The information that you will not have seen about Sats

OUR TABLE of primary school Sats results last week was only the tip of an iceberg.

The statistics released by the government can provide a mine of information about schools — if you know how to access it.

One person who does know how to crunch the numbers is Michael Glass, the former chairman of JFS, and he is keen to share his knowledge.

It can provide educational leaders with a much more in-depth picture of what is going on inside schools, he says. “The wealth of data will help all governing bodies to really understand the differential performance of the schools and enable them to set strategy.”

The graph compiled by Mr Glass, which we publish this week, is one example. While bare Sats results may tell you how well a particular school did in any one year, they don’t reveal whether a school may have done well because it had a large proportion of higher-ability children.

Mr Glass’s chart, however, shows the number of mediumability children who achieved high scores when they took their Sats — in others, it is an indication of the quality of teaching.

So Beit Shvidler Primary in Edgware did particularly well this year in enabling a large proportion of medium-ability children to achieve good scores in both English and maths, according to Mr Glass’s analysis.

Children’s ability in maths and English is internally assessed by schools in year two. According to Mr Glass, those early classifications “appear to be in general accurate”.

While a few schools enabled medidum-ranked children to do particularly well in their maths Sats, in most cases it was the other way round; children in Jewish primary schools made better progress in English than they did in maths.

And from his research, he has also found that boys are doing much better than girls in maths.

Eden Primary in Muswell Hill was omitted from last week’s Sats table. Its results put it mid-way in our table in 15th place, with 79 per cent of pupils reaching the expected standards in maths, reading and writing, and 24 per cent reaching the higher level: pupils scored an average 110 for reading and 106 for maths.

Children made better progress in Engish’