Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the current performance data held by the Department for Education and its agencies, what estimate they have made of the number of (1) primary, and (2) secondary, schools that are likely to fall into the category of coasting.

No school will be identified as coasting until the end of 2016, when there is data available for three years, 2014, 2015 and 2016. A school will only be deemed to be coasting when its performance data falls below the coasting level in each of the three previous years. The coasting level for 2016 will be based on the new primary and secondary accountability measures to be introduced in 2016 and will be set in 2016 once the impact of these changes is known. For these reasons it is not possible to provide an accurate forecast of the number of coasting schools, but the department estimates that numbers will be in the hundreds.