ABSTRACT

If one change has characterised education reform in recent years, it has been an explosion of information about school performance. Each year, school and college performance tables – now renamed School and College Attainment and Achievement Tables – are published by the DfES in England for the national tests at Key Stages 2 and 3, as well as for GCSEs, A Levels and their vocational equivalents. While education ministers in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff bowed to teaching union demands to scrap what they call league tables (and some testing) altogether, English ministers doggedly insist that they are here to stay. More importantly, a raft of information is now provided to every school each autumn by the Government and Ofsted. This enables each school to evaluate its own performance and the performance of individual pupils, to identify where improvements can be made and to benchmark that achievement against that of schools with similar characteristics, such as social mix or the proportion of students whose first language is not English. And, together with Ofsted's new shorter inspections, the Government is planning to introduce new school profiles to bring together key material about schools for parents (see Chapter 11).