Flagship school aimed at lifting standards misses the mark

Outwood Grange Academy, whose chief executive Michael Wilkins’s services have cost the taxpayer more than a £1m over the past four years, has been given the job of transforming five other schools under the National Leaders in Education programme.

Official figures show, however, that its own GCSE results were among the lowest in Wakefield last year in a league table measuring how many pupils achieved the new English Baccalaureate.

Although 71 per cent of Outwood Grange’s students hit the Government target of getting five good GCSEs including English and maths – the best score of any state school in Wakefield, only two per cent of pupils achieved the grades needed to secure the E-Bac.

The E-Bac is awarded to pupils who achieve six A* to C grades at GCSE including English, maths, two sciences, a language and a humanity. Only two state schools in Wakefield achieved worse results than Outwood Grange using this measure. The two per cent figures compares with a Wakefield average of 10.1 per cent and a national average of 15.1 per cent.

The E-Bac was created by the Government last year and used for the first time to measure schools performance in league tables produced in January.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the York-based Campaign for a Real Education, said the E-Bac should be the main measure on which all schools were judged as the five A* to C grade including English and maths test allows schools to enter pupils into vocational qualifications which can be worth up to three or four GCSEs.

“The E-Bac is welcome because all of the subjects it contains are the key academic areas which young people need,” he said.

A spokesman for Outwood Grange said: “Successive governments have stressed the importance of schools achieving good results in five GCSEs including English and maths.

“The coalition has said that it expects all schools in future to achieve a minimum of 35 per cent on this measure. Labour had set the target at 30 per cent. Good results in English and maths are what employers say matter most.”

All five of the schools which Outwood Grange has worked with have seen more than 30 per cent of pupils achieving this target. The spokesman added that Outwood Grange would be working hard to improve results in E-Bac subjects and pointed out that the measure was only introduced in January.

A Yorkshire Post investigation revealed that Mr Wilkins’s services have cost the taxpayer more than £1m over a four-year-period. The money relates to his salary, payments made to his company and payments awarded to Outwood Grange for Mr Wilkins’s role in raising standards at five other schools in Doncaster, North Yorkshire and Stockton-on-Tees.