Election special: Counting good schools

15th May 2017 by Timo Hannay [link]

A friendly reader contacted us recently about the following local election claim made by the Conservative party in Kent, where it controls the council:

In short, they wanted to know if this is true. Straightforward enough, you might think, but it turns out to be a deceptively complex question to answer. It's also one that throws an interesting light on the way in which misleading partial truths can distort the facts.

 

Matters of opinion

Naively speaking, it ought to be simple enough to add up the numbers of Kent schools in each Ofsted category and use these to calculate a percentage. Here are those numbers for all mainstream state primary and secondary schools in Kent:

Out of a total of 515 schools, 467 (or 91%) are either 'Good' or 'Outstanding'. So the Kent Tories are vindicated and we can all go home?

Not so fast. There are actually 551 schools in Kent, so what happened to the other 36? These are schools that currently have no Ofsted rating. This can happen for a few different reasons (which we will come to below), but for now let's just say that they are new schools that the Ofsted inspectors have yet to visit. So a more accurate summary of the situation in Kent is as follows:

This raises the question of whether the extra 36 schools should be included in the denominator. Since they don't have a rating, it's not unreasonable to argue that they shouldn't, though if that's the case then you should at least make clear that 91% of all schools that have a rating are 'Good' or 'Outstanding'. Conversely, you could claim that we care about all schools, not just the ones that Ofsted has visited, and that none of the unrated schools have yet proved themselves to be 'Good' or 'Outstanding'. In this case, the percentage of high-performing schools is 467 / 551 = 85%.

That might not seem like a huge difference, but in effect we've gone from a situation in which 9% of schools are under-performing to one in which 15% are, at the very least, not demonstrably good. Proportionally, this is a big difference.

 

Creative statistics

And the story doesn't end there. My description above glossed over the reasons that some schools don't have ratings. The most common situations are (in no particular order):

1. Brand new schools that have yet to be inspected by Ofsted.
2. 'New' schools that have been created by merging two established schools.
3. Schools that have converted to academies and have not been inspected since.

These distinctions are important because only the first group can genuinely claim not to have been inspected at all. The other two have been inspected, but have, in a sense, wiped the slate clean by adopting a new identity (complete with a new ID number in the DfE's database).

Of the 36 schools in Kent with no Ofsted rating, only 10 are actually new. This means that the other 26 actually have Ofsted ratings, albeit under a previous name and/or management. Of these, 2 are the results of mergers¹ while 24 are schools that have recently switched to academy status. Within that last group, only 3 were rated 'Good' before converting, while 21 had Ofsted ratings of either 'Requires Improvement' or 'Inadequate'. (Indeed, 4 were in special measures.) This seems to have been the result of a concerted academisation effort in which nearly all 'Inadequate' schools and many of those rated 'Requires Improvement' were compulsorily converted into sponsor-led academies. This is all very well – there is some evidence that such turnaround programmes can lead to improvements – but it's highly disingenuous to remove nearly a third of under-performing schools from the statistics and then use this to claim a rise in overall school standards.

If we reallocate all schools based on the results of their last inspections, even if they've merged or converted into academies since then, we get the following:

That's a bit less impressive than before: 87% of the schools with ratings, and 85% of all schools, are 'Good' or 'Outstanding'. The latter figure compares with 84% across England as a whole, so Kent is more or less in line with the national average.

 

Greatly improved?

Still, if that's up from 71% three years ago then it still looks like substantial progress. (Yes, the Kent Tories have been in control since long before that time, so were presumably also responsible for whatever situation pertained in 2014, but let's not go there.) Analysing historical Ofsted inspections data, we find the following breakdown in Kent for reports published up to 30th April 2014:

That means 73% of rated schools and 68% of all schools were categorised as 'Good' or 'Outstanding'. Given some wiggle room on parameters such as the exact cutoff date, this is close enough to the claimed figure to give them the benefit of the doubt. But, truth be told, the same pattern has held across England as a whole, where the proportion of 'Good' and 'Outstanding' schools has risen by about 10 percentage points in the last 4 years.

So the reality is that Kent has seen improvements, but not much more than those seen across the rest of the country. Any claimed effects beyond that are due to misleading statistical shenanigans. Kent was about average and remains about average, albeit in a country where school ratings as a whole are gradually rising.

 

Our verdict

On a bullshit scale of 0 (The Institute for Fiscal Studies) to 10 (The Full Donald), we would give this a 6. At least it uses recognisable numbers, but it abuses some of them and the overall effect is certainly misleading.

Have you come across any cockamamie campaign claims? If so, send them to us at [email protected]. We can't promise to look into everything we receive, but we'll definitely enjoy (if that's the word) seeing what 'facts' are being proffered in the name of democracy and education.

 

Disclaimer: SchoolDash is politically and financially independent; we neither support nor oppose any political parties. All of them are guilty of bending the facts to suit their cause and the purpose of this post is not to have a dig at the Conservatives (or Kent) in particular, but rather to highlight one illustrative example of this much wider phenomenon.

Footnotes:

1. Of the two schools that were the results of mergers, one was a combination of an 'Outstanding' and a 'Good' school, while the other involved schools rated 'Good' and 'Requires Improvement'. We assigned each merged school to the lower of the two categories of its parent schools (ie, 'Good' and 'Requires Improvement', respectively).