Exclusive: Call for Yorkshire schools improvement programme to be expanded

COUNCIL leaders in Yorkshire will today be urged to roll out a school improvement programme which aims to help raise standards across the region.
Photo: Chris Radburn/PAPhoto: Chris Radburn/PA
Photo: Chris Radburn/PA

The Yorkshire Pathfinder initiative was launched earlier this year by grouping together 26 improving schools in an attempt to learn lessons which could become a blueprint for wider school improvement.

A new report into the scheme says this work has achieved “remarkable progress” in a short space of time.

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Now the team leading this project are to meet councillors and officials responsible for schools from 15 local authorities across Yorkshire to urge them to extend the scheme further.

Standards of attainment by pupils at both primary and secondary level are lower in Yorkshire than anywhere else in England.

The most recent figures showed that on average children in the county were already falling behind their peers elsewhere in both reading and writing by the age of seven.

And tables from this summer’s GCSEs showed Yorkshire had the lowest level of 16-year-olds getting to the five good GCSEs, including English and maths, benchmark.

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The Pathfinder scheme was launched after a summit in Leeds held earlier this year at which council leaders said they wanted to turn Yorkshire’s school system into the best in the world.

Twenty six schools were chosen which had been found to “require improvement” by Ofsted but which were already showing signs of getting better.

The idea behind the plan was that by working together in “families of schools” and with outside expert help these schools could be supported to improve and be rated as good or outstanding.

A report to councils says that so far five schools have been lifted out of the requires improvement category.

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Prof Mel Ainscow, who is one of the experts leading the scheme ,said that the results so far were “very encouraging”.

He said: “I don’t want to overstate it because we have been working on a relatively small scale but there has been clear progress made. The interesting thing about the Pathfinder initiative is that it has involved similar schools in similar positions working together to raise standards and that has proved very useful.

“It is very different to the most common model of school to school improvement work across the country which normally involves a stronger school supporting one in difficulty.” Prof Ainscow said that allowing schools which were improving to work together had allowed teachers to share ideas across local council boundaries.

The Pathfinder initiative is supposed to be the first step to a much wider school improvement programme.

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The project has been compared to programmes like the Greater Manchester Challenge – an initiative which has been credited with raising school standards in the North West. Prof Ainscow was the Government’s chief advisor to the Greater Manchester project. However one key difference is the funding. The Greater Manchester Challenge was a £50m initiative whereas the Yorkshire Pathfinder project has had no central Government funding.

In the report being presented to council bosses today it recommends that the programme be extended to a second cohort of schools in Yorkshire.

It also calls for the lessons learned so far to be spread across the 15 local authority areas so more schools can benefit and it says there needs to be a “political mandate” which supports the expansion of the project.