13 January 2016 weekly update

Dear Colleagues

Welcome to new Head of School Improvement

I would like to welcome Anton Francic, who has joined us recently as Head of School Improvement. Anton has been a Secondary School Headteacher and a senior officer in several local authorities. More recently he was Assistant Director for School Improvement in the London Borough of Haringey. Anton leads the team of Senior Improvement Advisers and Improvement Advisers and will be visiting schools to meet Headteachers and to discuss the work of the service.

Ofsted Inspection update

In December Ofsted published its Annual Report on Education and Skills 2014-15. This shows that nationally the performance of Secondary schools lags behind that of Primary schools. For the first time this has become the case in Kent. Across England 85% of Primary schools and 74% of Secondary schools are rated good or outstanding. In Kent the figures are, currently, 84% of Primary schools and 82% of Secondary schools rated good and outstanding.

Nationally, 18% of Primary schools are outstanding, 67% are good, 14% require improvement and 1% are inadequate. 21% of Secondary schools are outstanding, 53% are good, 21% require improvement and 5% are inadequate.

In Kent, 15% of Primary schools are outstanding, 69% are good, 14% require improvement and 2% are inadequate. 28% of Secondary schools are outstanding, 54% are good, 16% require improvement and 2% are inadequate.

Nationally, in the best performing local authorities, 97% of pupils attend a good or outstanding Primary school and 100% of pupils attend a good or outstanding Secondary school.

In Kent overall, 83% of pupils attend a good or outstanding school, including 83% of Primary pupils, 83% of Secondary pupils and 95% of pupils attending Special schools. These figures rank Kent at 109 out of 150 local authorities for Primary education and at 51 for Secondary education.

Kent Primary schools made very good progress in the last school year in improving inspection outcomes and in increasing the number of good and outstanding schools. At the end of the 2014-15 school year, 82% of schools were good or outstanding which was in line with the national average. This included 17% of schools judged to be outstanding and 65% judged to be good, compared to 20% outstanding and 62% good schools nationally.

In July 2015, there were 362 good and 96 outstanding schools, 85 schools requiring improvement (including 67 Primary schools and 14 Secondary schools) and 14 schools in a category, out of a total of 557 schools that had a current inspection result. This means that there were 38 more good and outstanding schools compared to July 2014.

In July 2014, 75% of Kent schools were good or outstanding, compared to 68% in 2013, 59% in 2012 and 55% in 2011.

Of the 115 schools inspected in the 2014-15 school year 72%% were judged to be good or outstanding, compared to 65% in 2013-14, which was a better rate of improvement.

The greatest improvement was in Primary Schools, where 75% of the 87 schools inspected between September 2014 and July 2015 were judged good or outstanding, compared to only 54% in 2013-14.  In the same period 22 Secondary schools were inspected and only 54% were judged good or outstanding.

Currently, there are 361 good and 100 outstanding schools, 79 schools requiring improvement (including 60 Primary schools and 16 Secondary schools) and 9 schools in a category, out of a total of 549 schools that have a current inspection result.

Many 'satisfactory' or 'requires improvement' schools are well led and making good progress, so that we are confident of future good inspection outcomes. As at July 2015 we reached our target of at least 82% of schools to be good or outstanding. Our priority for 2016 onwards is to continue to increase the rate of improvement in education in Kent.  We expect this positive trend to continue towards our ambitious target of at least 90% of Primary and Secondary schools to be judged good or outstanding in the next year or two.

At the end of the academic year 2014-15, 3% of schools in Kent were in an Ofsted category of concern. This is now 2%, which represents a decrease from the previous year and means Kent is in line with the national average of 2% of schools judged to be inadequate by Ofsted. This is an improved picture compared to previous years; (4% in 2012 and 2013 and 5% in 2014).

Currently, the latest Ofsted data for Kent shows that 84% of schools are now rated good or outstanding compared to 84% nationally. There are now 41 more good and better schools than this time last year.

Key lessons from schools that achieve a good or better inspection outcome include: confident use of data to show evidence of pupil progress and attainment in all year groups; a strong focus on improving rates of progress for all groups of pupils; procedures for ensuring the consistency and continuous improvement of teaching; effective use of the pupil premium and other funding to ensure under-achieving pupils catch up quickly and gaps narrow; good use of assessment to feed back to pupils and help them to do better;  effective use of data to track individual pupils' progress and monitor teaching quality, which informs the school's procedures for targeting improvement activity; evidence of moderating school assessments and accurate evaluation of the school's strengths and weaknesses with clear actions to address under-performance; and clear evidence of improvement since the last inspection.  No school achieves consistency of practice and continuous improvement without highly effective leadership and governance.

As always, we encourage schools to learn from others' inspection experiences and some of the best preparation for inspection is to talk to a school that has been inspected recently.

All schools currently rated as inadequate and as ‘requires improvement’ are working closely with the School Improvement Team, and are supported by other schools, to ensure they achieve a rapid rate of improvement.

The local authority takes its school improvement responsibilities very seriously and we use all the available powers of intervention and support to accelerate improvement, address decline and prevent school failure. We are determined to do everything we can, within the framework of government policy and through our own local initiative, to bring about dramatic improvement in the quality of schools in Kent to ensure every school requiring improvement becomes a good school within the next two years, and our aim is to continue to work in partnership to ensure no good and outstanding schools decline.

Patrick Leeson
Corporate Director for Education and Young People's Services