Education Bill

David Ward Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. Ofsted inspectors need to learn what an outstanding school looks like. That always was the case. Even when schools are exempted from inspection, inspectors will still see outstanding schools in themed inspections, which might look at how religious education or maths is taught. On those occasions, inspectors will still experience outstanding schools.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

Does the Minister agree that the way to deal with coasting schools is not so much through the inspection process, but through the publication of contextual value added evidence from schools?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Performance tables are an important piece of the jigsaw of measures that holds publicly funded schools to account. We are not going to pursue the contextual value added measure, because of its flaws, not least of which is the fact that it tends to entrench low expectations for certain sections of society, which we do not believe is right. All children, from all backgrounds, should be expected to reach the best of their academic ability at school, and schools should deliver a high quality of education to all young people. However, there are other important progress measures, such as how a child performs at the end of key stage 2 compared with how they perform in their GCSEs.

As I said earlier, in the performance tables to be published in January, we intend to have separate columns indicating how well a school performs in relation to children who enter secondary school with a level 5 at key stage 2 and those who enter with a level 3.