REVEALED: HOW EACH SCHOOL PERFORMED IN LATEST COLOUR-CODED RATINGS
As schools in Wales celebrate an overall rise in performance in the latest colour categorisation leading educationalists urged parents to look elsewhere to gauge the quality of schools.
Professor David Reynolds, head of Swansea University School of Education, and Professor Sally Power, director of education at Cardiff University’s Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data and Methods, said all information is useful but colour banding is not the full picture.
Professor Power said the range of performance data “could seem like a smoke screen”.
While she believes education is going in the right direction in Wales she warned it was “still a far way off from where we want to be”.
“Categorisation is more useful for schools and local authorities and is not a very useful indication for parents to select a school,” Prof Power said.
“Because it does not just reflect attainment you can’t use it as a results league table. It is more an indication of how well a school is doing at addressing challenges it faces.
“Sometimes it feels like a smoke screen because there is so much data and the system is in a state of flux.”
She said schools still faced many challenges such as uncertainty and anxiety over the new curriculum, funding and leadership.
“I’m sure we have not completely turned the corner. There are enduring challenges.
“There is also some good news. There are signs the attainment gap is narrowing.
“But it’s a long way before we have the system we want. We are still a far way off from where we want to be.”
Prof Reynolds echoed this view, saying: “The traffic light system is useful. The more data we have the better so that there is no hiding place if you fail our children in Wales.
“But the publication (of colour bands) ranks schools on their capacity to improve, which is different to their actual quality.
“You could be a wonderful school but lack the capacity to get better. I would recommend parents and others look at the Welsh Government website My Local School if they want high quality judgements about school quality, particularly the Benchmarking sections where schools are rightly compared with others of similar pupils.
“And in the case of the secondaries look at the variation in results of different subject departments.
“Good schools will have a low variation within them and be consistently good. So the message is to dig even deeper into the issue if you want to look at school quality.”
The latest categorisation of 1,500 schools shows a continued upward trend since the first year it was introduced in 2015.
This year the Welsh Government and Wales’ four school improvement consortia widened the areas they looked at.
As well as looking at performance data such as GCSE results, this year, for the first time, schools were judged on wider issues such as quality of teaching and learning and well-being.
It showed 85.3% of primary schools and 68.3% of secondary schools are now in the top two green and yellow categories, deemed as needing the lowest levels of support.
There has been a very small rise in the proportion of red schools – those identified as needing most support – by 0.4 percentage points in the primary sector and 2.9 percentage points in the secondary sector.
45 per cent of special schools have been categorised as green, and needing less support, with none categorised as red and in need of most support.
Dr Philip Dixon, who has been a previous critic of the system in his book Testing Times: Success, Failure and Fiasco in Welsh Education Policy Since Devolution, believes Wales’ schools have now turned a corner.
Dr Dixon, former director of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Cymru and now chief executive of the Assessment Foundation which works with hundreds of schools across Wales, said: “It seems as if we have turned a corner and are now heading in the right direction.
“Anyone who worries that the categorisation system has got softer should note that the number of red schools has increased, a sure sign that robust judgements are being made.
“But the main story is the increase in the number of green and yellow schools. The hard work of pupils and staff is paying off. We mustn’t get complacent, there is still a lot to do, but we can take heart that the system seems to be improving year on year.”
Local education authorities, schools, teaching unions and school leaders said they were delighted with improvements seen in categorisation.
But opposition parties said changes meant the assessment was not comparable to previous years.
Darren Millar AM, Welsh Conservative Shadow Education Secretary, said: “The latest Estyn report showed that school performance is standing still, while last summer’s GCSEs were the worst in a decade. Taken together, these results therefore stand at odds with the impression given by today’s ratings.”