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Almost half of Scarborough’s primary schools have fallen well below the average for progress in reading, writing or maths, figures reveal.
Of the 20 primary schools in the Scarborough area, 14 have fallen below the country’s average for the percentage of pupils meeting expected standards.
The worst performing schools include Braeburn Primary School at 33%, Friarage Community Primary School at 29% and Barrowcliff School at just 21%. And pupils at nine of the 20 schools have progressed well below average in one or more areas including reading, writing and maths.
Robert Goodwill, MP for Scarborough and Whitby and minister for education, said: “It’s good news for Scarborough as one of the opportunity areas which will be granted £6 million to go on issues like education.
“The government is well aware that this bit of the country is a blackspot for social mobility. We do have some excellent provisions in the
area such as the Sixth Form College and Scarborough TEC but through the opportunity area programme it looks at primary schools more and even children earlier than that.”
St Peter’s Roman Catholic Primary School is the best performing in the Scarborough area with 85% of pupils meeting expected standards.
The school also performed well above average in the progress scores for reading and maths.
Andrew Krlic, headteacher at St Peter’s Roman Catholic School, said: “I am really proud of how well our children did in their SATs tests. It is a result of the hard work of the pupils, teachers and parents here at St Peter’s School.
“We follow a Problem Solving Approach for mathematics which has seen our results in the significant top 10% for the past two years. This is because it makes maths ‘real’ for pupils by putting their work into a real life context.
“Each week we have two after school SATs Clubs which are ran by our dedicated staff, the children are joined by their parents and have lots of fun doing practical activities.”
Snainton Primary School is scored below average in maths but has remained on par with the country in reading, writing and the percentage of pupils meeting expected standards.
Headteacher, Ruth Wackett said: “Snainton is a good school, our latest Ofsted report found pupils made good progress because teaching is good. For the second year our pupils attainment was in line with national average.
“English continues to be a great strength in our school. In maths we had a dip, though having very small cohorts does exaggerate the outcomes.
“We are committed to continued improvement and are involved in a mastery maths project across local schools.”
St George’s Primary School also performed well below average in writing and maths.
In a statement from the school, executive coheadteachers Anne Parr and Angela Spencer said: “St George’s staff and governors are extremely pleased with the improving trend in overall attainment and particularly attainment in reading and maths which both compare favourably with other Scarborough schools.
“The school is confident that this rising trend will continue. Whilst progress for some individual pupils has been good, we are working hard to ensure that overall progress scores increase next year; especially for those children who have moved schools, often more than once, which affects their rate of progress.”
Throughout North Yorkshire 58% of pupils are meeting expected standards.
A spokesperson for North Yorkshire County Council said: “Primary schools in North Yorkshire are driving up improvement across the whole county and are improving at a faster rate at Key stage 2 than nationally.
“Our priorities for all children in the county are; to be happy, to be healthy and to achieve, therefore we are working with all our schools to become at least good. We are supporting our schools to bring about the necessary improvements through carefully targeted improvement plans focusing particularly on the needs of individual learners.
“Some schools in the county do have unusually large numbers of vulnerable children, with English as an additional language or special educational needs for example, or with a high percentage of children eligible for free school meals.
“In every single one of those schools we provide additional support and we have an action plan to accelerate the rate of improvement to enable their children to make the best possible progress and to the high standard that we expect from all North Yorkshire’s schools.”