§ Mr. WattsTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, how ethnicity is measured by schools and local education authorities and what checks are carried out to ensure the accuracy of those figures. [78609]
§ Mr. Stephen TwiggIn January this year the Department issued to LEAs updated guidance on how schools should obtain and record pupils' ethnic group. This guidance was prompted in part by a new ethnic group classification introduced by the 2001 national Census of Population, which meant that all existing information had to be re-collected on this new basis. The main features of the guidance are:
once the re-collection exercise is complete, information for new pupils to be collected on first entry to school, and then passed on from school to school;information to be collected via parents, who, in the case of pupils aged 11 or over, are encouraged to involve the pupil in the decision;any refusal to provide information must be respected. However if a parent merely fails to respond to the school's enquiries, the school may, subject to certain conditions, ascribe an ethnic group based on its own best judgement. In these cases the fact that the information has been derived in this way, rather than provided by the parent or pupil, must be recorded;LEAs have discretion to adopt a more detailed ethnic group classification where necessary to meet local monitoring needs (within a framework specified by the Department).The steps taken to ensure the accuracy of the information obtained and recorded by schools under the new guidance are:the guidance was drawn up following extensive discussions with the Commission for Racial Equality and the Information Commissioner, and a major consultation exercise involving (amongst others) the teacher unions, LEAs and a sample of schools;great emphasis has been placed on the need for LEAs to take the lead in ensuring that their schools implemented the guidance fully and correctly, and have all the advice and support necessary to enable them to do so;each LEA has been asked to nominate and notify the Department of a senior officer within authority who will take overall responsibility for implementation of the guidance, and all authorities have now done so. Feedback on progress has been obtained through these contacts, and further guidance or clarification issued as required;an explanatory leaflet (with translations into 14 languages) has been produced by the Department for distribution by schools to parents. A model letter and completion form for parents has also been provided for schools' use;a dedicated website (www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/ethnicminorities) has been set up through which all guidance and key documents (including translations) can be viewed and downloaded;LEAs have been required to submit to the Department for approval any refinements of the national ethnic categories which they propose to adopt for local monitoring purposes in order to ensure that consistency of data at national level is maintained;the Department has worked very closely with the suppliers of management information systems to schools and LEAs to ensure these systems are developed in order to store and process the new data correctly, and enable it to be transferred electronically from school to school as pupils move.718W The new information will be collected by the Department for the first time in the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census (PLASC) taking place in January 2003. These data will be analysed closely to verify that they accord with the guidance. Any apparent gaps or anomalies will be taken up with the LEA concerned.