A breakdown of GCSE results for every school in England has been published in an attempt to expose head teachers who enter students for “soft” subjects to boost their league table scores.
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, published for the first time records of how many students sat GCSEs in each subject at all secondary schools and the range of grades they achieved.
The move is a further effort to put pressure on schools that steer their students towards easier or vocational qualifications that have the same status as GCSEs in school league tables
Mr Gove hopes that parents, campaign groups, media groups and, in time, private companies will use the data to make their own league tables showing local school performance in their area.
In future he will break down the figures still further, publishing anonymous results on a per student rather than a per school basis, enabling people to devise school league tables showing the proportion of students who sat any combination of subjects.
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Details of how much money per pupil each school receives and in what categories it is spent have already been released.
Mr Gove also hopes that such data will be used by teachers to compare the performance of their department with that of a nearby or similar school, or to find out more about a school to which they may apply for a job.
Later this year he will also strip out from the chief league table measure a series of vocational qualifications that he judges to be of low value or insufficiently challenging, and downgrade some others that are counted as worth two or even four GCSEs.
This follows this month’s report by Alison Wolf, of King’s College London, which said that up to a third of vocational courses on a par with GCSEs were worthless or even of negative value.
Professor Wolf called on the Government to publish an approved list of vocational qualifications that offered breadth and depth and were suitably assessed, which could still count towards school league tables. She further recommended that vocational courses should take up no more than 20 per cent of a pupil’s timetable at school.
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According to the Government’s chief yardstick for measuring school performance, 53.4 per cent of children achieved at least 5 GCSEs at grade C or above last year, or equivalent vocational qualifications, in five subjects including English and maths.
After stripping out vocational courses, which are often assessed by teachers as pupils progress rather than by examinations, this figure falls to 49.2 per cent.
Schools in which fewer than 35 per cent of pupils achieve this benchmark face being turned into an academy, having their head teacher or governing body replaced, or even closure unless they can show that children made good academic progress from a lower starting point.
Labour ministers used a threshold of 30 per cent. Mr Gove confirmed today that he planned in future to raise this “floor target” again to continue driving up school standards.
The new batch of data shows what proportion of GCSE candidates in each school, and each local authority, achieved A* or A grades in each subject, as well as passes at grade C or above.
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Parents will be able to see a school’s success rate per subject, and look up how many pupils were entered for each subject.
If their child has an aptitude for science, history, music or art, parents will be able to compare how many pupils sat GCSEs in each subject at their nearest community, academy and independent schools, and what sort of results they achieved.
Course notes
639,744 pupils of GCSE age
104,402 studied French
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82,866 took Physical Education
22,140 studied office technology
Source: Department for Education