Issue - meetings

School Performance / Narrowing the Gap / SACRE

Meeting: 03/11/2020 - Children, Adults, Health and Wellbeing Policy Development and Scrutiny Panel (Item 50)

50 Education Updates - School Performance / Narrowing the Gap / SACRE pdf icon PDF 146 KB

This report provides the Panel with a wide range of requested education updates.

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Minutes:

The Director for Education, Inclusion & Children’s Safeguarding introduced this report to the Panel, a summary is set out below.

 

Primary School performance

 

Due to the CV19 pandemic and the lockdown, no formal tests were sat within

primary schools and as a result neither the DFE nor the LA requested data from

any primary setting. During lockdown all primary schools in B&NES were asked to facilitate home learning for all pupils. This was often delivered via information sent directly from class teachers and tutors to family homes, or in some cases via online lessons. To ensure that all families were able to access education, schools prepared and delivered home learning packs.

 

All primary schools in B&NES remained open during lockdown to provide face to face educational support to children of keyworkers and vulnerable children. The local authority monitored the school offer to these children and offered additional support to vulnerable families to ensure that children were able to access education. The attendance rates of vulnerable children in B&NES schools was good and in line with the south-west average and above the national average.

 

This school term all primary schools in B&NES are assessing children to see if the lockdown has impacted upon the educational progress that children could have been expected to make. This information will be used as a baseline and justification for any curriculum adaptations and planned expenditure of the Covid Catch-Up money provided to all schools via the DFE.

 

Secondary School Performance

 

Formal examinations for Key stage 4 and 5 were cancelled during the lockdown. Instead, secondary schools were asked to allocate grades at KS4 and KS5. The methodology for doing this was a challenging process with changes to the system used. These challenges were widely reported in the national media and did cause disruption. However, all children, due to finish their education in KS4 & KS5, were allocated school assessed grades to enable them to go on to the next stages of their education, training or employment.

 

In the spring of 2020, the DFE formally announced that it would not be collecting

any educational performance data from schools and has stated that it does not

expect any school to be judged or compared in any way by this year's formal

examination results. Schools were advised that if they wished to publish their

results, they could do, but that this was a decision for each school.

 

The LA did ask for some basic results information from each school; in particular, the LA was keen to understand any implications for vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils. However, the information we received was limited and not submitted by all schools. In line with the DFE request, we have not pursued this any further. In BANES outcomes for pupils were amongst the best in the region in 2019 and there is no reason to believe that this would not continue to be the case in 2020.

 

Virtual School

 

The virtual school operated very effectively during lockdown to support carers and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 50

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