The Wardman Wire

From the news on Radio 4 at 6.00am this morning:

“More than 25% of the schools in England branded as ‘failing’ by the Prime Minister and threatened with closure have been judged good or outstanding by Schools Inspectors. Last week the Secretary of State for Schools Ed Balls launched a scheme to improve or close schools where fewer than 30% of pupils are getting less than 5 good GCSEs.”

Here’s where they were threatened with closure. From the BBC on June 10th:

Almost one in five secondary schools in England have been given a “no excuses” warning to improve their GCSE exam results or face closure.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has launched a £400m drive to raise results in the lowest-performing 638 schools.

Ooops.

Here’s the audio:

I wonder why about 200 “good” or “outstanding” secondary schools merit a “no excuses” warning with a requirement on Local Authorities to come up with an Action Plan (taran-taraaaa !!) in 50 days flat. I suppose an Action Plan is at least better than the usual “Review”.

Again, from Mr Ed in Balls-out mode shooting from the lip:

“I don’t want to see excuses about poor performance - I want to see clear plans to raise standards,”

(Remember - Mr Ball’s own Inspectorate are saying that 25-30% of these schools are “outstanding” or “good”).

The NUT said at the time:

The National Union of Teachers has rejected the government’s threat of closing these 638 schools - and says that these schools are often performing well in the “toughest areas”.

Judging on the numbers above, it seems that the NUT was right on this occasion.

Wrapping Up

I’d have thought that for this sort of exercise, Mr Balls would be wanting to fix how well “underperforming” schools were doing based on his own department’s value-added league tables - to give a proper context - rather than relying on crude measures such as raw GCSE results. RIP joined-up government.

I’m looking at Mr Balls with a good deal of scepticism on all subjects these days, since I heard him make claim in a video on his website on 11 December 2007 that there are 6500 Faith-based Secondary Schools in the Country with 1.7 million children being educated in them. The actual figure is just between 600 and 700. The figures he quoted were for ALL faith schools.

If the Children’s Minister in the Cabinet can’t get his facts straight when he’s specifically answering questions on the particular subject (or have his video fact-checked before publication), then we have a problem.

Tags: ed balls, education secretary, secondary schools