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Mistakes leave head 'angry and frustrated'
THE head of a Yorkshire school which was wrongly named as the best in the country at improving its pupils' performance has warned parents that the latest league tables are "discredited and cannot be trusted".
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Tony Parker, head teacher of St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Huddersfield, said he was angry and frustrated that two sets of incorrect data were published yesterday despite repeated warnings from the school.
The league tables show how 11-year-old pupils performed in their Key Stage Two tests in English, maths and science last year.
The tables, due to be published last December, were delayed after a fiasco saw contractor ETS Europe unable to complete the marking of the Standard Assessment Test papers.
St Joseph's was named yesterday as the primary school with the highest contextual-value-added (CVA) score in the country.
The CVA table aims to show how much of an impact a school is having on its pupils' education by measuring their performance against their results in earlier years, and the results of pupils from a similar background.
Mr Parker told the Yorkshire Post his school's league table position was wrong and based on data that has been incorrect for four years. He also claimed the error has been compounded by another mistake which has seen his school's scores in maths and English downgraded.
He said: "It is a confusingmuddle. One of our scores is too high and another is too low.
"Our CVA score is wrong because of a mistake made inputting data about these pupils when they were in year two at school. The information makes it seem that they did worse at Key Stage One than they actually did, which means that our im-provement score is inaccurate.
"I have found it embarrassing actually and it has detracted from our CVA score, which was still very good."
Mr Parker said that the school's score for the number of pupils reaching level four in English and maths was also wrong because several papers were not marked at the time.
He said: "I have contacted four different agencies to inform them that our marks were wrong and I was assured by the agency which checks these figures that they have been changed.
"I am angry and frustrated to see these figures are still wrong and it casts a doubt over the accuracy of all of the tables."
A spokeswoman for the Dep-artment for Children, Schools and Families said: "If schools have not submitted amendments through the tables checking exercise or disagree with the information published it is still possible to make changes. We are now in an errata period and schools can query what we've published and provide us with the necessary information to enable us to amend their data."
The tables confirm that despite a small improvement last year 28 per cent of pupils still failed to reach the expected level in literacy and numeracy tests last summer.
The number scoring higher than expected dipped sharply, particularly in English, fuelling concerns that while schools are working to raise weaker pupils' scores in an effort to improve their league rankings, high achievers are being neglected.
Across the county half the pupils in 798 primary schools failed to reach the expected level in both English and maths.
Liberal Democrat spokesman David Laws said: "It is shocking that there are still hundreds of schools which are not equipping the majority of their pupils with the basic skills they need."
But Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers said the results were a "fantastic achievement."
She said: "It shows how significantly standards have risen over the last decade."
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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