ATL

Reading the report card

Sweeping changes to accountability are in the offing and there is much trepidation among education staff. ATL deputy general secretary Martin Johnson runs the rule over the proposals

What's that saying about the best being the enemy of the good? It circled around the back of my mind in response to my beach reading, a relaxing booklet entitled A school report card: prospectus. Enticing, eh? To be honest, Cloud atlas was more engaging. However, I concluded that the school report card may not be the best, and may not even turn out to be good, but it just might be better than what we have now in English schools. Let me explain.

Around the time school staff were thinking about sports day, the government published a White Paper on schools in England. Another one. Its working title was Twenty-first century schools, although cynics have been heard to suggest that it's the 20th-century school with the roof fixed. It was a mixture of new ideas and restatements of good practice. One that caught the eye, and not in a good way, was the proposal that teachers should be subject to a five-yearly renewal of a licence to teach, although that may turn out to be less objectionable in practice than it sounds in principle.

Chapter four covers accountability. Now ATL has a strong policy on accountability. In short, we accept that schools should be accountable. The questions are: to whom? And, how? At the moment, we have too many overlapping mechanisms, too much accountability to Whitehall and not enough to local communities.
One of the government's proposals is to reform the school improvement partner (SIP) role. SIPs would take responsibility for implementing the local authority's duty to monitor and improve schools.

This is ATL's policy, so it's nice to think we've been heard, but we question the need for both a strengthened SIP and Ofsted inspections of schools. Let Ofsted monitor what SIPs do.

Another aspect of accountability is published information about how schools are doing. The report card idea is an import from across the Atlantic that the government has been thinking about for a while and is intent on introducing, which is why a separate booklet on it was published with the White Paper.

The Shadow Secretary of State has made contradictory statements in recent months on Conservative intentions. The booklet is encouraging in insisting that most decisions on the detail will be taken only after a two-year pilot scheme, so there will be plenty of chances for ATL to influence the final product. On the other hand, the government is clear about the outlines.

The report card will contain data on pupil achievement in three different ways: raw scores of attainment, pupil progress, and 'narrowing gaps in pupil performance'. It will also contain data on so-called well-being, pupils' perceptions and parents' perceptions. Data on each category will almost certainly then be combined by means of a formula into a single score that will generate a rating. Previously, ATL argued strongly and successfully that if a report card was to include information on well-being it would need to be limited to indicators over which a school has a large measure of control, and by insisting that the report card be based on data, the government limits what can be included. Actually, there is a big problem in measuring both well-being and perceptions.

Discussion on how to implement all this soon becomes highly technical, with talk of performance indicators and standardisation. In the end, decisions will have to be made about the weighting attached to each category, where small changes could make big differences to some schools. Does it all sound a bit dodgy?

Well, yes, and ATL could just be negative throughout the pilot. But wait. Suppose pupil progress is given a high weighting towards the final grade, and suppose it is derived from the current contextual value added (CVA) indicator, as the government intends? The outstanding feature of the CVA table is that there is very little difference between the performance of the vast majority of schools. In fact, the table confirms the consistent research finding that, in general, schools vary very little in their effectiveness. Now this runs counter to all political talk about education but fits with teacher experience. We could well end up with a school report card where most schools are on the same grade.

Then suppose that the report card replaces the current league tables. Yes, this is the intention. Then suppose that the report card is published on the school website, but nowhere else - not currently the intention. This would certainly enable local parents and community to compare local schools, which is the right kind of accountability, but would be the end of the national league table mentality. Now we're talking.

ATL will engage positively with government to develop the report card. It would be worth it to end the blight of league tables.