School Gate blog: What's it like to be on the National Challenge Register?

Some leading state secondary schools are likely to be judged to be “coasting” and expected to improve, even if their exam results are impressive.

Hundreds, including grammar schools, will be targeted if they are perceived to be resting on their laurels.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, wrote to every local authority yesterday telling them to seek out and take action against coasting schools.

Teachers’ leaders reacted angrily to the prospect of yet more schools being labelled and put into “crude categories”.

More than 600 schools were judged previously by the Government to be underperforming, because less than 30 per cent of their pupils achieved five good GCSEs including English and maths.

Mr Balls now has in his sights schools that are superficially doing well but have shown little or no improvement recently.

He wrote to all directors of children’s services, saying: “Coasting schools often have respectable overall GCSE results which conceal poor progress. We are asking you to identify coasting schools in your authority.”

Rather than spelling out specifically how a school would fall into that category, Mr Balls listed “indicators”, of which coasting schools would display at least one. They include complacent leadership, a strong focus on threshold targets but not being ambitious about progress and pupils starting school at the expected level but failing to achieve their potential by 16.

Councils have until the end of January to notify the Department for Children, Schools and Families about which schools they believe are coasting.

They can bid for a share of £40 million to tackle the problem, through strategies such as forming links with high-perform-ing schools, and improved training for teachers on tracking pupils’ progress.

Mr Balls said that coasting schools often appeared to be above average but were “not driving progress in the way we would like”. That was because “the average pupil is not making enough progress, or the highest-achieving children are not being given the support they need, or children with special needs aren’t being given the chance to progress”, he added. “Our aim is for every school not to be satisfactory or good, but great.”

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “There has to be a better way of providing support to schools than attaching unhelpful labels. The terminology is a convenient shorthand, but demeans the school and misleads the public.”

Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, said: “Regular public labelling often oversimpli-fies the challenges schools are facing. These announcements are serving only to feed the failure-fixated culture that has developed around schools.”

Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Each school is unique. Their definition into crude categories is a continuing obsession of the Government.”

Fewer than ten pupils have signed up for the work-related diploma in some of the local authorities piloting the new alternative to GCSEs and A levels. Low take-up rates mean that the Government is spending £10,700 per pupil. Nationally, only 12,000 pupils began studying for the diploma in September, less than a quarter of the 50,000 predicted. Michael Gove, Shadow Schools Secretary, who obtained the figures from a parliamentary question, said: “The Government has botched their introduction by generating confusion about what they are about.”

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