26th December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A report by the Royal Society of Arts recently called for schools labelled satisfactory for longer than six years should be pushed to improve. Reported on the BBC, this follows the results that show that half of the schools classed as satisfactory failed to improve their results in the last two Ofsted inspections. In November Ofsted reported that more than half of schools in England were ‘coasting’ in the sense that they were not trying hard enough to improve if they were not rated as performing below the required level.
The report from the RSA, published jointly with Ofsted, also said that schools labelled as satisfactory or lower were more likely to be in less affluent areas, and that there was less chance of a school improving its level if it was in one of these areas. The author of the report, Professor Becky Francis, said that the results were worrying for disadvantaged pupils, and that the schools need more support to improve, and need to be held accountable for doing so.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education agreed with the conclusions of the report, but pointed out that the label ‘satisfactory’ appears to be a misleading. If Ofsted are to require schools to improve after receiving a satisfactory rating then they must admit that the rating in fact means that the school is performing badly. The suggestion is that there should instead be three ratings: performing above, below, or at the expected level of performance.