What is the school report card?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families’ publication “A School Report Card: Prospectus” contains the following information about the progress on the consultation and recommendations for the School Report card.

“Chapter 4 of the White Paper: Your child, your schools, our future: building a 21st century schools system, published alongside this document, sets out the Government’s plans for the school accountability system and the position of the School Report Card within it. Those plans are summarised in the box below. The full text of the White Paper can be found at www.dcsf.gov.uk/21stcenturyschoolssystem.

This document, which has been produced jointly by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and Ofsted, sets out our early decisions on the overall shape of the School Report Card and how we will now take forward work on its detailed design.

The School Report Card will supersede the School Profile and the Achievement and Attainment Tables as the central source of externally verified, objective information on the outcomes achieved by schools. That will not mean a reduction in the information publicly available about schools’ performance. All the detailed performance data used to prepare the School Report Card will continue to be published, so that users can understand how the School Report Card has been prepared and so that they can see a school’s outcomes in specific areas of interest. Where further data are collected by the Government, this will also, where appropriate, be made available to the public; and, in line with the Government’s wider commitment to making data on all public services available, we will explore how we can make it easy for parents to access data that reflects their individual interests and concerns.

The School Report Card, however, will be the principal tool used for accountability, ensuring that a school will be held to account for its overall performance across the full range of its responsibilities.

We will engage with all stakeholders through two years of piloting beginning in September 2009. At the core of the pilot will be a substantial sample of schools which will work with us in ensuring the underlying systems produce timely, accurate data and will contribute to the development of the information that underpins the School Report Card and how it is presented. That in turn, will provide tangible outputs which will be used to engage other stakeholders. The results of the pilot will be published at regular intervals throughout the two years.

In the first year of piloting we will:

• develop the performance indicators which might be used in the Pupil Attainment, Pupil Progress, and Narrowing Gaps in Pupil Performance categories, and exploring the weightings to be used to produce a score for each of those categories;
• test the robustness of the 16-19 Progression Measures for use in the Pupil Wellbeing category;
  
• consider which background information about a school should be included on the Report Card and the possibility of a free format field to be completed by the school to demonstrate unique aspects – e.g. the school ethos statement;
  
• test options for contextualising the School Report Card information;
  
• begin to develop design features – including how the top level information and underpinning data will be presented on the School Report Card; and how the School Report Card will link to other sources of information;
  
• continue to consider the need for a single overall grade and how it might be constructed.

In the second year of piloting we will:

• build on lessons learnt in the first year – agreeing and refining methodologies, and improving systems for data collection;
  
• when survey data becomes available, develop the indicators which might be used for Pupil Wellbeing, and for Parents’ Perceptions and Pupils’ Perceptions – including exploring the weightings to produce a score for each of those categories;
  
• build the public website, based on lessons learnt in the first year;
  
• continue to consider the need for a single overall grade and (with a full dataset now available) test how it might be constructed;
  
• test options for reflecting a school’s work with children with Special Educational Needs and disability;
  
• pilot a means of showing a school’s performance over time;
  
• confirm our arrangements for publication of the School Report Card alongside the Framework for Excellence.

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