Ofsted today released some new data about education standards across England.
They’re taking a different approach with one of the reports, focusing on the Local Authority (LA), rather than individual schools, with the intention of allowing people to compare performance between LAs.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, HM Chief Inspector, highlights the reason for this, “The inequities for local children are stark. This is completely unacceptable.
“That’s why I intend, from January, to use Ofsted’s new regional structure to inquire further into areas that are performing badly. We need to find out what is happening, and inspect where necessary. We will also work with local areas to support them and help them link up with best practice.”
Online tool – DataView
To this end they’ve released DataView which they describe as ‘an online tool which allows open access to, and the comparison of, inspection findings about the performance of providers at national, regional, local authority and constituency level over time.’
We’ve had a look over it, and, despite us taking different approaches to the data held on the interactive view, we can’t balance what is being shown in the ‘Local authority area focus’ (3/4 down the page) against what we know about the Isle of Wight Secondary schools.
One Island school shown for 2011/12
Only one school is being shown for the Island for 2011/12. It’s one with 911 places/learners. The only Secondary school that we can think of that is close to fitting that criteria would be Christ the King (CtK).
CtK tell us that the 911 pupils level is around what they had before they opened their sixth form and had a larger-than-before Year 7 intake.
Other data missing
The initial mystery is that as well as none of the other secondary schools (Colleges) being listed (Cowes, Medina and Carisbrooke) neither are the two Isle of Wight Academies (Ryde and Sandown) – the inclusion of which is something that was heavily-trailed on Radio 4’s Today programme as a central innovation of this report. This may be due to Ofsted inspections of the new schools and Academies not having taken place as yet.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, HM Chief Inspector, is clearly impressed with the performance of Academies across England: “Academies are also making a difference. Most of the sponsored academies that we have inspected are better than the poor quality schools they replaced.”
If the Colleges and Academies are known about, but not inspected, it would seem reasonable that this would be shown somehow on the graph, rather than just ignored.
Can you help with any insight?
We’re going to get in touch with Ofsted to try and unravel this, but in the meantime wanted to make readers aware of it.
If you get a chance to have a look at it and can gather any insight, we’d be really grateful if you could share it in the comments below.
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