SOS - Save Our Schools!

Standards-Not-Tiers Press Release - 25th February 2008

David Pugh stated on Isle of Wight Radio today (News 06:30) that he finds little to be happy about in the fact that Isle of Wight High Schools are collectively one of only 5 Authorities to have no schools achieving less than 39% in the 2007 GCSE A*-C including English and Maths. Standards Not Tiers believes that Cllr Pugh has misunderstood the significance of this data.

Whilst we acknowledge that our average score is itself by no means excellent, the range of scores is excellent and particularly so when we look at the actual make up of the other authorities that we are compared with; in particular the sizes of the schools involved, their funding status and in many cases quasi or actual selection processes that they employ.

All Isle of Wight schools included in the data are non selective community comprehensive schools many drawing pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and less well off families.

Unlike many of the comparator authorities we do not have a beacon school that siphons off the best students, which whilst driving up the overall average for the county, results in some schools falling well below the governments 30% target. In this respect the Isle of Wight’s attainment is to be commended. This is particularly so when one considers the appallingly difficult political situation with regard to reorganisation over the last 5 years.

We regard this as an important feature of our truly comprehensive and non selective system on the Isle of Wight and it places us in a unique position that needs to be built upon. Parents should be extremely concerned at any plans to increase the size of our high schools as the data indicates that this is a major contributor to under performance at GCSE. The Local Authorities current plans for options 2 and 3 will result in secondary schools that are almost twice the size of most mainland secondary schools and far bigger than most of those that have achieved the Governments 30% consistency target at GCSE.

We have extracted the data for every school in each of the local authorities that are in the top ten for the target.

Data source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/league_tables/default.stm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 8:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.