Agenda item

Barriers Faced by Secondary Schools (Top Valley Academy Perspective)

S. Kelly - Head of Top Valley Academy

Sean Kelly, Head of Top Valley Academy, presented a report on the barriers facing secondary schools in Nottingham.

The following points were highlighted by Mr Kelly:

(a)  a growing lack of coherence and fragmentation in secondary education is caused by;

·  the changing educational landscape (started with Building Schools for the Future  ( BSF): academies capital programme alongside BSF);

·  a range of academy sponsors in the City (and now from outside the City), stand-alone academies, free schools/’free choice’ and now NUAST (14-19);

(b)  this leads to challenges for Nottingham City Secondary schools evidenced by;

·  a fragmented and at times, isolated City wide effort to address engrained  issues  for children of Nottingham;

·  a growing and unhealthy sense of local competition even though the sector is not

judged within a local context but against a national one;

·  direct central government challenge to local authorities coupled with the authorities

  diminishing capacity to support its schools;

·  the National framework used to judge school performance, that does not take account of contextual factors (OFSTED);

·  moving now to measure progress over time, with the same expectation regardless of how low someone's starting point may be;

·  currently being ‘monitored’ by both HMI and an ‘educational consultant’ on behalf of

the DFE, both with different interpretations of good progress in a year.

(c)  when looking for best practice models to shape Nottingham’s response to its current challenges, Nottingham is directed to the London Challenge. However, more recent research has found that once the children’s ethnic background was factored in, the London effect in pupil progress was found to disappear. White British pupils tend to achieve the lowest GCSE scores against their attainment to the end of primary school compared with those from ethnic minority backgrounds. This white British group makes up 36% of Year 11 in London and around 84%, in the rest of England;

(a)  Top Valley was rated ‘requires improvement’ by OFSTED. It serves a predominantly white British community where the Index of Multiple Deprivation shows the extent of wider contextual factors which perhaps explains why public services, including education, under perform. 83% of the pupils are white British and given the acknowledged national picture of the group’s attainment, it is unlikely that the Academy will meet or exceed national expectation;

(e)  Top Valley seeks to use this knowledge to inform judgements about the school, not as an excuse, but as an opportunity to remove some of the blame culture on an overstretched and under resourced service due to the multiple levels of need;

(f)  Top Valley Foundation is showing improvement;

·  2013/14 5.9% absence rate ;2014/15 trend improving;

·  Year 11, 1.5% increase on previous year – against a national decline for this year group;

·  NEET 2.7% (3 students);

·  low exclusion rate - 2013/14  4.6% (11/12 NA 8.5%);

·  attainment target 45-50% on track;

·  English/maths progress 60-65% on track;

(g)  the current descriptor of what constitutes a ‘good’ school is extremely limited and narrow because OFSTED refuses to deal with the complexity of the contextual factors that exist in all communities and instead measures all schools in a single national context. The Academy shares the ambition to be good (and eventually outstanding) but this will not be achieved in isolation unless all the critical external factors such as health, well-being, safety, housing and material security are fully aligned with education and aspiration to that purpose.

Councillor Sam Webster stressed that it is important for the Leaders of City schools to get together and take ownership of the problems, to co-ordinate and tackle issues to avoid losing the brighter children to County schools. The Education Improvement Board is already working on this.

RESOLVED to thank Sean Kelly for his thought-provoking presentation.