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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

The Government’s target is to get good schools, which is the right target. Parents want a good local school—whatever title we give it. That is why I want to focus on teaching and learning. Some academies are very good, but the intake of some academies is very different from that of their predecessor school. That is a plus in one sense, but it also makes it extremely difficult to compare results because we are not comparing like with like. Some academies have a very high expulsion rate—much higher than that of the local authority in which it is situated. If difficult and challenging children are moving to other schools in the system, that also makes comparing results difficult, because the challenges presented by such children are not tackled, but moved somewhere else. There has also been the specialist schools programme. The Education and Skills Committee—and that Committee in its previous incarnation as the Education Committee—has made it clear that there are varying assessments of that programme. It is undoubtedly true that many specialist schools have improved their results and that they have offered further opportunities to many children, but let us look at last year’s results. The average point score at GCSE in specialist schools increased by 10.5 per cent. but it increased throughout the secondary school maintained sector by 10.8 per cent. It is therefore very difficult to draw conclusions from those results at these early stages. It sounds confusing, but education can be confusing, because it is very difficult to establish control groups when starting new things. To make matters more confusing, in some areas certain things have worked and Government interventions have been very successful. For example, in 1997-98 45.9 per cent. of schools in the most deprived wards were in special measures; by 2004-05, that figure had fallen to 28.8 per cent. Primary schools with the highest number of children on free school meals—a good rough index of deprivation—had narrowed the results gap on schools with a smaller proportion of children on free school meals.