Team of experts to help improve school standards

LEADING education experts from around the country are to help 30 target schools across Yorkshire to kickstart a massive improvement programme aimed at getting the region off the bottom of national league tables.
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A project – which brings together all 15 education authorities in the region – is looking to identify around 15 primaries and 15 secondary schools which are improving but do not yet deliver a good standard of education.

The idea is to support each school’s improvement work and use lessons learned from this to then launch a much bigger Yorkshire-wide school programme. The councils have decided to join forces in an attempt to replicate the success achieved by the London and Greater Manchester Challenge projects which have been credited with raising school standards.

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A Yorkshire and Humber Education Summit is to be held in Leeds, on February 11, to formally launch the school improvement programme.

Town hall bosses, led by Leeds City Council’s deputy leader and executive member for children’s services Coun Judith Blake are also looking to use data from Ofsted to help identify areas of underperformance in schools around the region.

Recent league tables and a damning Yorkshire-wide Ofsted inspection, both published last month, have highlighted how the region’s school system lags behind the rest of the country.

Ofsted’s first ever regional report, published last month, warned that Yorkshire has one 
of the lowest numbers of good primary schools and the 
worst secondary schools in the country.

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It rated regions based on the number of pupils who attend schools which are good or better.

The education watchdog can give four grades to schools: outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

The requires improvement category was introduced in 2012 to replace satisfactory in an attempt to make clear “that only good is good enough.”

The latest primary school league tables also made grim reading for Yorkshire.

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Figures showed almost half of the country’s worst performing areas for primary schools failing to hit national targets were in Yorkshire last year.

The tables show how 11-year-old pupils fared in maths and reading tests and teacher assessments of their writing in their final year of primary school.

The Department for Education data showed that four out of the ten education authority areas nationally with the highest number of schools failing to meet floor targets for mastering the three Rs were in Yorkshire. Bradford, Doncaster, Hull and Kirklees were all in the bottom ten out of more than 150 areas across England.

Across the region there were 130 schools below the floor targets – which were made tougher last year with pupils expected to get to a set standard in maths, 
reading and writing rather than just in maths and English which had been the case in previous years.

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Now Yorkshire councils have employed three leading education experts, Prof Mel Ainscow, Prof Dennis Mongan and 
Margaret Woodhouse to drive the improvement plan.

Prof Ainscow was the Government’s chief adviser for the Greater Manchester Challenge, a £50m initiative between 2007 and 2011 to raise school standards.

Local councils hope to be able 
to replicate the success of this 
programme with the Yorkshire-wide scheme but it will not have any large-scale Government funding.

Prof Ainscow has written to a series of improving schools around the region which are rated by Ofsted as either requiring improvement or are in the old category of satisfactory, inviting them to take part in a pathfinder initiative.

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He told the Yorkshire Post the project was looking for schools “where there was reason to believe that they can make rapid improvement towards an Ofsted grading of good or outstanding”.

“The purpose will be to get behind the efforts of these schools, adding further support to the strategies they are already using and, in so doing, learning more about what works and why in moving such schools forward.”

He said the improvements in these schools would then be used to support a wider programme. And he hopes the strong Yorkshire identity would help schools from across a diverse region to pull together to raise standards.

He also said that the heads of academy chains would be invited to part of the programme as they were a part of the education landscape.