Agenda item

14:15

Roy Leach, Strategic Lead for Educational Sufficiency will present an early overview of the provisional educational outcomes of children and young people in Oxfordshire primary schools for the academic year 2016-17.

The report provides an overview of attainment across school partnership and type of school, as well as highlighting the number of schools of concern.

As a means of scrutinising educational attainment in more depth, the Committee is RECOMMENDED to consider the merits of a deep dive following the availability of validated attainment data, and visits to low and high performing schools.

At its last Meeting, the Committee had identified Educational Attainment as a top priority for scrutiny and agreed to give consideration as to whether the Committee should undertake an in depth investigation into attainment levels in Oxfordshire particularly the gap for vulnerable learners.

Accordingly, Roy Leach, Strategic Lead for Educational Sufficiency, Alison Wallis, Performance Information Manager and Rachael Etheridge, Education Inclusion Manager attended to present an overview to the Committee of the provisional educational outcomes of children and young people in Oxfordshire primary schools for the academic year 2016-17.

The presentation and report provided an overview of attainment across school partnership and type of school in Oxfordshire, as well as highlighting the number of schools of concern. 

In introducing the report, Alison Wallis reported that provisional data showed that educational performance had increased in all four of the key assessment stages.  3 year trend data was available for Early Years and Phonics screening. However, due to the changing curriculum and assessments, only two years of data was available for key stages 1 and 2.

Increases in performance generally reflected a similar increase to provisional national figures. Performance at Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) had risen from 60% of children with a good level of development in 2014 to 73% in 2017. In 2016 the Oxfordshire figure rose above the national average for the first time since the new assessment started. This trend looks like it is continuing this year. Validated figures and national comparisons would be published by the DfE in October.

In 2016 the proportion of Oxfordshire children reaching the expected standard in writing at key stage 1 was amongst the lowest nationally (62% compared with 66%). This proportion had increased to 66% this year. Early indications were that although this figure was likely to remain below the national average, the gap would have decreased.

Key stage 1 and phonics validated data and national comparisons were due to be published by the DfE at the end of September.  Key stage 2 comparisons had already been published by the DfE. In Oxfordshire the proportion of children reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths had increased from 52% to 61%. Oxfordshire now performed in line with the national average for this measure.

For individual subject areas at key stage 2, Oxfordshire performed above the national average in reading (74% compared with 71%), in line with the national average in maths (75%) and below the national average in writing (73% compared with 76%).

There continued to be a degree of variation in performance between school partnerships.  At key stage 2 the proportion of children reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths varied from 42% across the Oxford South East partnership to 76% across the Sonning Common partnership, although it should be noted that there was also a difference in cohort sizes – there were 260 children at the end of this key stage in the Oxford South East partnership but 100 in the Sonning Common partnership. This affected the statistical significance of the results.  In order for Oxford South East partnership to perform in line with the national and Oxfordshire average (61%) then an additional 50 children would need to have met the expected standard in all 3 subjects. In order for the partnership to be in line with the highest performing partnership then a further 39 children would need to meet the standard.

During debate, Members made the following points:

·      There was a disparity of outcomes between city and rural; there was a need for consistency throughout Oxfordshire schools;

·      handwriting remained a concern throughout Oxfordshire;

·      the role for the County Council was disseminating good practice so that schools could go and see what an ‘outstanding’ school looked like on the ground;

·      Pupil premium and how it was spent and whether it made a difference needed investigating;

·      There was a need to drill down into partnerships to see if certain types of schools were not performing;

·      There was a need for the group to look at which schools would fall below the DfE floor standard definition this year and whether any of them fell blow the floor last year

·      Group need to look at any common themes of which type of support has brought about improvements;

·      Civilian Military Partnerships Board were looking at RAF and Service Children;

·      It was agreed that absence and exclusions more than likely had a strong bearing on attainment and therefore should be scoped first for a ‘deep dive’ review.

In light of the debate, the Committee RESOLVED to:

(a)       nominate Councillor Bartington, Carole Thomson and Richard Brown to conduct an Outcome led deep dive into Exclusions with immediate effect and appoint Councillor John Howson as Lead Member to oversee the process and report back to Committee;

(b)       ask the Director for Children’s Services to allocate adequate resources to support the deep dive to ensure positive outcome;

(c)       to start the working group following the extraordinary meeting of the committee in January;

(d)       give consideration to how the information will be disseminated to schools following the outcome.