There is palpable anger among secondary headteachers that while the Department for Education (DfE) is not publishing key stage 2 performance tables, it will publish them for key stage 4 qualifications.
President of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), Pepe Di’Iasio, said in a speech to the union’s annual conference that they had been “thrown to the wolves” by the move.
The tables will be published despite students having faced two years of disruption caused by Covid, with high levels of pupil absence this year as well as huge problems caused by high levels of staff absence.
Mr Di’Iasio was speaking to more than 1,000 ASCL members who gathered for the annual conference in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre last week.
He said: “The government must rethink its plan to publish key stage 4 and post-16 performance tables based on this summer’s exams. How can it be right to compare the performance of one school or college with another when they have been so differently affected by the pandemic over the last two years?”
In guidance published last month (DfE, 2022), the DfE said it would “advise caution” for readers of the league tables: “We recognise the uneven impact on schools and colleges of the pandemic and will ensure clear messages are placed on the performance tables to advise caution when drawing conclusions from the 2021 to 2022 data.”
However, this assurance did not land well with Mr Di’Iasio: “The government’s answer is to say that it will place a health warning on performance tables and advise caution when considering the data. Surely, if the data is unreliable, the obvious answer is not to publish it in the first place.
“This is not a small matter. Careers and reputations are affected by performance tables. Newspapers publish them. It feels as though we are being thrown to the wolves by the government’s insistence on going ahead with this misguided and counterproductive policy. That is a pretty terrible way to treat a profession which surely deserves more respect after the last two years.”
Students are due to sit formal summer exams in GCSEs and A levels for the first time since 2019. Adaptations have been made to this summer’s exams including the provision of advance information on some of the exam content.
In an ASCL survey of 1,429 state-sector school and college leaders in England, published to coincide with the annual conference, 65.6% agreed with the decision to go ahead with examinations (23% disagreed), but 82.6% disagreed with the league table decision (10.4% agreed).
Commenting on the findings, ASCL reported: “Among those against the publication of performance tables, the reasons included settings having been impacted in different ways due to Covid with huge variations in staff and student absence; those with more disadvantaged pupils having been disproportionately negatively affected; and there being a contradiction between measures to make exams fairer for students but not doing so for settings.”
Elsewhere in his address, Mr Di’Iasio called for the government to scrap performance tables in their current form and “introduce instead an accountability dashboard – or ‘balanced scorecard’ – which gives a rounded view of a school or college and enables parents to see the things that most matter to their children – what we teach and how we support them”.
- DfE: Guidance: Coronavirus (Covid-19): School and college accountability 2021 to 2022, February 2022: https://bit.ly/3KPgvtK