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22 May 09
JOHN DUNFORD l School league tables are out of fashion, to be replaced by scorecards that will judge schools on more balanced and holistic criteria. But the design will need to be carefully thought through first.

School league tables are out of fashion, to be replaced by scorecards that will judge schools on more balanced and holistic criteria. But the design will need to be carefully thought through first.

The school report card is the next big idea in school accountability. Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently announced that such a system

would be introduced in 2011 to replace old-style league tables. The intention is to create a balanced scorecard comprising a number of performance indicators based on models used primarily in the US.

This has the potential to be a more holistic, more accurate way of measuring and comparing school performance. If it is carefully and intelligently designed, it will be a far more useful tool for parents than crude exam league tables ever were. It will also help to ensure that the latter are consigned to the rubbish heap — not the recycling bin — of education policy once and for all.

There are some extremely important issues in designing the report card that will materially affect the reputation of all schools, so it will be vitally important to get the detail right. That’s why the Association of School and College Leaders has strongly welcomed the long timescale for its introduction.

However, I worry that the government is in danger of rushing into major decisions — such as which indicators will be included and whether there will be a single grade at the end of the process — before it has finalised what the basic framework of the report card will look like.

There are three stages in the development of the report card. First is deciding the categories to be included: attainment, progress and wellbeing are three likely candidates. The next stage is to decide the best way of measuring each of those categories — this is where the indicators come in. Only then should the minister make a decision about whether to reduce all the information to a single grade.

Special interest groups and education task forces have already been jumping the queue, pushing for their particular issue to be included as an indicator. So far we have communication with parents, quality of school meals, pupils with special needs, bullying, partnership working, and participation with local children’s trusts, to name but a few.

Taken individually, each one of these is important. But the basket is overflowing before we even know what the basket will look like. If commitments are made to include specific elements, without first deciding the overall structure and considering the full range of indicators, the report card will become a dog’s breakfast rather than the sensibly balanced meal it should be.

When plans for a report card were first announced, ASCL discussed with ministers and civil servants a number of principles that we believed needed to be adopted in its design for it to present an accurate and useful picture of a school.

Foremost among them was the principle that it should be equally possible for schools serving disadvantaged communities and those serving affluent communities to obtain high scores. In other words, the starting point of students upon entry must be taken into account.

This is not the case currently with Ofsted inspections, even though there are many excellent schools with dynamic leaders and committed staff in disadvantaged communities.

Equally important, ASCL believes that there should be no single grade, A to F, summarising the performance of the school. The grades from each aspect of the scorecard should be reported separately.

It would be taking the pursuit of simplicity too far to pretend that a single grade could summarise the whole performance of a school. Recent Department for Children, Schools and Families research on parental attitudes to a report card showed that parents did not necessarily want to know ‘what’s the best school?’ but ‘what’s the best school for my child?’

A single grade says nothing about how safe students are, how happy they are, how well they progress in their studies. Comparisons will be much more meaningful if there are individual grades for a small number of areas. The point of a scorecard, after all, is to enable a wider range of performance to be taken into account.

Finally, the introduction of the report card is the ideal time for the government to do away with league tables of examination results.

Schools accept that they should be held to account for the efficient and effective use of public money. However, school accountability has increased hugely in the past 20 years, with national performance tables, Ofsted inspections, school improvement partners, increased powers for local authorities, increasing intervention by central government, the National Challenge, national strategies and much more.

ASCL continually urges the government to work on the principle of ‘one in, one out’. If the design of the report card is right, league tables will never be missed. This is an opportunity too important to be rushed.

John Dunford is general secretary, Association of School and College Leaders

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