last year. (I’m not clear if this is consequential upon any decision made by the Derby Lib Dems running the council.)
But it hasn’t been very long since the Lib Dems have complained about the gap between the very richest and the very poorest getting larger. Labour has tried to help the very poorest – encouraging people into work, minimum wage, tax credits and minimum pensions using pension credits, it’s a bit galling to have the Lib Dems then criticise policies aimed to boost the capacity of the most disadvantaged to achieve more in their adult life through a better education.
As for league tables, it’s hard to see how you can avoid results being collated and published in these formats, even if people are concerned about arguably simplistic presentations of how good schools are.
I do think presentations of schools’ achievements against an indication of the degree of deprivation their cohorts of children should be published, to highlight potential instances of schools coasting.
But I think the system of inspection that we’ve reached with schools is a very constructive way of judging schools. Look for assessments of the school’s leadership, its management, its quality of teaching and quality of learning, starting with the school conducting a self-assessment (with actions to be taken on weaknesses identified), and then have inspectors checking the honesty and accuracy of the self-assessment, conducting a full inspection if they have concerns.
In South Derbyshire, we also need to look out for the quality of school buildings and facilities; and for meeting the demand for schools like John Port school which will grow with the extra housing being planned between Findern and Stenson Fields. The commitment to renew our secondary schools in this decade, through the “Building Schools for the Future” programme, is so important.
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